Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

‘Then what does he want?’ the Prince hollers. ‘What does he want? Paradise?’ And the old one looks at him and at first the Prince tle s it’s because he aint forgot that sneer. But he finds out different.

‘No,’ the old one says. ‘He wants hell.’

And now for a while there aint a sound in that magnificent kingly hall hung about with the proud battle-torn smokes of the old martyrs but the sound of frying and the faint constant screams of authentic Christians. But the Prince was the same stock and blood his pa was. in a flash the sybaritic indolence and the sneers was gone; it might have been the old Prince hisself that stood there. ‘Bring him to me,’ he says. ‘Then leave us.’

So they brought him in and went away and closed the door. His clothes was still smoking a little, though soon he had done brushed most of it off. He come up to the Throne, chewing, toting the straw suitcase.

‘Well?’ the Prince says.

He turned his head and spit, the spit fiying off the floor quick in a little blue ball of smoke. ‘I come about that soul,’ he says.

‘So they tell me,’ the Prince says. ‘But you have no soul.’

‘Is that my fault?’ he says.

‘Is it?nine?’ the Prince says. ‘Do you think I created you?’

‘Then who did?’ he says. And he had the Prince there and the Prince knowed it. So the Prince set out to bribe him hisself. He named over all the temptations, the gratifications, the satieties; it sounded sweeter than music the way the Prince fetched them up in detail. But he didnt even stop chewing, standing there holding the straw suitcase. Then the Prince said, ‘Look yonder, ‘pointing at the wall, and there they was, in order and rite for him to watch, watching hisself performing them all, even the ones he hadn’t eventhought about inventing to hisself yet, until they was done, the last unimaginable one. And he just turned his head and spit another scorch of tobacco onto the floor and the Prince flung back on the Throne in very exasperation and baffled rage.

‘Then what do you want?’ the Prince says. ‘What do you want? Paradise?’

‘I hadn’t figured on it,’ he says. ‘Is it yours to offer?’