In the fourteenth century, the rector of North Marston conjured the devil into his boot. He said certain words, the devil went in, and the boot was shut. This became a popular image across medieval England: a man holding a boot with something inside it that could not get out.
By the sixteenth century, someone had made the image physical. A wooden box. A spring. A small figure of a devil that leapt out when the lid was opened.
The French called it a diable en boîte.
A devil in a box.
For two or three centuries, the figure that emerged was always a devil. Then, in the nineteenth century, it became a clown. The name stayed. The thing it named had been replaced.
The figure in this box is not a clown. It predates the transition. It wears a linen cap and a white cotton garment and has been looking the same way for more than a hundred years. It has no horns, no tail, no red paint. It does not look like a devil.
It looks like a person.
There is a folk tradition, older than the toy, of making a likeness to stand in for someone at a distance. A surrogate into which something might be drawn away from its host.
If the figure in this box was made not to represent a devil but to receive one, then what the box contains is not the possession. It is the poor soul it inhabited.
The box was built with a brass clasp. The clasp is gone. The hole in the front face is clean; it was removed deliberately. In the only comparable account we have, the clasp was found on the floor beside the closed box.
The box cannot now be closed.
In Performance
The diable en boîte is not a trick. It is a genuine nineteenth-century object made in the shape of a toy for purposes that had nothing to do with play.
Set it on the table. Do not introduce it. The figure will already be extended, already looking at the room. Let someone notice it. Tell the story when the time is right. Show them the hole where the clasp was. Everything you say is true.
The question the object leaves in the room is not what is inside it, but who.
Full performance ideas are included in the accompanying field guide.
Includes
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Genuine 19th-century French diable en boîte
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Le Diable en Boîte, a Laudanum House field guide to the history of the object and the tradition it comes from
