Chapter ten of The Chronicle of Young Satan is the penultimate chapter, and it’s structured like two episodes of a Saturday morning cartoon back to back. Episode one: the courtroom. Father Peter’s trial. Wilhelm defends him, the boys give testimony that makes the crowd laugh, Father Adolf’s three coincidences have everyone convinced — and then Wilhelm produces a coin from the wallet dated after the year Father Adolf claimed to have originally found the money, and the whole story collapses. Father Peter is acquitted. Satan gets to the jail first and tells him he lost. The shock drives Father Peter insane. By the time the rest of the town arrives, he is marching around calling himself the Emperor, bestowing principalities on the constables, making Wilhelm the Prince of India, and radiantly, completely, cosmically happy.
Satan’s explanation to Theodore: sanity and happiness are an impossible combination. No sane man can be happy, because to a sane man, life is real and he can see what a fearful thing it is. Only the mad can be happy. He replaced Father Peter’s tin life with a silver gilt fiction. He said he’d make him permanently happy, and he has — by the only means available to his race. The race, he sighs, is very hard to please.
Episode two: Satan delivers his argument that laughter is the most powerful weapon the human race possesses and refuses to use. Hereditary royalty is hilarious to angels. Papal infallibility is hilarious to angels. The race mistakes brass for gold and can’t perceive the comedy in any of it. Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand — and yet they leave it rusting. He produces a newspaper from the future proving his point, takes a heartbroken Theodore on a consolation tour of the globe, stops in Ceylon, outperforms a street juggler by growing a magic tree in full sunlight, and when a passing Portuguese merchant kicks him over it, curses the man to water the tree’s roots every hour throughout every night for the rest of his life or die. He has, Satan adds, already arranged for the man’s nights.
We dig into all of this, including the first contrapasso punishment in the whole book, why “against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand” is Twain’s most famous quote and where it actually comes from, and why Pope Leo’s recent excommunication of American Catholic bishops landed directly on top of Twain’s fake newspaper story about a widow’s prayer being approved and then rescinded by the Vatican.
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