Marcel Schwob - The Children's Crusade

Ive just read Marcel Schwobs The Childrens Crusade twice over, with deep admiration and reverence. I am profoundly moved: what a work! And to think Id never heard the name of Marcel Schwob. Who is he?Rainer Maria Rilke Marcel Schwobs 1896 novella The Childrens Crusade retells the medieval legend of the exodus of some 30,000 children from all countries to the Holy Land, who traveled to the shores of the sea, whichinstead of parting to allow them to march on to Jerusaleminstead delivered them to merchants who sold them into slavery in Tunisia or delivered them to a watery death. It is a cruel and sorrowful story mingling history and legend, which Schwob recounts through the voices of eight different protagonists: a goliard, a leper, Pope Innocent III, a cleric, a qalandar and Pope Gregory IX, as well as two of the marching children, whose naive faith eventually turns into growing fear and anguish. Though it is a tale drawn from the early 13th century, Schwob presents it through a modern framework of shifting subjectivity and fragmented coherency, and its subject matter and its succession of different narrative perspectives has been seen as an influence on and precursor to such diverse works as Alfred Jarrys The Other Alcestis, Ryunosuke Akutagawas In a Grove, William Faulkners As I Lay Dying and Jerzy Andrzejewskis The Gates of Paradise. It is a tale told by many yet understood by few, a mosaic surrounding a void, describing a world in which innocence must perish.