The Children's Crusade

“I’ve just read Marcel Schwob’s The Children’s Crusade twice over, with deep admiration and reverence.I am profoundly moved: what a work! And to think I’d never heard the name of Marcel Schwob.Who is he?”-Rainer Maria RilkeMarcel Schwob’s 1896 novella The Children’s 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, which-instead of parting to allow them to march on to Jerusalem-instead 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