Peter Schlemihl

Peter Schlemihl, a poor young man at a garden party, meets a strange, thin man in a grey coat who pulls from his pocket a telescope, a carpet, a tent and even saddled horses. The grey man offers Peter a purse that is never empty in exchange for his shadow, and Peter agrees. He becomes rich, but everyone who notices that he casts no shadow shuns him, and he loses the girl he loves. When the grey man offers to return the shadow in exchange for his soul, Peter refuses, and with a pair of seven-league boots he finds a new life as a wandering naturalist.

Adelbert von Chamisso (1781–1838), a French-born German poet and botanist who later sailed around the world, published the tale in 1814, and through it the old Yiddish word 'schlemihl', an unlucky fool, became known everywhere. This edition, edited by Henry Morley, adds Carové's 'The Story Without an End' and Novalis's 'Hymns to the Night'. Its bargain with the devil echoes Goethe's Faust.