UMBERTO ECO : THE PRAGUE CEMETERY

by Eco, Umberto

  Boullan tried to explain the differences between the various cults of what, as far as we were concerned, was simply the devil: "For some people Lucifer is the fallen angel who has now repented and could become the future messiah. There are sects, composed entirely of women, that regard Lucifer as a good female being, opposed to the wicked male God. Others see him as Satan cursed by God, but believe that Christ hasn't done enough for humanity, and therefore devote themselves to adoring the enemy of God — and these are the real Satanists, those who celebrate the black masses and so forth. There are worshipers of Satan who pursue only their taste for witchcraft, envoûtement, fortunetelling; and there are others who practice Satanism as an actual religion. Among them are people who seem to be organizers of cultural gatherings, such as Joséphin Péladan, or, worse still, Stanislas de Guaita, who cultivates the art of poisoning. And then there is Palladism, a rite for few initiates in which even a Carbonaro like Mazzini took part. It is said that Garibaldi's conquest of Sicily was the work of the Palladians, enemies of God and of the monarchy."

  I asked Boullan why he accused his rivals Guaita and Péladan of Satanism and black magic when rumors I'd heard in Paris suggested that they themselves were accusing him of Satanism.

  "Ah," he said, "in this universe of occult sciences the boundaries between good and bad are extremely subtle, and what is good for one person is bad for others. Even in ancient times, the difference between an angel and a witch might simply be a question of age and physical charm."

  "How does this sorcery work?"

  "They say that the Grand Master of Charleston fell out with a certain Gorgas from Baltimore, the head of a breakaway Scottish rite. He managed to obtain Gorgas's handkerchief by bribing his laundress. He left it to soak in salt water, and each time he added salt he murmured, 'Sagrapim melanchtebo rostromouk elias phitg.' He left it to dry in front of a fire of magnolia branches, and every Saturday for three weeks he offered an invocation to Moloch, holding out his arms with the handkerchief spread over his open hands, as if in offering to the demon. On the third Saturday, toward dusk, he burned the handkerchief in flaming alcohol, put the ashes on a bronze plate and left it out overnight, and the following morning he mixed the ash with wax and made it into a doll, a diabolical creation called a dagyde. He placed the dagyde under a glass dome attached to a pneumatic pump, which removed all the air, creating a vacuum in the dome. At that moment his rival began to feel a series of terrible pains and couldn't understand what was causing them."

  "And did he die?"

  "That's not the point. Perhaps he didn't want to go quite that far. The important thing is that magic works over a distance, and that is what Guaita and his friends are doing to me."

  He did not want to say any more, but Diana, who had been listening, followed him with an adoring gaze.

  At the appropriate point Bataille had, at my insistence, devoted a substantial chapter to the Jews in Masonic sects, going back to the eighteenth-century occultists and revealing the existence of five hundred Jewish Freemasons who were secretly confederated alongside the official lodges, and their own lodges carried no name but only a number.

  Our timing was excellent. It was more or less during that period that newspapers began to use a fine expression: anti-Semitism. We became part of an "official" current, and the spontaneous mistrust of Jews became a doctrine, like Christianity or idealism.

  Diana was present during these sessions, and when we referred to the Jewish lodges she uttered the words "Melchizedek, Melchizedek" several times. What was she recalling? She continued: "During the Patriarchal Council, the emblem of the Jewish Masons . . . a silver chain around their neck holding a gold plaque . . . represents the Tablets of the Law . . . the Law of Moses."

  The idea was a good one, and here were our Jews, gathering in the temple of Melchizedek, exchanging signs of recognition, passwords, greetings and oaths that obviously had to look fairly Hebrew, such as Grazzin Gaizim, Javan Abbadon, Bamachec Bamearach, Adonai Bego Galchol. The lodge, of course, was bent on undermining the Holy Roman Church and the ubiquitous Adonai.

  In this way, Taxil (under the cover of Bataille) could ensure those he was working for in the Church were kept happy, without upsetting his Jewish creditors. By now, however, he could have paid them off — after all, during the first five years, Taxil had made three hundred thousand francs (net) in royalties — and another sixty thousand came to me.

  Around 1894, I think it was, the newspapers talked of nothing but the case of an army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, who had sold military intelligence to the Prussian embassy. By sheer coincidence, the villain was Jewish. Drumont pounced on the Dreyfus case, and I thought that our periodical Le diable should also contribute a few sensational revelations. But Taxil said it was always better not to get mixed up in stories involving military espionage.

  Only later did I realize what he had sensed — that it was one thing to talk about the Jewish involvement in Freemasonry, but the introduction of Dreyfus would mean suggesting (or revealing) that Dreyfus, as well as being a Jew, was also a Mason. That would have been unwise, given that (since Masonry thrived particularly well in the army) many of the senior officers who were prosecuting Dreyfus were probably Masons.

  On the other hand, there was no shortage of other avenues to explore —and from the point of view of the readership we had built up, our cards were better than Drumont's.

  About a year after Le diable's first appearance, Taxil said to us: "You know, when it comes down to it, everything that appears in Le diable is the work of Doctor Bataille. Why should anyone believe what he writes? We need a Palladian convert who reveals the sect's innermost mysteries. What is more, has there ever been a good story without a female character? We presented Sophia Sapho in a negative light. She couldn't stir the sympathies of Catholic readers, even if she were to convert. We need someone who is immediately likeable, though still a Satanist, as if her face shone with her imminent conversion, a naive Palladian ensnared by the sect of Freemasons, who gradually breaks free from that yoke and returns to the arms of the religion of her forebears."

  "Diana," I said. "Diana is more or less the living image of what a converted sinner might be, given that she is either one or the other almost on command."

  And that is how Diana arrived on the scene in issue number 89 of Le diable.

  Diana was introduced by Bataille, but to make her appearance more credible he immediately wrote a letter expressing dissatisfaction with the way in which she had been presented, even criticizing the picture that had been published, according to the style of the Le diable periodicals. I have to say that her portrait was rather mannish, and we offered a more feminine picture of Diana, claiming it was done by an artist who had been to visit her at her Paris hotel.

  Diana also made her first appearance in the journal Le Palladium Régénéré et Libre, which presented itself as the voice of breakaway Palladians who had the courage to describe the cult of Lucifer down to the smallest detail and the blasphemous expressions used in their rituals. The horror people still felt about Palladism was so apparent that a certain Canon Mustel, in his Revue Catholique, spoke about Diana's Palladian dissidence as the beginnings of a conversion. Diana contacted Mustel, sending him two one-hundred-franc notes for the poor. Mustel invited his readers to pray for Diana's conversion.

  I swear that Mustel was no invention of ours, nor did we bribe him, but he behaved exactly as we had hoped. And in addition to his magazine support came from La Semaine Réligieuse, inspired by Monsignor Fava, the bishop of Grenoble.

  It was, I think, in June '95 that Diana converted, and Mémoires d'une ex-Palladiste was published over the next six months, once again in installments. Those who subscribed to Palladium Régénéré (which of course stopped publication) could transfer their subscription to the Mémoires or get their money back. My impression is that, apart from a few fanatics, the readers accepted the change of position. Diana the convert, after all, was telling stories that were just as bizarre as tho
se of Diana the sinner, and it was what the public wanted. This was Taxil's basic idea — there was really no difference between describing the private love life of Pope Pius IX and the homosexual rituals of Masonic Satanists. People want what is forbidden to them, and that's that.

  * * *

  We offered a more feminine picture of Diana.

  * * *

  And this was exactly what Diana promised: "I will be writing to reveal all that happened in the Triangles and which I did everything I could to prevent, all that I have always despised and all that I believed to be good. Let the public judge."

  Well done, Diana. We had created a myth. But she herself knew nothing about it. She lived under the effect of the drugs we administered to tranquilize her, and she responded only to our (my God, no, their) caresses.

  I recall so vividly those times of great excitement. Diana, the angelic convert, received the love and admiration of priests and bishops, pious mothers and repentant sinners. Le Pèlerin recounted how a woman called Louise, who had been seriously ill, had been sent on a pilgrimage to Lourdes under the auspices of Diana and was miraculously cured. La Croix, the leading Catholic newspaper, wrote: "We have just read the draft of the first chapter of Mémoires d'une ex-Palladiste, shortly to be published by Miss Vaughan, and are overcome by an indescribable emotion. How wonderful is the grace of God in those souls who give themselves to Him." Monsignor Lazzareschi, the Holy See's delegate to the Central Committee of the Anti-Masonic Union, authorized a three-day thanksgiving to be celebrated for Diana's conversion at the Church of the Sacred Heart in Rome, and a "Hymn to Joan of Arc," supposedly composed by Diana (though it was in fact an aria from an operetta composed by one of Taxil's friends for a Muslim sultan or caliph), was performed at the Central Committee's anti-Masonic feasts and sung in several basilicas.

  And then, as if the whole thing had been invented by us, a mystic Carmelite nun from Lisieux, already regarded as a saint despite her youth, interceded on behalf of Diana. This Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, having received a copy of the converted Diana's Mémoires, was so moved by this creature that she included her as a character in her play The Triumph of Humility, written for her sister nuns, in which Joan of Arc makes an appearance. And she sent Diana a photograph of herself dressed as Joan of Arc.

  Diana's Mémoires were translated into several languages, and Cardinal Vicar Parocchi congratulated her upon her conversion, which he described as a "magnificent triumph of Grace." Monsignor Vincenzo Sardi, the apostolic secretary, wrote that Providence had allowed Diana to become part of that vile sect so that it could be crushed more effectively, and Civiltà Cattolica stated that Miss Diana Vaughan, "summoned from darkness into the divine light, is now using her experience in the service of the Church, with publications that are unequaled for their accuracy and utility."

  I saw Boullan more regularly at Auteuil. What was his relationship with Diana? Sometimes, returning to Auteuil unexpectedly, I surprised them in each other's arms, Diana staring at the ceiling with an expression of ecstasy. But perhaps she had entered her second state, had just confessed and was enjoying the moment of absolution. More suspicious, it seemed, was her relationship with Taxil. Returning, once again without warning, I had surprised her on the couch, half dressed, in intimate contact with a cyanotic-faced Taxil. Fine, I thought, someone has to satisfy those carnal urges of the "bad" Diana, provided it isn't me. The idea of sexual contact with a woman is bad enough, but with a madwoman . . .

  When I find myself once again with the "good" Diana, she rests her virginal head on my shoulder and cries, begging my forgiveness. The warmth of her head against my cheek and the breath of penitence cause me to shudder, and I immediately withdraw, inviting her to go and kneel before a holy image and pray for forgiveness.

  In Palladian circles (do they really exist? many anonymous letters seem to prove it, and in any event it's quite enough to talk about something to make it exist) dark threats were being made against Diana the traitress. In the meantime, something happened that escapes me. I was about to say: the death of Abbé Boullan. And yet I have a hazy memory of him and Diana together in more recent years.

  I've been overtaxing my memory. I must rest.

  23

  TWELVE YEARS WELL SPENT

  From the diary for 15th and 16th April 1897

  At this point not only do the pages of Dalla Piccola's diary intersect almost, I would say, frenetically with those of Simonini, both sometimes speaking of the same event though from differing points of view, but Simonini's own pages become erratic, as if it were difficult for him to remember the events as well as the characters and organizations with which he'd had contact over those years. The period of time that Simonini reconstructs (often confusing dates, placing first what in all probability must have occurred later) runs from Taxil's supposed conversion until '96 or '97—at least twelve years — in a series of rapid notes, some almost in shorthand, as if he feared leaving out things that suddenly came to mind, interspersed with more detailed descriptions of conversations, thoughts, dramatic events.

  So the Narrator, finding himself without that well-balanced vis narrandi which even our diarist seems to lack, will limit himself to separating the recollections under different headings, as if the events had occurred one after the other, or each separate from the other, though in all probability they were taking place at the same time — so, for example, after a conversation with Rachkovsky, Simonini left to meet Gaviali that same afternoon. But, as they say, that's how it is.

  Salon Adam

  Simonini remembers how, after urging Taxil on the path to conversion (he does not know why Dalla Piccola had then taken the whole business out of his hands, so to speak), he decided, while not actually joining the Masons, to move among circles with republican sympathies where, he imagined, he would find Masons aplenty. And thanks to the good offices of people he had met at the bookshop in rue de Beaune — in particular Toussenel — he gained admittance to the salon of Juliette Lamessine, now Madame Juliette Adam, wife of a parliamentary deputy from the republican left who was the founder of Crédit Foncier and later a senator for life. Money, high politics and culture graced the house in boulevard Poissonnière (later in boulevard Malesherbes) whose hostess was herself a writer of some note (indeed, she had published a life of Garibaldi). It also attracted such statesmen as Gambetta, Thiers and Clemenceau, and writers like Prudhomme, Flaubert, Maupassant and Turgenev, and it was here that Simonini met Victor Hugo, shortly before his death, already transformed into a living monument, fossilized by age, with the title of Senator and with the aftereffects of an apoplectic stroke.

  These were not circles Simonini was used to. It must have been around this time that he had met Doctor Froïde at Magny (as he recalled in his diary of the 25th of March) and had smiled when the doctor described how he'd had to buy a dress coat and a fine black cravat to go to dinner at Charcot's house. Now Simonini had to buy a dress coat and cravat as well, and not only that but a new beard, from the best (and most discreet) wigmaker in Paris. Although his early studies had left him with a modicum of education, and during his years in Paris he had read a fair amount, he felt uneasy in the midst of the sparkling, informed, often learned conversation in which the salon's participants were always à la page. He preferred to remain silent, listened carefully to what was said and confined himself to describing distant military exploits during the expedition in Sicily — Garibaldi was still well looked upon in France.

  Simonini was most surprised. He had expected to hear conversation that was not just republican — the least to be expected for that period — but strongly revolutionary. And yet Juliette Adam adored being surrounded by Russians of tsarist leanings and was an Anglophobe like her friend Toussenel. In her Nouvelle Revue she also published a figure like Léon Daudet, who was rightly regarded as a reactionary, to the same extent that his father, Alphonse, was considered to be a genuine democrat — though let it be said, to Madame Adam's credit, that both were adm
itted to her salon.

  Nor was it clear what was the origin of the anti-Jewish debate that often animated the conversation. Did it stem from a socialist hatred of Jewish capitalism, of which Toussenel was an illustrious representative, or from the mystical anti-Semitism circulated by Yuliana Glinka, a woman closely linked to Russian occultism whose practices were reminiscent of the Brazilian Candomblé rituals into which she was initiated as a girl, when her father served in Brazil as a diplomat — and who, it was whispered, was an intimate friend of Madame Blavatsky, the great pythoness of Paris occultism at that time?

  Juliette Adam's distrust of Jewry was no secret, and Simonini was present one evening during the reading of several pieces by the Russian writer Dostoyevsky, who had obviously made use of what that man Brafmann, whom Simonini had met, had revealed about the great Kahal.

  "Dostoyevsky tells us, " Juliette was saying, "that to have lost their lands and their political independence, their laws and nearly their faith, so many times, and always to have survived, almost more united than before, these Jews — a people so dynamic, so extraordinarily strong and energetic — could not have resisted without a state over and above the existing states, a status in statu, which they have preserved, always and everywhere, despite the most terrible persecutions, isolating themselves, cutting themselves off from the people with whom they lived, without integrating with them, and observing one fundamental principle: 'Even when you are spread over the face of the earth, fear not, have faith that all that has been promised you will come to pass, and meanwhile live, loathe, unite, exploit, and wait, wait.'"