UMBERTO ECO : THE PRAGUE CEMETERY (53 page)

As we are now in April 1897, my involvement with Taxil and Diana has been going on for about a dozen years, during which time so much has happened. When, for example, did we organize Boullan's disappearance?

It must have been less than a year after we had begun publishing
Le diable
. Boullan arrived one evening at Auteuil, distraught, continually wiping a whitish froth from his lips with a handkerchief.

"I am dead," he said. "They are killing me."

Doctor Bataille decided that a good glass of strong spirits would put him right. Boullan did not say no, and then in broken words he recounted a story of sorcery and witchcraft.

He told us that he was on very bad terms with Stanislas de Guaita and his kabbalistic Order of the Rose Croix, and with Joséphin Péladan, who, in a spirit of dissent, had founded the Catholic Order of the Rose Croix —figures whom
Le diable
had already investigated. In my view, there was little difference between Péladan's Rosicrucians and the Vintras sect of which Boullan had become grand pontifex, all people who went around in dalmatics covered with kabbalistic symbols. It was hard to understand whether they were on the side of God Almighty or of the devil, but perhaps this was why Boullan ended up at daggers drawn with the Péladan camp. They went foraging in the same territory, trying to seduce the same lost souls.

Guaita's closest friends described him as a refined gentleman (he was a marquis) who collected grimoires spangled with pentagrams, works by Llull and Paracelsus, manuscripts by his master of black and white magic, Eliphas Lévi, and other hermetic works of great rarity. He passed his days, it was said, in a small ground-floor apartment in avenue Trudaine, where he received no one but occultists, and was sometimes there for weeks without going out. Others claimed it was in those very rooms that he fought with a wraith whom he held prisoner in a wardrobe and, sodden with alcohol and morphine, gave substance to the phantasms produced by his deliria.

It was clear that he moved in sinister circles from the titles of his
Essays on the Infernal Sciences
, in which he denounces Boullan's Luciferine or Luciferian, satanic or satanesque, diabolic or diabolesque, schemes, portraying him as a degenerate who had "raised fornication to a liturgical practice."

The story was an old one. Back in 1887 Guaita and his entourage had assembled an "initiates court" that had condemned Boullan. Was it a moral condemnation? Boullan had long claimed he was being punished physically, and he felt continually attacked, struck, wounded by occult fluids, javelins of an impalpable nature that Guaita and others were hurling at him, even from a great distance. Boullan was now at his wits' end.

"Each evening, as I fall asleep, I feel I am being knocked about, punched, slapped, and it is not a figment of my diseased imagination, believe me, because at the same moment my cat becomes agitated as if an electric shock has been sent through him. I know that Guaita has made a wax figure he pierces with a needle, and I feel stabbing pains. I tried to cast a counterspell to blind him, but Guaita sensed the trap; he is more powerful than I in these arts, and has cast the spell back at me. My eyes blur, my breathing is labored, I don't know how many more hours I'll be able to keep going."

 

He fought with a wraith whom he held prisoner in a wardrobe
and, sodden with alcohol and morphine, gave substance
to the phantasms produced by his deliria.

We were not sure he was telling us the truth, but that was not the point. The poor man was really ill. And then Taxil had one of his flashes of inspiration: "Pass yourself offfor dead," he said. "Let your close friends announce that you ceased to be while on a trip to Paris. Do not return to Lyon, find a refuge here in the city, shave your beard and mustache, become someone else. Wake up again, like Diana, in another person . . . but unlike Diana, remain there. In that way, Guaita and company will think you're dead and stop tormenting you."

"And if I can't go to Lyon, how do I live?"

"Live here with us at Auteuil, at least until the dust has settled and your opponents have been exposed. After all, Diana needs greater support, and you're more useful to us if you can be here every day rather than a mere visitor."

"But," Taxil added, "if you have friends you trust, before passing yourself offfor dead, write letters filled with premonitions of death and make clear accusations against Guaita and Péladan, so your grieving followers can launch a campaign against your murderers."

And so it was. The only person to know about the subterfuge was Madame Thibault, Boullan's assistant, priestess and confidante (and perhaps something more), who had given his Paris friends a touching description of his dying moments. I don't know how she dealt with his followers in Lyon; perhaps she arranged for the burial of an empty coffin. Shortly afterward she was employed as a housekeeper by Huysmans, a fashionable writer and one of Boullan's friends and posthumous defenders — and I am convinced that on some evenings when I was not at Auteuil, Madame Thibault came to visit her old associate.

On the news of his death, the journalist Jules Bois attacked Guaita in Gil Blas, accusing him of witch-like practices and the murder of Boullan, and
Le Figaro
published an interview with Huysmans explaining in every detail how Guaita's incantations had worked. Bois continued the allegations, again in
Gil Blas
, calling for an autopsy on the body to see whether the liver and heart had actually been damaged by Guaita's fluidic darts, and urging a judicial inquiry.

Guaita replied, also in Gil Blas, referring with irony to his deadly powers ("Well, yes, I handle the most subtle poisons with infernal art, I disperse them to send their toxic vapors, a hundred leagues away, into the nostrils of those I do not like, I am the Gilles de Rais of the coming century"), and he challenged both Huysmans and Bois to a duel.

Bataille sneered, observing that with all those magical powers, from one side and the other, no one had managed to harm anyone, but a Toulouse newspaper suggested that someone really had used witchcraft: one of the horses pulling Bois' landau to the duel collapsed without apparent cause, the horse was changed and the second one also dropped to the ground, the landau overturned, and Bois arrived on the field of honor covered with bruises and scratches. What is more, he was later to claim that one of his shots was stopped in the barrel of his pistol by a supernatural force.

Boullan's friends sent information to the press that Péladan's Rose Croix had had a Mass celebrated at Notre Dame, but at the moment of the elevation they had brandished daggers menacingly at the altar. Who is to know what actually happened? For
Le diable
this was most intriguing, and not as hard to believe as other news to which its readers were accustomed. Except that Boullan had to be dragged in, and fairly unceremoniously.

"You're dead," Bataille reminded him. "Whatever they say about this disappearance must no longer interest you. Besides, if you should reappear one day, we'll have created around you an aura of mystery that can only be to your benefit. So don't worry what we write. It won't be about you but about the figure of Boullan who no longer exists."

Boullan agreed and, perhaps in his narcissistic delirium, took pleasure in reading what Bataille continued to dream up about his occult practices. But in reality he now seemed fixed only on Diana. He remained beside her with morbid constancy, and I almost worried for her: she was becoming increasingly hypnotized by his fantasies, as if she didn't already live far enough from reality.

You have described well what then happened. The Catholic world was split in two, and one part doubted the very existence of Diana Vaughan.

 

He felt continually attacked, struck, wounded by occult fluids,
javelins of an impalpable nature that Guaita and others were
hurling at him, even from a great distance.

Hacks had given the game away, and the castle that Taxil had constructed was collapsing. We were now being harassed by our opponents and at the same time by Diana's many impersonators, such as that man Margiotta, whom you have already mentioned. We realized we had gone too far; the idea of a three-headed devil who banqueted with the leader of the Italian government was difficult to swallow.

A few meetings with Father Bergamaschi had convinced me that even if the Roman Jesuits of
Civiltà Cattolica
had decided to continue supporting Diana's cause, the French Jesuits (as apparent from the article by Father Portalié that you referred to) were already determined to drop the whole story. Another brief conversation with Hébuterne had persuaded me that the Masons couldn't wait for the farce to end. The Catholics wanted to end it quietly, so as not to bring further discredit to the hierarchy, but the Masons demanded a dramatic recantation, so that all the years of Taxil's anti-Masonic propaganda would be branded as sheer villainy.

Thus one day I received two messages at the same time. One, from Father Bergamaschi, said: "I authorize you to offer Taxil fifty thousand francs to close the whole business. Fraternally in Xt, Bergamaschi." The other, from Hébuterne, stated: "So let's bring an end to it. Offer Taxil a hundred thousand francs if he publicly admits having invented everything."

I was covered on both sides. All I had to do was proceed — after, of course, cashing the sums promised by my paymasters.

Hacks's defection made my task easier. All I had to do was urge Taxil to convert or perhaps reconvert. Once again I had a hundred and fifty thousand francs, as at the start of this business, and seventy-five thousand was enough for Taxil, since I had arguments more persuasive than money.

"Taxil," I said, "we've lost Hacks, and it will be difficult to expose Diana to public examination. I'll think about how to get rid of her, but I'm worried about you. From what I've heard it seems the Masons have decided to end it all with you, and you yourself have written how bloody their revenge can be. First you defended Catholic public opinion, but now you can see that even the Jesuits are creeping away. That's why they're offering you an extraordinary opportunity: a lodge — don't ask me which, as it's highly confidential — is offering you seventy-five thousand francs if you publicly declare that you duped everyone. You understand the advantage it would bring to the Freemasons: they would be cleansed of the mud you've been slinging at them and the Catholics will be covered by it instead; they'll come across as incredibly naive. And so far as you're concerned, with all the publicity from this turn of events, your next works will sell better than your last ones, which were selling fewer and fewer copies to the Catholics. You'd win back the anticlerical and the Masonic public. It's worth your while."

He didn't need much persuasion. Taxil's a buffoon, and the idea of performing in a new piece of buffoonery brought a sparkle to his eyes.

"Listen, my dear Abbé, I'll rent a room and tell the press that on a certain day Diana Vaughan will appear and present to the public a photograph of the demon Asmodeus, which she took with the permission of Lucifer himself! On a handbill, let's say that I'll promise a raffle among those present for a typewriter worth four hundred francs. We won't need to go ahead with the raffle because I'll appear to say that Diana doesn't exist —and if she doesn't exist, of course the typewriter doesn't exist either. I can see it already: I'll end up on the front page of all the papers. Magnificent. Give me time to organize the event properly, and if you don't mind, ask for an advance on that seventy-five thousand francs, for expenses."