«Herostratus. Yes, of course,» said Bergamaschi, pondering. «And yet, the ways of the Lord are infinite…»
«How much can we give him for a clear conversion?»
«A sincere conversion ought to be made freely, ad majorem Dei gloriam. Having said that, we shouldn’t be too fussy. But don’t offer him more than fifty thousand francs. He’ll say it’s too little, so point out to him that first of all, he’s saving his soul, which is priceless, and second, if he writes against the Masons he will enjoy the benefit of our distribution system, which means hundreds of thousands of copies.»
Simonini wasn’t sure he’d be able to secure the deal, so he took the precaution of going to Hébuterne and telling him there was a Jesuit plot to persuade Taxil to turn against the Masons.
«If only it were true,» said Hébuterne. «Just for once my opinions coincide with those of the Jesuits. You see, Simonini, I speak to you as a dignitary of no little importance in the Grand Orient, the only true Masonic order, which is lay, republican and, although anticlerical, not antireligious, since it recognizes a Great Architect of the Universe—so each person is free to recognize him as the Christian God or as an impersonal cosmic force. The presence of that rascal Taxil is still causing us embarrassment, even though he’s been expelled. What is more, we wouldn’t be upset if an apostate began saying things about Freemasonry that were so terrible that no one could believe them any longer. We are expecting an attack from the Vatican, and we don’t expect the pope to be particularly gentlemanly.
The Masonic world is tainted by various confessions, and the writer Ragon, many years ago now, listed seventy-five kinds of Freemasonry, fifty-two rites, thirty-four orders (including twenty-six androgynous orders) and fourteen hundred grades of ritual. And I could tell you about the Knights Templar and Scottish Freemasonry, about the Rite of Heredom, the Rite of Swedenborg, the Rite of Memphis and Misraim (established by that scoundrel and charlatan Cagliostro), and then Weishaupt’s ‘Unknown Superiors,’ the Satanists, Luciferians or Palladians as they are otherwise known…It’s all Greek to me. The various satanic rites bring us the worst publicity of all, and even some of our more respectable brethren have taken part in them, perhaps for purely aesthetic reasons, without realizing the harm they’re doing us. Proudhon may have been a Freemason for only a short time, but forty years ago he wrote a prayer to Lucifer: ‘Come, Satan, come, thou the calumniated of priests and kings! Let me embrace thee and press thee to my bosom!’
That Italian Rapisardi wrote Lucifero, which was the usual myth about Prometheus, and Rapisardi wasn’t even a Freemason, but Garibaldi praised him to the skies, and so it’s now taken as gospel that the Freemasons worship Lucifer. Pope Pius IX never failed to find the devil behind everything that Freemasonry did. Then some time ago the Italian poet Carducci, part republican and part monarchist, a great windbag and unfortunately a great Freemason, wrote a hymn to Satan, crediting him with the invention of the railways. Carducci then claimed that Satan was a metaphor, but by that time everyone seemed to think the cult of Satan was the Masons’ principal amusement.
In short, our brethren wouldn’t be displeased if a person who had already been long disgraced, notoriously expelled from Freemasonry and a blatant turncoat, were to start a series of violently libelous pamphlets against us. It would be a way of getting back at the Vatican, driving it onto the side of a pornographer. If you accuse a man of murder, you might be believed, but if you accuse him of eating children for lunch and dinner like Gilles de Rais, no one will take you seriously. If you reduce anti-Freemasonry to the level of the feuilleton, you have reduced it to colportage. So, yes, we could do with people who bury us in mud.»
From this, it was clear that Hébuterne was shrewder and more intelligent than his predecessor Lagrange. He was unable to say there and then how much the Grand Orient might be able to invest in such a venture, but his reply came a few days later: «One hundred thousand francs. But on condition that it is complete and utter rubbish.»
Simonini therefore had 150,000 francs for buying rubbish. If he offered Taxil only 75,000 francs, with the promise of a large circulation, he would say yes immediately, considering the difficulty he was in. And 75,000 would be left for Simonini. A fifty percent commission wasn’t bad.
On whose behalf could he make the offer to Taxil? On behalf of the Vatican? Maître Fournier, the notary, didn’t have the appearance of a papal plenipotentiary. Perhaps he could arrange a visit from someone like Father Bergamaschi. After all, that’s the whole point of priests, so that people can convert and confess their murky pasts to them.
But when it came to murky pasts, should Simonini trust Father Bergamaschi? Taxil mustn’t be left in the hands of the Jesuits. There had been atheist writers who had sold a hundred copies of a book and then fallen to their knees before the altar and recounted the story of their experience as converts, boosting their sales to two or three thousand. After all, when it came down to it, the anticlericalists counted for something among the republicans in the city, but the reactionaries who dreamt of the good old days, of king and curate, lived in the countryside and, even excluding those who couldn’t read (though the priest would read to them), were legion, like demons. By keeping Father Bergamaschi out of it, Taxil could be offered a deal on his new publications and invited to sign a contract whereby whoever was collaborating with him would be entitled to ten or twenty percent on his future works.
In 1884 Taxil had dealt the ultimate blow to the feelings of good Catholics by publishing The Secret Loves of Pius IX, defaming a pope now dead. In the same year the reigning pope, Leo XIII, published his encyclical Humanum Genus, which was a «condemnation of the philosophical and moral relativism of Freemasonry.» And in the same way as he had railed against the monstrous errors of socialists and communists in his encyclical Quod Apostolici Muneris, this time he directed his attack at the doctrines of Freemasonry, exposing the secrets that made its followers captives and prone to every kind of crime, since «this continual pretense and desire to remain hidden, this binding of men, like vile slaves, to the arbitrary will of others, and to abuse them as blind instruments for any enterprise, however evil it be, and to arm their right hands for bloodshed after securing impunity for the crime, are excesses from which nature recoils.»
Not to mention the naturalism and relativism of Freemasonry’s doctrines, which made human reason the sole judge of everything. And it was perfectly clear what the results would be: the pope stripped of his temporal power, the intention to annihilate the Church, marriage made into a simple civil contract, the education of children no longer carried out by priests but by lay teachers, and the teaching that «all men have the same rights, and are in every respect of equal and like condition; that every man is, by nature, independent; that no one has the right to command another; that it is tyranny to require men to obey any authority other than that which emanates from themselves.» So for the Freemasons «the origin of all civil rights and duties is in the people, or in the state,» and the state could only be godless.
It was obvious that «once the fear of God and reverence for divine laws is taken away, the authority of rulers trampled upon, sedition permitted and approved, and the popular passions urged on to lawlessness, with no restraint save that of punishment, revolution and universal subversion will necessarily follow…which is the deliberate plan and open purpose of many associations of communists and socialists: to such intentions the Masonic sect cannot properly describe itself as hostile.»
News of Taxil’s conversion had to break as soon as possible.
At this point Simonini’s diary becomes confused. It seemed he could no longer remember how Taxil was converted, or by whom. It was as if his memory were leaping ahead, allowing him to remember only that Taxil, in just a few years, had become a Catholic voice against Freemasonry. After proclaiming, urbi et orbi, his return to the bosom of the Church, he published Les frères trois-points (the three points being those of the thirty-third Masonic degree), Les mystères de la Franc-Maçonnerie (with dramatic illustrations of satanic invocations and hideous rites) and immediately afterward Les soeurs Maçonnes, which described the (hitherto unknown) female lodges—and a year later La Franc-Maçonnerie dévoilée, followed by La France Maçonnique.
He published Les frères trois-points (the three points being those of the thirty-third Masonic degree), Les mystères de la Franc-Maçonnerie (with dramatic illustrations of satanic invocations and hideous rites)…
From these first books the description of an initiation was enough to make readers shudder. Taxil had been summoned to attend the Masonic lodge at eight o’clock one evening, and was met at the door by a brother. At
