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 admitted 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.'»
«This Dostoyevsky is a great master of rhetoric,» commented Toussenel. «See how he begins by professing an understanding, a sympathy, dare I say a respect, for the Jews: ‘Am I too perhaps an enemy of the Jews? Might it be that I am an enemy of that unfortunate race? On the contrary, I say and I write that everything demanded by humanity and justice, everything required by humanity and Christian law, all of this must be done for the Jews.’ A fine start. But then he shows how this unfortunate race seeks to destroy the Christian world. Great move. Not new—perhaps you’ve not read Marx’s Communist Manifesto.
It begins with an incredible coup de théâtre, ‘a spectre is haunting Europe,’ then offers us a bird’s-eye view of the class struggle from ancient Rome to today. The pages dedicated to the bourgeoisie as a revolutionary class are breathtaking. Marx shows us this new, unstoppable power that is affecting the whole planet, as if it were God’s creative breath at the beginning of Genesis. And at the end of this eulogy (which, I promise, is truly remarkable) the subterranean powers arrive on the scene, invoked by the bourgeois triumph: from the bowels of capitalism, its own gravediggers, the proletariat, emerge. They proclaim, loud and clear: ‘Now we want to destroy you and take away all that belonged to you.’ Marvelous. And that’s what Dostoyevsky does with the Jews—he justifies the conspiracy that has determined their
