As we have already heard from Abbé Dalla Piccola, both Drumont and Taxil had stood as council candidates in Paris, seeking support from the same group of voters. Their battle had therefore already begun.
Taxil wrote a pamphlet, titled Monsieur Drumont, étude Psychologique, in which he criticized his rival’s anti-Semitism with excessive sarcasm, observing that hatred of Jews was more typical among the socialist and revolutionary press than among Catholics. Drumont replied with Le testament d’un antisémite, casting doubt on Taxil’s conversion, recalling the mud he had thrown on religious issues and raising disturbing questions about his lack of belligerence toward the Jewish world.
If we consider that 1892 had seen the creation of two publications—La Libre Parole, the campaigning political newspaper that succeeded in exposing the Panama scandal, and Le diable au XIXe siècle, which could hardly be described as a reliable publication—it is understandable that Drumont’s editors should treat Taxil with contempt, and that his increasing difficulties should be followed with malevolent sneers.
Taxil’s position was being damaged, Drumont observed, not so much by criticism as by unwelcome support. In the case of the mysterious Diana Vaughan, dozens of dubious opportunists were boasting their familiarity with a woman whom they had probably never seen.
A certain Domenico Margiotta published Souvenirs d’un trente-troisième: Adriano Lemmi, chef suprème des Francs-Maçons and had sent a copy to Diana, declaring his support for her campaign. In his letter, Margiotta described himself as Secretary of the Savonarola lodge in Florence; Venerable of the Giordano Bruno lodge of Palmi; Sovereign Grand Inspector-General, thirty-third degree, of the Ancient and Accepted Scotch Rite; Sovereign Prince of the Rite of Memphis-Misraim, ninety-fifth degree; Inspector of the Misraim lodges in Calabria and Sicily; Honorary Member of the National Grand Orient of Haiti; Acting Member of the Supreme Federal Council of Naples; Inspector General of the Masonic lodges of the Three Calabrias; Grand Master ad vitam of the Oriental Masonic Order of Misraim or Egypt, ninetieth degree, of Paris; Commander of the Order of Knight-Defenders of Universal Masonry; Honorary Member ad vitam of the Supreme General Council of the Italian Federation of Palermo; Permanent Inspector and Sovereign Delegate of the Grand Central Directory of Naples; and Member of the New Reformed Palladium. He ought to have been a senior Masonic dignitary, but said that he had recently left Freemasonry. Drumont said that he had converted to Catholicism because the supreme and secret leadership of the sect had not passed to him, as he had hoped, but to a man named Adriano Lemmi.
Margiotta described how this murky character Lemmi had started his career as a thief in Marseilles when he forged a letter of credit in the name of Falconet & Co. of Naples and stole a bag of pearls and three hundred gold francs from the wife of a doctor friend of his while she was making a tisane in the kitchen. After serving time in prison he sailed to Constantinople, where he entered the service of an old Jewish greengrocer, saying that he was ready to repudiate his baptism and be circumcised. With the help of the Jews he was then able to rise, as we have seen, through the orders of Freemasonry.
This, concluded Margiotta, is how «the damned Jewish race, who are the cause of every human evil, have used all their influence to ensure that one of their own people, the most villainous of them all, is promoted to the Supreme Universal Government of the Masonic order.»
These accusations delighted the ecclesiastical world, and Le Palladisme: Culte de Satan-Lucifer dans les triangles maçonniques, published by Margiotta in ’95, opened with letters of praise from the bishops of Grenoble, Montauban, Aix, Limoges, Mende, Tarentaise, Pamiers, Oran and Annecy, as well as from Ludovico Piavi, the patriarch of Jerusalem.
The trouble was that Margiotta’s information involved half the politicians in Italy, and Crispi in particular, who had been Garibaldi’s lieutenant and was by that time Italy’s prime minister. As long as phantasmagorical stories about Masonic rites were being written and sold, everyone was reasonably happy, but as soon as they touched upon the real connections between Freemasonry and political power there was a danger of upsetting some very vindictive personalities.
Taxil ought to have realized this, but was clearly trying to regain the ground that Margiotta was taking from him, and so he published, in Diana’s name, a book of almost four hundred pages, Le 33ème Crispi, in which he mixed well-known facts, such as the Banca Romana scandal involving Crispi, with news about his pact with the demon Haborym and his participation in a Palladian gathering during which the ubiquitous Sophie Walder had announced that she was pregnant with a daughter whose child would in turn give birth to the Antichrist.
«The stuff of operettas,» exclaimed Drumont, scandalized. «That’s no way to carry out a political campaign!»
Yet the work was favorably received in the Vatican, which infuriated Drumont even more. The Vatican had a score to settle with Crispi, who had unveiled a monument in a Roman square dedicated to Giordano Bruno, a victim of ecclesiastical intolerance, and Leo XIII had spent that day in prayer of atonement before the statue of Saint Peter. We can imagine the pope’s joy at reading the allegations against Crispi: he directed his secretary, Monsignor Sardi, to send Diana not just the usual «apostolic benediction» but also heartfelt thanks and encouragement to continue her meritorious work of unmasking the «iniquitous sect.» And the iniquity of the sect was demonstrated by the fact that, in Diana’s book, Haborym appeared with three heads, one human with hair aflame, one of a cat and one of a snake—though Diana pointed out with scientific rigor that she had never seen it in that form (on her invocation he had appeared only as a refined old man with a flowing silvery beard).
«They don’t even bother to respect plausibility!» spluttered Drumont. «How can an American girl who’s only just arrived in France know all the secrets of Italian politics? It’s obvious, people don’t notice these things, and Diana is in the business of selling books, but the Supreme Pontiff…the Supreme Pontiff will be accused of believing any old claptrap! The Church must be defended against its own frailty!»
La Libre Parole was the first to openly express doubt about Diana’s existence. It was immediately joined by publications with an avowedly religious viewpoint, such as L’Avenir and L’Univers. Other Catholic groups, though, did everything they could to prove Diana’s existence. Le Rosier de Marie published a declaration by the president of the Order of Advocates of Saint-Pierre, Lautier, who stated that he had seen Diana in the company of Taxil, Bataille and the artist who had produced her portrait, though it had happened some time ago when Diana was still a Palladian. Yet her face must already have been radiant with her imminent conversion, since the writer described her as follows: «She is a young lady of twenty-nine, charming, refined, above average height, outgoing, sincere and honest, eyes brimming with intelligence, showing resolution and a commanding disposition. She dresses elegantly and with taste, without affectation and without that abundance of jewelry that so ridiculously characterizes the majority of rich foreigners…Unusual eyes, now sea blue, now bright golden yellow.» When she was offered a glass of Chartreuse, she refused out of hatred for everything related to the Church. She drank only cognac.
Taxil had been pars magna in organizing a large anti-Masonic conference at Trent, in September 1896. But it was here, in fact, that suspicion and criticism from the German Catholics intensified. A certain Father Baumgarten asked for Diana’s birth certificate and evidence from the priest to whom she had made the recantation. Taxil claimed to have the evidence in his pocket, but didn’t produce it.
A month after the Trent congress, a certain Abbé Garnier, writing in Le Peuple Français, went so far as to suspect that Diana was a Masonic mystification. A Father Bailly, in the respected journal La Croix, also dissociated himself, and the Kölnische Volkszeitung recalled that Hacks-Bataille, in that same year when the first installments of Le diable appeared, was blaspheming God and all his saints. Canon Mustel once again came out in support of Diana, along with Civiltà Cattolica and a secretary of Cardinal Parocchi, who wrote to her «to fortify her against the storm of slanderous allegations that would not place in doubt her existence.»
Drumont had no lack of good contacts in various circles, no shortage of journalistic intuition. Simonini did not know how he had done it, but Drumont managed to track down Hacks-Bataille, probably surprising him during one of his alcoholic crises, during which he was ever more prone to melancholy and regret. And this is how the dramatic turn of events took place. Hacks confessed he was a fraud, first in the Kölnische Volkszeitung and then in La Libre Parole. He wrote frankly: «When the encyclical Humanum Genus appeared I thought there was some money to be made out of the credulity and unfathomable nonsense of the Catholics. All you need is a Jules Verne to give a terrifying appearance to these tales of brigandry. I was this Verne, and there it is. I described scenes of hocus-pocus, putting them into exotic
