In Le Rosier de Marie, Lautier wrote that he had perhaps been misled and the person he had seen was not Diana Vaughan, and then finally the first Jesuit attack appeared, written by a Father Portalié in Études, another respected journal. As if this were not enough, a few newspapers wrote that Monsignor Northrop, the bishop of Charleston (where Pike, the Grand Master of Grand Masters, was supposed to be living), had gone to Rome to personally assure Pope Leo XIII that the Masons in his city were respectable people and that there was no statue of Satan in their temple.
Drumont was victorious. Taxil had been put in his place. The fight against the Masons and the Jews was back in serious hands.
24. A Night Mass
17th April 1897
Dear Captain,
Your last pages detail an incredible number of events, and it is clear that while you were involved with those matters I was busy with others. And you were obviously informed (inevitably, given the stir that Taxil and Bataille were creating) about what was going on around me, and perhaps you remember more about it than I can piece together.
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.
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.»
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 off for 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 off for 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.
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.
You have described well what then happened. The Catholic world was split in
