When Charles de Secondat, Baron de la Brède and de Montesquieu, sought The Spirit of Laws not in the Gospel but in the Temple of Gnidus, he engaged—unconsciously yet not irresponsibly—in true demon-worship.
Hence arose these classical ventriloquisms with the vilest societies of the other World: Soliloquy of Lysimachus, Dialogue Between Sulla and Eucrates, then the whole sabbath assembled: Grandeur et Décadence des Romains. More Greek and Latin spirits than needed to gyrate right and left the head of a Gascon legist—if not his writing desk. But the old Demons of the South had a first-rate medium in this majestic Bordelais, insufficiently catechized by the Reverend Fathers. Moreover, it was these Mentors who had introduced their Telemachus to these deplorable acquaintances. Through this demon-mania arriving from the Holy See and the Minerva, all the scorched ones from underground cooked over sulfur fires something that smelled foul. This stew of rastas (rastaquouère) in buskins and espadrilles might be called the Gentiles’ revenge—so named because they are the vilest of all.
A vapor of perdition issued from the Abyss’s crevices where the Middle Ages’ tutelary snow and ice melted to boiling. This was mistaken for spring.
As urchins in the Champs-Élysées assail victorias with violet bouquets, hideous gnomes thrust Rosa la Rose under every nose. But she was artificial, full of witches’ herb ointment, belladonna and henbane. She maddened great and small, masters and pupils alike.
Like jackdaws and parrots gorged on poppy seeds in their perches, clergy and clergiate vaticinated Athens’ Past, prophesied Roman rococo.
Toga-clad phantoms, lemures in greaves, walked at high noon in all books, at midnight in all theaters—their demons too. Court and town were infatuated with them.
Swift-footed Hermes edited the Mercure galant. Venus danced the minuet with the Sun King; she placed the crown on Louis XV’s head while slyly giving him a dainty kick. Cupid trussed madrigals for all hoop-skirted Chlorises; Neptune waved the tresses of beauties to coif them “à la frégate”; Flora flirted with young abbés; Pomona offered the hard apple to old canons who left their last tooth in it.
Devils peppered Castalia’s fountain. Hippocrene induced hysteria, Hymettus’ bees brought tarantism. Every inkwell held its Narcissus or toad—often both, as today. The Python serpent crept softly from dark abodes and breathed, in dactyls and spondees, the delirium tremens of mind’s orgies while awaiting blood’s. Silenus and Sancho sang together La Fontaine’s Tales and Sappho’s Odes. Their asses inaugurated universal fraternity’s era. They raised hell’s din worldwide, vying in thunderous incongruities.
Bacchus and Don Quixote arm in arm zigzagged aboard ship for Utopia. They read on the Argo’s deck Cyrus and Abbé Terrasson.
Pegasus and Rocinante kicked at crossroads where Pentheus reinstalled Priapus while in the wood’s corner the anthropophagic bacchanal awaited Pentheus and post-chaise travelers on the road to Varennes.
Diana with silver horn, ebony bow, crystal quiver, illumined Parc-aux-Cerfs’ nights with her slender nudity; swift-footed Nymphs loosed her greyhounds. Echo cried “Tally-ho!” arrows flew, and the goddess sounded the mort for all husbands. Thus she preluded Christian marriage’s rupture, free union, ovary-less feminism.
The Lernaean Hydra, mocking Hercules and Deianira for being marble, spawned masses of horrid progeny in all Le Nôtre’s basins. Sensing the hour approach, they scurried to every gutter in Paris. At last the old She-Wolf from Bondy’s forests of ancient Rome suckled endless litters of wolf cubs licking their chops for coming lycanthropies, gnashing teeth for the cracking of saints’ bones in all reliquaries—then of France’s Church and French social State.
Should a medium articulate his political formula, Paganism would reconstitute itself with less Orpheus, fewer Sages and Pythagoras. Montesquieu became its Thomas Aquinas in doublet, knee-breeches and buckled shoes, jabot and lace cuffs, sword at his side like a bolt, inkhorn slung across. The saint had struck a Concordat with the least vile Gentile philosophy; the Baron surrendered to Gentiles without Concordat.
Thus the Demons exulted. Their Company of Judas dragged by the feet pupils of the Company of Jesus—not a few Jansenists, some Oratorians, numerous Monks, all the parish priests jealous of miters, cardinals like Dubois, bishops like Autun’s—the youth of sword and robe, all the cream of Gradus ad Parnassum, the whole general staff of de Viris illustribus on Mardi Gras spree.
While plumed ones cudgeled Christianity’s watch, mere captains of adventure enlisted prudhommes and bourgeois, dressing them in Roman carnival.
All logic professors made their Jourdains—Monsieur, Madame and Family—rave, down to the interesting youngest. Monsieur became Numitor, Madame embodied Lucretia while ogling shopboys with kitchen knife in hand. The interesting youngest was debaptized—he spoke Latin, called himself Brutus, and burst his drum awaiting Santerre’s.
Ruined Don Juans played Catiline; the Monsieur Dimanches[*] took their last yard of cloth to drape as Menenius Agrippa. The Commander’s statue sketched with stony leg the Rubicon’s fatal step.
Tartuffe, kicked out, meditated the Law of Suspects. He blew cooks’ fires to forge Jacobins and Tricoteuses. The Misanthrope dreamed Burrhus, Philinte Seneca, Oronte Nero lyre in hand. Vadius ruminated “Friend of Man,” Trissotin “Père Duchêne.” All clientless Diafoiruses turned Pompilius with syringe slung. Court and town, refusing to die by their pills, awaited glory day while honing lancets on tallest poppy-heads in pharmacy gardens.
Soon would emerge from their ranks Humanism’s Aesculapius—Philanthropy’s great “bleeder,” the excellent Doctor Guillotin.
Devoted to snuffbox pedants, Learned Ladies raged unappeased against duchesses’ graces and their swarms of dapper fops. Jaundiced, they dressed as Muses, terrifying young clerics by day—for night makes all cats gray in the “Garden of Greek Roots.”
But all this paled before lawyer Pathelin. He declared war on all French society in the name of De Cujus from Forum, Agora, even English parliamentarism—which he mistook for a windmill of words.
Tricorne askew, sulfur-powdered queue standing rigid, he brandished The Spirit of Laws. His wolflike eyes flashed, his teeth chattered, his voice howled. He put the devil into the bodies of the Basoche and the Sorbonne, becoming their secular mouthpiece. He appealed to Mascarille against townhouses, to Cartouche and Mandrin against castles, to the Rights of the Citizen against the City, to man’s against Humanity’s—from summum Jus to summa Injuria against every cause his empty purse would not back…
T-52 — Editor’s Note: Monsieur Dimanche — the hapless creditor in Molière’s Don Juan (1665), a character who is endlessly put off and manipulated by the debtor he tries to collect from. ↩