Many (like some of the insane, whom they surpass in this point) continually intersperse their conversation with puns and plays on words. A certain Jassio wished to prove the analogy of the hand and the week in which God created the world, by means of a pun on the words main and semaine. Hécart, who had himself said that it is the peculiarity of the insane to occupy themselves with useless trifles, wrote the biography of the madmen of Valenciennes, and the strange book entitled Anagrammata, poëme en VII. chants, XCVe édition (as a matter of fact, it was the first), rev. corr. et augmentée; à Anagrammatopolis, l’an XIV. de l’ère anagrammatique (Valenciennes, 1821, 16º). The book is almost entirely composed of inversions of words. The following is an example:
“Lecteur; il sied que je vous dise
Que le sbire fera la brise;
Que le dupeur est sans pudeur,
Qu’on peut maculer sans clameur....
La nomade a mis la madonne
A la paterne de Pétronne
Quand le grand Dacier était diacre
Le caffier cultivé du fiacre.”
And so on for twelve thousand lines, concluding with this:
“Moi je vais poser mon repos.”
Here it is as well to note that, on the margin of a copy of the Anagrammata belonging to the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris is the following confession, in the author’s handwriting, “Anagrams are one of the greatest inanities of which the human mind is capable; one must be a fool to amuse one’s self with them, and worse than a fool to make them.” This is a correct diagnosis of his case.
Filopanti, in the Dio Liberale, explains Luther’s propaganda by a caprice on the part of the Deity, who caused Mars to become a monk. The latter thus became Martin, and then Martin Luther.
The origin of Gleizes’ vegetarian mania was a dream, in which he heard a voice crying in his ears, “Gleizes means église.” He thus thought himself suddenly appointed by God to preach his doctrine to mankind. Du Monin has the plague decapitated, “Take away this head from hence; I fear that this head will deprive my people of their heads by a new mischief.”[346]
But a still more prevalent characteristic is the singular copiousness of their writings. Bluet left behind no less than 180 books, each more foolish than the other. We shall see how Mangione, who, in addition, was crippled in one hand and could not write, deprived himself of food to defray the cost of printing, and sometimes spent more than one hundred scudi per month to enable him to gratify his taste for authorship. We know how many reams of paper Passanante covered, and how he attached more importance to the publication of a foolish letter of his than to his own life. Guiteau used so much paper as to incur a considerable debt which he was unable to pay. The list of George Fox’s works is so long that the bibliographer Lowndes does not venture to give it. Howerlandt’s Essay on Tournay consists of 117 volumes.
Sometimes they content themselves with writing and printing their vagaries, and make no attempt to diffuse them among the public, though they assume that the latter must be acquainted with them.