[255] See Les Six Voyages de Jean Baptiste Tavernier, en Turquie, en Perse et aux Indes, Paris, 1676. There were five French editions, and the work was also translated into English.
[256] This is really the title of a particular treatise, but as it is exceedingly long and may be said to be de omnibus rebus, it may not be taken unjustly to represent his philosophy at large.
[257] The latest and most successful apologist of Paracelsus says that the charge of intemperance was invented by his enemies. See the Life of Paracelsus, by Miss Anna M. Stoddart, 1911.
[258] Éliphas Lévi, who rather misquotes Dante, held that he had performed the same kind of mental pilgrimage, and had escaped in the same manner—by reversing dogma. He says elsewhere: “It was after he had descended from gulf to gulf and from horror to horror to the bottom of the seventh circle of the abyss ... that Dante ... rose consoled and victorious to the light. We have performed the same journey, and we present ourselves before the world with tranquillity on our countenance and peace in our heart ... to assure mankind that hell and the devil ... and all the rest of the dismal phantasmagoria are a nightmare of madness.”
[259] The interpretation of the Divine Comedy as embodying an act of war against the papacy was begun by Gabriele Rossetti, about 1830, in his Disquisitions on the Anti-Papal Spirit which produced the Reformation. For the obscure and dubious tenets to which Éliphas Lévi gives the name of Johannite, he substitutes the doctrines of Albigenses and Waldenses. The same thesis, taken over from its Italian deviser, was maintained in the same interest by Eugène Aroux, firstly in Les Mystêres de la Chevalerie, and afterwards in the great body of annotation attached to his translation of Dante. The latter work appeared in 1856. The interpretation of Lévi is a variant of that of Aroux. The disquisitions of the French writer are a fountain of joy for criticism. He produced yet another monument, being Dante, Hérétique, Revolutionnaire et Socialiste, 1854. He was a devoted member of the Latin Church, though I think that there would have been joy among the faithful had his books been burnt at Rome.
[260] The authority is the demonographer Bodin. Trois-Échelles confessed to the King that he had given himself over to a spirit who enabled him to perform prodigies. He was forgiven on condition that he denounced others who were guilty of sorcery. It is supposed that his subsequent condemnation was the consequence of new operations on his own part.
[261] That is, Pierre de l’Étoile. See Véritable Fatalité de Saint Cloud, art. 8.
[262] This account is drawn from Garinet, who cites two pamphlets of the period: (A) Les Sorcelleries de Henri de Valois, et les Oblations qu’il faisait au Diable dans le Bois de Vincennes, 1589; (B) Remonstrances à Henri de Valois sur les choses horribles envoyées par un enfant de Paris, 1589.
[263] Compare Aroux: La Comédie de Dante, vol. ii., p. 33 of his Clef de la Comédie. The Rose is “the Albigensian Church and its doctrines ... transformed into a mystic flower.” Hence the immense vogue of the romance of William of Lorris, despite the anathemas of Gerson.
[264] The words of Flamel are as follows: “On the fifth leaf was a fair rose-tree, flowered, in the midst of a garden, growing up against a hollow oak, at the foot whereof bubbled forth a fountain of pure white water, which ran headlong down into the depths below. Yet it passed through the hands of a great number of people who digged in the earth, seeking after it, but, by reason of their blindness, none of them knew it, except a very few, who considered its weight.” Le Livre de Nicolas Flamel.