Telegrams everywhere announced the arrests of poets, one after another, and the electrocution of the American poets was made known early in the afternoon.
In Paris, several young poets of the left bank, who had been spared on account of their lack of notoriety, organized a demonstration extending from the Closerie des Lilas to the Conciergerie, where the "prince of poets" was imprisoned.[15]
Troops arrived to disperse the demonstrators. The cavalry charged. The poets drew their firearms and defended themselves but the people rushed in and took a hand in the mêlée. The poets were strangled and so was everyone else who came to their defense.
Thus began the great persecution which swept rapidly throughout the entire world. In America, after the electrocution of the famous poets, they lynched all the negro minstrels and even many persons who had never in their lives written a rhyme; then they fell upon the whites of literary Bohemia. It was learned that Tograth, after having personally directed the persecution in Australia, had embarked at Melbourne.
André Dérain
[XVII. ASSASSINATION]
Like Orpheus, all the poets felt violent death staring them in the face. Everywhere, publishers had been pillaged and collections of verse burnt. The admiration of all went out to Horace Tograth who, from far off Adelaide (Australia), had succeeded in unloosing this storm which seemed destined to destroy poetry forever. This man's knowledge, they said, bordered on the miraculous. He could drive away clouds or bring on rain anywhere he pleased. Women, once they had seen him, were ready to do his bidding. For the rest, he did not disdain either feminine or masculine virginities. As soon as Tograth had seen what enthusiasms he had evoked in the whole world, he announced that he would visit the principal cities of the globe, after Australia had been rid of its erotic and elegiac poets. And indeed some time later uprisings of the population were heard of in Tokyo, Pekin, Yakutsk, Calcutta, Buenos Ayres, San Francisco, Chicago, upon the appearance of the terrible German, Tograth. Wherever he went, he left an unearthly impression on account of his "miracles" (which he called scientific), and his extraordinary healings, all of which lifted his repute as a scientist and a thaumaturgist to sublime heights.
On May 30, Tograth debarked at Marseilles. The people were massed along the quays; Tograth landed from the steamer in a launch. No sooner was he recognized than cries, shouts, toasts, from innumerable gullets mingled with the sound of the wind, the waves and the sirens of the vessels. Tograth, tall and thin, was standing up in the launch. As it approached the land, the features of the hero could be distinguished more and more clearly. His face was smooth-shaven and blue, his mouth almost lipless, disfigured by an ugly cut; he had a receding chin which gave him the appearance, one might have said, of a shark. His brow rose straight up, very high and very large. Tograth was dressed in a pasty white costume, his shoes also being white and high-heeled. He wore no hat. As soon as he placed his foot upon the soil of Marseilles the furor of the crowd rose to such heights that when the quays were cleared three hundred people were found dead, strangled, trampled, crushed. Several men seized the hero and raised him upon their shoulders while they sang and shouted, and women threw flowers at him all the way to the hotel where a suite had been prepared for him and managers, interpreters and bell-boys were waiting to greet him.