The Book of Buried Treasure / Being a True History of the Gold, Jewels, and Plate of Pirates, Galleons, etc., which are sought for to this day

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

In The London Times of November 3rd, 1882, there was published under the head of "Foreign Intelligence," the following dispatch which may be regarded as a tragic sequel of the foregoing paragraphs:

"The titular Archbishop of Lepanto, who is the head of the Chapter of St. Denis, has addressed a remonstrance to the Government against the renewed divining rod experiments on which Madame Caillavah is insisting under her compact with the State for a division of the spoils. He dwells on the absurdity of the theory that on the Revolutionary seizure of 1793 the Benedictines could have concealed a portion of their treasures, of which printed lists existed and the most valuable of which were notoriously confiscated.

"As to the notion of an earlier secretion of treasures, the memory of which had perished, he urges that St. Denis having belonged to the Benedictines from its very erection, no motive for secretion existed and had there been any, the tradition or record of it would have been preserved, while at least four successive reconstructions would certainly have brought any such treasure to light. The mob of 1793, moreover, actually ransacked the vaults, after the removal of the bodies, for the very purpose of discovering such secret hoards. St. Denis, in short, is the very last place in the world for treasure-trove, and as for the central crypt, which the sorceress claims to break into, it was rifled in 1793 when it contained fifty-three bodies which left no vacant space.

"The Archbishop need scarcely have troubled himself with this demonstration. Public ridicule has made an end of the project, and even if Madame Caillavah carried out her threat of a lawsuit, no tribunal would hold her entitled to carry on excavations ad libitum, with a risk, perhaps, of herself and her workmen being buried under the ruins of the finest of French cathedrals. In debating the Fine Arts Department estimates, M. Delattre, Deputy for St. Denis, animadverted on the divining rod experiments in the cathedral. M. Tirard replied that the Government had had no share in this ridiculous business. The treaty with the sorceress was concluded in January, 1881, by an official who had since been superannuated, but was not acted upon till she could deposit two hundred francs guarantee, and as soon as he himself heard of the experiments he put a peremptory stop to them.

"It is important here to observe that it afterwards transpired that the object of Madame Caillavah's lawsuit was not so much to obtain damages for any breach of contract as to vindicate her private and public character and her professional reputation as a so-called 'diviner' from the odium, scorn, and defamation which the repudiation of the treaty so universally entailed. The sad result of all this was that the unfortunate and sensitive lady was not able to withstand the opprobrium that was heaped upon her, nor 'the ridicule that made an end of her project.' This maligned and misunderstood lady (who, as expressly stated, 'had no doubt brought a good pedigree with her') after a few months of sorrow, and conscious of her rectitude, at length succumbed and, as reported, ultimately died of a 'broken heart.'"

[[1]] "Corpuscular philosophy, that which attempts to account for the phenomena of nature, by the motion, figure, rest, position, etc., of the minute particles of matter."—Webster's Dictionary.

[[2]] Andrew Lang writes in a chapter on the divining rod in Custom and Myth:

"The great authority for the modern history of the divining rod is a work published by M. Chevreul in Paris in 1854. M. Chevreul, probably with truth, regarded the wand as much on a par with the turning tables which, in 1854, attracted a good deal of attention.... M. Chevreul could find no earlier book on the twig than the Testament du Frere, Basile Valentin, a holy man who flourished (the twig) about 1413, but whose treatise is possibly apocryphal. According to Basile Valentin, the twig was regarded with awe by ignorant laboring men, which is still true."

[[3]] "And Jacob took him rods of green poplar, and of the hazel and chestnut tree; and pilled white strakes in them, and made the white appear which was in the rods.

"And he set the rods which he had pilled before the flocks in the gutters in the watering troughs when the flocks came to drink, that they should conceive when they came to drink." (Genesis xxx, 37-38.)