In the assassin of Henry III.,
Frère Jacques Clement,
they discovered
C’est l’enfer qui m’a crée.
The French appear to have practised this art with peculiar facility. A French poet, deeply in love, in one day sent his mistress, whose name was Magdelaine, three dozen of anagrams on her single name.
The father Pierre de St. Louis became a Carmelite monk on discovering that his lay name—
Ludovicus Bartelemi—
yielded the anagram—
Carmelo se devovet.
Of all the extravagances occasioned by the anagrammatic fever when at its height, none equals what is recorded of an infatuated Frenchman in the seventeenth century, named André Pujom, who, finding in his name the anagram Pendu à Riom, (the seat of criminal justice in the province of Auvergne,) felt impelled to fulfill his destiny, committed a capital offence in Auvergne, and was actually hung in the place to which the omen pointed.