Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [230]
It was, again, the Plan of the Jesuits and, before that, of the Ordonation of the Templars. Few variations, few changes: the Protocols were self-generating; a blueprint that migrated from one conspiracy to another.
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And when we racked our brains to find the missing link that connected this whole fine story to Nilus, we encountered Rach-kovsky, the head of the tsar’s secret police, the terrible Okhrana.
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A cover is always necessary. In concealment lies a great part of our strength. Hence we must always hide ourselves under the name of another society.
—Die neuesten Arbeiten des Spartacus und Philo in dem Illuminaten-Orden, 1794, p. 165
At that same time, reading some pages of our Diabolicals, we found that the Comte de Saint-Germain, among his numerous disguises, had assumed the identity Rackoczi, at least according to the ambassador of Frederick II in Dresden. And the landgrave of Hesse, at whose residence Saint-Germain was supposed to have died, said that he was of Transylvanian origin and his name was Rago/ki. We had also to consider that Comenius dedicated his Pansophiae (a work surely born in the odor of Rosicrucian-ism) to a landgrave (another landgrave) named Ragovsky. A final touch to the mosaic: browsing at a bookstall in Piazza Castello, I found a German work on Masonry, anonymous, in which an unknown hand had added, on the flyleaf, a note to the effect that the text was the work of one Karl Aug. Ragotgky. Bearing in mind that Rakosky was the name of the mysterious individual who had perhaps killed Colonel Ardenti, we now could include in the Plan our Comte de Saint-Germain.
“Aren’t we giving that scoundrel too much power?” Diotal-levi asked, concerned.
“No, no,” Belbo replied, “we need him. Like soy sauce in Chinese dishes. If it’s not there, it’s not Chinese. Look at Aglie, who knows a thing or two: Did he take Cagliostro as his model? Or Willermoz? No. Saint-Germain is the quintessence of Homo Hermeticus.”
Pierre Ivanovitch Rachkovsky: jovial, sly, feline, intelligent, and astute, a counterfeiter of genius. First a petty bureaucrat, later in contact with revolutionary groups, in 1879 he is arrested by the secret police and charged with having given refuge to terrorist companions after their attempted assassination of General Drentel. He becomes a police informer and (here we go!) joins the ranks of the Black Hundreds. In 1890 he discovers in Paris an organization that makes bombs for demonstrations in Russia; he arranges the arrest, back home, of seventy-three terrorists. Ten years later, it is discovered that the bombs were made by his own men.
In 1887 he circulates a letter by a certain Ivanov, a repentant revolutionary, who declares that the majority of the terrorists are Jews; in 1890, a “confession par un veillard ancien revolution-naire,” in which the exiled revolutionaries in London are accused of being British agents; and in 1892, a bogus text of Plekhanov, which accuses the leaders of the Narodnaya Volya party of having had that confession published.
In 1902 he forms a Franco-Russian anti-Semitic league. To ensure its success he uses a technique similar to that of the Ro-sicrucians: he declares that the league exists, so that people will then create it. But he uses another tactic, too: he cleverly mixes truth with falsehood, the truth apparently damaging to him, so that nobody will