He first engaged in unrestrained anticlerical propaganda, publishing offensive books, even in their titles, against the Pope, the clergy, and leading Catholic thinkers (*La sountane grotesque* [Paris 1879], *La chasse aux corbeaux* [ibid. 1897], *Les bêtises sacrées* [ibid. 1881], *L'empoisonneur Léon XIII* [ibid. 1883], *Vie de Jésus* [ibid. 1884], etc.), despite numerous trials and convictions. In 1881 he joined Freemasonry but did not remain long. Suddenly, in 1885, he professed conversion, repudiated his past, and launched an anti-Masonic campaign under the pseudonym L. T. and others, aimed at exposing the sect’s Satanism and its alleged worship of the devil (*Révélations complètes sur la franc-maçonnerie* [3 vols., Paris 1885], *Confessions d’un ex-libre penseur* [ibid. 1887], *La France maçonnique* [ibid. 1888], *La corruption fin-de-siècle* [ibid. 1891], etc.). He fabricated the existence of Diana Vaughan, a priestess of the sect, wife of the demon Asmodeus and daughter of the demon Bitru and Sofia Walter, an ancestor of the Antichrist. The exaggeration, heightened by immorality, of these revelations aroused suspicion among some Catholics; the Anti-Masonic Congress of Trent (1896), in which L. T. participated, did not conclude in favor of the evidence of the hoax—
TAVOLETTE CERATE — Fifth panel of a waxed triptych from Pompeii, written on 24 June 56 AD, discovered in the 1875 excavations in the house of the banker L. Caecilius Jucundus — Naples, National Museum.