A hoax of this kind fits perfectly into the career of Lamothe-Langon. For Lamothe-Langon was not a historian at all but the author of innumerable vaguely historical novels, with a marked taste for the sinister, the mysterious and the melodramatic. He came from Toulouse: the countryside and city where he sets his drama of witches’ sabbats and witch-burnings was familiar to him in every detail. Also, he specialized in fabricating spurious historical sources, which he produced in thousands upon thousands of pages. For such a man nothing would have been easier, or more diverting, than to concoct the confessions of Anne-Marie de Georgel and Catherine, wife of Pierre Delort.
The matter, and the man, call for closer attention.(21) Etienne-Léon de Lamothe (to give him his original name) was born in 1786, of a noble family: his ancestors included capitouls, his father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all been councillors of the parlement of Toulouse. Along with a number of similar public figures from Toulouse, his father was guillotined in Paris by the revolutionary government in 1794; which, since Mme de Lamothe was a totally ineffective person, left the eight-year-old boy to manage his life for himself. He avoided any formal schooling and educated himself in his father’s library, devouring every book he could lay hands on, indiscriminately and without any kind of guidance. At the age of sixteen he began to write, and within four years he had turned out four tragedies, six comedies, three operas, a novel and sundry other works. And if these juvenilia circulated in manuscript only, by the age of twenty-two he had published four novels, including a five-volume novel on the troubadours which was translated into English, German and Italian.
Meanwhile a tumultuous love-life with a series of fashionable mistresses, first at Toulouse, then in Paris, consumed the remnants of a fortune which had never been large. Lamothe set out to find employment in the imperial administration, and he found it — first as auditor to the Conseil d’Etat, then, at the age of twenty-five, as sub-prefect of Toulouse. He carried out his duties with distinction and proved himself a good administrator. On the other hand, it would be absurd to take seriously his claim that during this period he also laid the foundations of his Histoire de l’Inquisition by studying manuscript sources.(22) His appointment at Toulouse lasted only two years (1811-13) and was certainly no sinecure. Moreover, he had no training in paleography; and when he quotes unpublished materials, he never supplies verbatim transcriptions — as serious historians commonly did, even at that time.
Lamothe’s administrative career was closely identified with the imperial cause — during the Hundred Days he resumed service, as subprefect at Carcassonne — and with the final overthrow of Napoleon all prospects of official employment vanished. He tried to ingratiate himself with the royalists by writing a satirical account of his late master, entitled Bonaparte; but in vain. So he turned to writing as a full-time occupation. Under the names of Lamothe-Houdancourt (from 1815 to 1817) and of Lamothe-Langon (from 1817), and also under a vast number of pseudonyms, he became the most abundantly productive author in France, in an age when many authors were abundantly productive.
In the years following Napoleon’s fall the public was insatiable for novels, criticism was at low ebb, publishers were concerned with quantity not quality, and the few novelists who existed were mostly poor devils whose only choice lay between non-stop production and starvation. Lamothe did at least make a great deal of money (which he spent as fast as he made it, or faster) but at the cost of becoming the supreme hack in a generation of hacks. Late in life he commented bitterly on his fate: “Despite the force of temperament and the mental energy with which I was blessed by our divine Creator, I could no longer carry on.... Fifty years of unremitting labour, beginning each day between three and four o’clock in the morning and continuing to two o’clock in the afternoon — labour surpassing and crushing human strength — in the end extinguished my imagination and annihilated my energy.”(23) In sheer bulk his achievement was indeed prodigious— some 400 works, in prose and verse, representing some 1,500 volumes of manuscript.
The three-volume Histoire de l’Inquisition can be justly appreciated only against this background. Lamothe-Langon himself made high claims for the work: “For twenty years I collected valuable material. . brought together scattered documents… I venture to call it a truly Benedictine work…”(24) In reality, his preoccupations and methods had little in common with those of the patient historians of Saint-Maur. The Histoire appeared after a whole series of horrific novels with titles like Tête de mort, on la Croix du cimetière de Saint-Aubin; les Mystères de la tour Saint-Jean, ou les Chevaliers du Temple; les Apparitions du château de Tarabel, ou le Protecteur invisible; le Monastère des frères noirs, ou Étendard de la mort; la Vampire ou la Vierge de Hongrie. Moreover the very year 1829, which saw the publication of the Histoire, also saw the publication of no less than twenty other volumes by Lamothe-Langon! For such a man the labour of historical research was clearly out of the question.
It is easy enough to divine what inspiration lay behind this particular work. In a pamphlet which he wrote to smooth the way for his history, Lamothe-Langon mentions the Critical History of the Spanish Inquisition, by Giovanni Antonio Llorente.(25) This Italian work had been published in French translation in 1817-18, and by 1829 there had been three French, three German, two English, two Spanish and two Dutch translations. Nothing could be more natural than for Lamothe-Langon to try to imitate so successful a production. Only he failed; his history passed almost unnoticed, was never reprinted, and had no translations. Moreover when, from about 1880 onwards, French historians began serious work on the Inquisition in the south of France, they passed over Lamothe-Langon in silence, as unworthy of notice.(26) And no doubt the book would have been altogether forgotten if Joseph Hansen— himself a most honourable and devoted archivist and historian — had not, in the simplicity of his heart, reprinted the supposed reports of witch-trials it contains.
Neither Hansen himself, nor the many historians who have followed in his footsteps, would have been so easily deceived if they had examined some of the works which Lamothe-Langon produced after the Histoire de l’Inquisition. For from that date onwards he turned out volume after volume of spurious memoirs, attributed either to figures famous in French history or else to individuals who had been close to such figures. Four of these memoirs, each in several volumes, appeared in the very same year as the Histoire: Mémoires historiques et anecdotiques du due de Richelieu, Mémoires de madame la comtesse du Barry, Mémoires et souvenirs d’un pair de France and above all Mémoires d’uine femme de qualité, which achieved an international success. And thereafter, although Lamothe-Langon continued to write novels as before, this new genre became his principal and most profitable speciality: in all he produced twenty-four memoirs, totalling ninety volumes, in seventeen years.