For our present purpose the memoirs attributed to Napoleon and to Louis XVIII are particularly relevant, for they show that Lamothe-Langon did indeed possess all the skill and audacity required to fabricate and launch a historical myth. Not only are the Mémoires de Napoléon Bonaparte (1834) presented as the work of the emperor himself, but a projected continuation is announced in the following terms: ‘‘Here, without doubt, is the most important publication of the century. There need be no fear that anyone will confuse the great man’s authentic memoirs with the multitude of memoirs and recollections that are constantly appearing.... These most valuable memoirs were completed on the isle of Elba. Brought back to the Tuileries, they were left in the emperor’s study.... Later, they were placed in the hands of the same person to whom Louis XVIII had entrusted his own memoirs, about which nobody had ever raised any doubts.”(27) The reference is to the spurious memoirs of Louis XVIII, which were also the work of Lamothe-Langon.
As for the Mémoires de Louis XVIII and the Soirées de S.M. Louis XVIII, it is thanks to them that one specific, notorious imposture, which would otherwise have been quickly forgotten, has continued to intrigue and deceive some people right down to our times. In the 1830s a deserter from the Prussian army, called Naundorff, appeared in France and claimed to be Louis XVII, i.e. the Dauphin who in reality had died in prison during the Revolution. The man was quickly unmasked and expelled from France. Lamothe-Langon, however, inserted into his spurious memoirs of Louis XVIII various remarks suggesting that the Dauphin had not in fact perished and might well be Naundorff. He also inserted into other spurious memoirs, attributed to other personalities, passages which seemed to corroborate this view of the matter; and so constructed a whole body of self-supporting but completely fictitious evidence which still continues, at intervals, to give rise to further outbursts of argument and to fresh crops of books. One such occasion was around 1910; at that time Dr de Santi, the Toulousain expert on Lamothe-Langon, produced a pamphlet in which he showed that the “proofs” of the pro-Naundorff faction consisted almost wholly of passages culled from books which, whatever their ostensible authors, were really all by Lamothe-Langon. Not that that put an end to the affair — a new pro-Naundorff campaign was launched in 1954!(28)
Fortified with these insights into the personality and methods of Lamothe-Langon, we may return to his most successful hoax, the imaginary witch-hunt in fourteenth-century Languedoc. Although in the preface to his history he claims to have studied manuscript sources in various archives, he makes no such claim in respect of the confessions of Anne-Marie Georgel and Catherine, wife of Pierre Delort. On the contrary, this text is described in a footnote as “extracted from the archives of the Inquisition of Toulouse, by Father Hyacinthc Sermet, metropolitan bishop of the South”. Now, Antoine-Pascal-Hyacinthe Sermet really existed.(29) Born at Toulouse in 1732, he started as a Carmelite monk and rose to be provincial of his order. He was a man of some erudition, and at one time concerned himself with the history of the Inquisition of Toulouse. Nevertheless, it is highly improbable that he ever made any extracts from the archives of the Inquisition. In the single, twelve-page article which was all that he ever published on the subject, he makes it plain that he had not discovered any unpublished sources.(30) That was in 1790, when Sermet was already fifty-eight and had reached the end of his career as a scholar. For with the coming of the Revolution he became deeply involved in politics. He was one of the clerics who accepted appointments from the revolutionary government — in 1791 he took office as the metropolitan bishop of the Haute-Garonne, in defiance of his superiors. “Le Père Sermet”, as he popularly was called, became a most controversial figure, denounced by his archbishop, pouring out political pamphlets in Provençal, taking part in ecclesiastical councils sponsored by the government and even — having conferred on himself the title of “metropolitan bishop of the South” — holding a provincial council of his own at Carcassonne. He continued in this style until 1801, when the changing political climate induced him to retire on a pension; after which he spent his last few years in obscurity and died in Paris. So it is hard to see when or how Sermet could have carried out the labours which Lamothe-Lagon attributes to him. On the other hand, by the time the attribution was made he was in no position to comment, for he had been dead for twenty-one years.
But all this is beside the point. We have already demonstrated, from internal evidence, that the whole passage containing the confessions is spurious. It remains to consider what models Lamothe-Langon had before him when he concocted it.
Practically all Lamothe-Langon’s voluminous manuscripts were destroyed after his death, but fortunately this particular problem can be solved without recourse to manuscript sources. In the preface to his history Lamothe-Langon mentions that he knew (how could he fail to?) the famous Historia Inquisitionis of the seventeenth-century Dutch Protestant Philipp van Limborch, and that he had been particularly struck by the appendix, which contains a number of sentences passed by the inquisitors of Toulouse.(31) The documents in this Liber Sententiarium Inquisitionis Tholosanae not only give the text of the sermons and sentences but list the various clerics who were present on each occasion; and they also mention that royal officials and capitouls were in attendance. Lamothe-Langon would have needed to look no further for the framework of his fabrication. The sermon by which Bernard Guidonis in 1322 sentenced a number of heretics to various penalties, for instance, would have provided an admirable model for the imaginary sermon which Lamothe-Langon attributes to Bernard’s nephew Pierre.(32) Two other works mentioned by Lamothe-Langon will have supplied him with the names of the personages who are supposed to have been involved. An old and well-known history of Toulouse, La Faille’s Annales de la Ville de Toulouse, gives the names of the six capitouls for 1335, in almost exactly the same order.(33) The fatal error concerning Pierre Guidonis, on the other hand, can be traced back to Percin’s list of inquisitors of Toulouse, published in 1693.(34) It is typical of Lamothe-Langon that, having taken both the name and the date from Percin, and constructed a whole melodrama around them, he should add: “By an inexplicable oversight, Father Percin did not include in his list Pierre Guidonis, who was functioning as an inquisitor in 1334.”(35)
To find models for the witches’ confessions he will naturally have had to look to a later historical period, when the new stereotype of the witch was fully developed. An obvious source would be Pierre de Lancre’s Tableau de l’Inconstance des Mauvais Anges, which was published in 1612. This celebrated work, which has always been easily available, reveals in great detail the beliefs of a witch-hunting magistrate at the height of the great witch-hunt, and the correspondence with Lamothe-Langon’s account is exact. The initial appearance of the Devil in the form of a black man; the pact, concluded at midnight; the witch transported by a mere effort of will to a sabbat held usually on Friday nights, though in the most varied places; the Devil in the form of a gigantic black goat, presiding over the sabbat and copulating with the women participants; the promiscuous mating between the men and women present; the banquet where new-born babies are devoured, and disgusting liquids are drunk, but where no salt is ever to be seen; the cooking of poisonous herbs and of substances from exhumed corpses; the poisoning of human beings and of cattle, and the destruction of crops by means of poisonous mists — all these details are to be found in the pages of de Lancre,(36) and they also figure in the fictitious confessions of Lamothe-Langon’s witches.