Comte de Gabalis

ABBÉ N. DE MONTFAUCON DE VILLARS. Pierre-Nicolas de Montfaucon was born in Alet-les-Bains (Aude), 1635, in a noble family; but because he was not de elder son, his only option was the Church. After some success in the south, he decided to go to Paris, where he made friends in the libertine circles. Involved in an act of conspiracy against Mazarin, he was jailed. In 1668, he wrote his master piece: “Le comte de Gabalis ou Entretien sur les sciences secrètes », a dialogue between a cabalist and a skeptic, that was, for a few, the cause of his violent death. Indeed, when he was traveling in the road for Paris to Lyon, in March 1675, he was killed by a gun shot. Immediately sprang the legend of the ritual murder because he had made forbidden revelations, some words about the true nature of God, the effective power of the name Agla, and the evocation of “a mystic Empire of Salamanders, integrated by mysterious inhabitants of the fire”.