This is an MDMD(8) post. Hit D-button if necessary.

[Michel Ryckx]

Is Chapter 11 'stencilized'?  First, the Reverend says he was not on St
Helena. Nor did he meet Mason in his 'Tyburn' period.  This is not
unusual in his account.  But then I have the impression he's getting
drunk, see the period "In lower-situated [. . .] an evil-in-innocence."
(M&D, 110.13-23)--say it out loud and you'll hear what I mean-- followed
by a parenthesis in which he's asked to have "Another Cup, Sir" (M&D,
110.27).

In that long period he even talks of "small darting winged beings,
untrustworthy as remembrancers".

Anyone?

Another tiny little observation: direct Jesuit mention number 5 in the
novel at p. 115.

It is a sign of those enlightened times that in a few decades the
Jesuits in Europe, so numerous, so rich and so intelligent, were
disgraced, humiliated and in the end forbidden by the pope himself.

It began in Portugal, where the Jesuits were accused by a Portuguese
Richelieu, the marquis of Pombal, of having attempted to kill the king.
In 1759 they were banned from the country.  The Inquisition burned a
jesuit, father Malagrida, on the 12th of September, 1761 (12 Sept by the
way is my oldest daughter's birthday.  A Certain Situation spoiled her
birthday party this year.  She's 11).

In France: the same picture, even since 1728, when a father Berruyer
published "Histoire du Peuple de Dieu"; part 2, published in 1753 was
disapproved by the Church, as happened with part 3, in 1758.  A month
after the Venus transit, on 3d of July, 1761, Joly de Fleury, in the
French parliament, said that the Jesuits were a danger for the safety of
the state. There was a very popular tract, called "Compte rendu des
Constitutions des Jésuites", written by a Louis-René de Caradeuc de la
Chalotais --which name even mr. Pynchon could not have invented--; in
1764, the King of France banned them all.

Spain, Europe's most catholic country followed in 1766; in 1767 the
jesuits were ordered to leave the country.

d'Alembert considered this phenomenon one of the most important things
of his time and wrote a book about it in 1765.  They were even banned
from Sicily, Parma and Venice.  The Pope, Clemens XIV, surrendered in
1773 and decreed in "Dominus ac Redemptor noster" on 21st of Juli 1773
the end of the Jesuit order.

(ths is all from chapter 7 of the Paul Hazard study I mentioned some
time ago)

No wonder we will find them again in America.

Michel
"Jesuit Counter"