CHAMPION LIAR OF THE AGE.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXII, Issue 8827, 31 May 1907, Page 4

CHAMPION LIAR OF THE AGE.

Leo Taxil is dead. He was the champion liar of the age. He invented “Diana Vaughan,” the supposed prophetess of Black Masonry, and hoaxed all Europe with it. It will go down in the list of great hoaxes with George Psahuauazar and his Formosan hoax and the forgeries of Chattorton. Loo Taxil was not his real name. In fact, there was nothing real about this champion “faker” of the ago. Ho was Gabriel Antoine Joyand-Pages, and he was born in Marseilles. Educated by the Jesuits, he very early developed faults, which resulted in his going to a house of correction. Ho 'came to Paris filled, he said, with hatred.

of the Jesuits, aud started au anticlerical bookshop. Having become a Freemason, ho was expelled from the order aud then turned clerical. He

made a public retraction with - groat pomp, aud so imposed on the clergy that they held a special thanksgiving service at Montmartre. He began exposing with his customary violence his old allies the Freemasons and Freethinkers, and in the cause of his campaign alleged®that the ‘ ‘ black mass” was still being celebrated by the Satauists among the French Freemasons. The clerical party snatched at this with joy as a means of discrediting their opponents, aud Leo Taxil’s books were translated into every European Language. He invented the celebrated Diana Vaughan, who was a priestess of the

Luciferin sect, and went so far as to supply her portrait to American newspapers. Interviews with her appeared, aud he actually fixed a day for her public recantation aud reception in the church. His most

impudent imposture was the sending of the devil’s tail to the Jesuits as a present. He declared that it had been 'secured at one of the "black masses” held by the Satanists in Masonic lodges. This tail turned out to be a portion of a rug made out of a lion’s skin with the tail attached a. Another of his stories was that the rock of Gibraltar is undermined by subterranean galleries where, tile Freemasons met Satan at fixed' times to hold their impious worship. At last the non-appearance of Diana Yaughan made his dupes uneasy and it ended, by this fluent liar making another recantation, in which he admitted that his Lucifer! an prophetess was a myth, and that "Satanism” did not exist. He died at last, rejected by all parties, in obscurity and poverty.