The Banned Lecture

I omitted to mention that all these suicides were excessively beautiful and even voluptuous young women of high social position, and that the wicked president had blackmailed them out of vast sums. You see, the people for whom this dear young gentle- man was writing all get sexually excited by pictures of young women, and also by any statement about large sums of money. For they immediately have a wish phantasm—if they had large sums themselves, what terrible fellows they could be. In the Middle Ages, the art of exciting the people was not very different. The Jew had always an immense hoard of ill-gotten wealth, and of course every penny that was exacted by Reginald Front-de- Boeuf was laid to the Jews’ account. But there was another treasure that the peasant was afraid to lose, the dearest treasure of all, his children. As little boys, thank God, have a habit of straying in search of adventure and getting lost in the process, which is good for their souls, the peasant naturally has moments of serious disquietude as to whether some- thing terrible can have happened to little Tommy. Very Good. All we have to do is to play on the alarm. We put into his mind that little Tommy (who turns up all right, if rather muddy, half an hour later) has almost certainly been kidnapped by the Jews for purposes of ritual murder. The main accusation against Gilles de Rais is therefore just this general accusation against anyone in Christendom who exhibited any desire for know- ledge. Only, in his case, it was concentrated and exaggerated to fantastic lengths by some factor or other on which I feel it useless to speculate. The