Page:Books Condemned to be Burnt - James Anson Farrer.djvu/33

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Introduction.
17

"Oui, je l'avoue avec vous
Que tous les poêtes sont fous;
Mais sachant ce que vous êtes
Tous les fous ne sont pas poêtes."

Hélot also escaped with a burning in effigy when his L'Ecole des Filles was burnt at the foot of the gallows (1672). Lyser, who spent his life and his property in the advocacy of polygamy, was threatened by Christian V. with capital punishment if he appeared in Denmark, and his Discursus Politicus de Polygamia was sentenced to public burning (1677).

In the eighteenth century (1717) Gigli's satire, the Vocabulario di Santa Caterina e della lingua Sanese; Dufresnoy's Princesses Malabares, ou le Célibat Philosophique (1734); Deslandes' Pygmalion ou la Statue Animée (1741); the Jesuit Busembaum's Theologia Moralis (which defends as an act of charity the commission to kill an excommunicated person), (1757); Toussaint's Les Mœurs (1748); and the Abbé Talbert's satirical poem, Langrognet aux Enfers (1760),—seem to complete the list of the principal works burnt by public authority. And of these the best is Toussaint's, who in 1764 published an apology for or retraction of his Mœurs which has far less claim upon public