I do not say that this expulsion reflects in any sense discreditably upon him as a man of honour, but it closed his Masonic career almost as soon as it had begun, so that his title to speak rests only on his literary researches and other forms of derived knowledge, good enough, no doubt, in their way, but not so exhaustive as could be wished in view of the position he has assumed.

It was shortly after this episode that Leo Taxil returned to the Catholic Church and attached himself to the interests of the clerical party.

Previously to this his literary history must be for him a painful memory.

He was a writer of anti-clerical romances and the editor of an anti-clerical newspaper--legitimate occupations in one sense, but in this instance too frequently connected with literary methods of a gravely discreditable kind.

A catalogue of the defunct _Libraire Anti-Clericale_ is added to one of the romances, and advertises, among other productions from the same pen, the following contributions made by Leo Taxil to the literature of sacrilege and scandal:--1st, a Life of Jesus, being an instructive and satirical parody of the Gospels, with 500 comic designs; 2nd, The Comic Bible (_Bible Amusante_); 3rd, The Debaucheries of a Confessor, a romance founded on the affair of the Jesuit Girarde and Catherine Cadiere; 4th, a Female Pope, being the adventures and crimes of Pope Joan, written in collaboration with F.Laffont; 5th, The Pope's Mistress, a "grand historical romance," written in collaboration with Karl Milo; 6th, Pius the Ninth before history, his life political and pontifical, his debaucheries, follies, and crimes, 3 vols.; 7th, The Poisoner Leo Thirteenth, an account of thefts and poisoning committed with the complicity of the present pontiff; 8th, Contemporary Prostitution, a collection of revolting statistics upon, _inter alia_, the methods, habits, and physical peculiarities of persons who practice paederasty.
It will be seen that since his conversion our author has changed his objects without altering his methods.