The Napus. Leon Daudet

were attributed to the Irish Saint Malachy, not to a “Moldavian” (Moldavia had not yet come into existence at that time), so Daudet appears to be deliberately playing up the falsity of the entire prophetic tradition.

4. Various characters of this name featured in French literature trace their origin back to one of the stock figures of the Théâtre du Guignol de Lyon, a marionette theater related ancestrally to the Italian commedia dell’arte and in terms of its descendants to British “Punch and Judy” shows. The word “sarsifie,” approximately equivalent to the English slang term “sauce” [pugnacious impertinence] was invented to describe the particular character of his irreverence.

5. Grégeois-la-Grège translates as “raw Greek fire.”

6. Élie Metchnikoff was a leading researcher at the Institut Pasteur, who received the Nobel Prize in 1908 for his studies of the immune system and the activity of phagocytes. The scornfully sarcastic reference is presumably to his commercial promotion of an ointment of calomel (mercury chloride) as a prophylactic against syphilis. The use of mercury to treat syphilis—which, if it ever worked at all, was severely undermined in its utility by horrid side-effects—fell into disuse after the discovery of better antibacterial treatments, eventually capped by antibiotics.