Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum by eco foucault (important books to read .txt) 📗

author ofthis text is an ordinary merchant who made some notes on businesstransacted at the Grange, or, rather, on the rue St.-Jean¡Xnot onthe night of Saint Jean¡Xand he recorded a price of thirty-sixsous, or crowns, or whatever denomination it was for one or eachwagon of hay.''

"And the hundred andtwenty years?"

"Who said anything aboutyears? Ingolf found something he transcribed as ¡¥120 a'...What isan ¡¥a'? I checked a list of the abbreviations used in those daysand found that for denier or dinarium odd signs were used; onelooks like a delta, another looks like a theta, a circle broken onthe left. If you write it carelessly and in haste, as a busymerchant might, a fanatic like Colonel Ardenti could take it for ana, having already read somewhere the story of the one hundred andtwenty years. You know where better than I. He could have read itin any history of the Rosicrucians. The point is, he wanted to findsomething resembling ¡¥post 120 annos patebo.' And then what doeshe do? He finds ¡¥it' repeated several times and he reads it asiterum. But the abbreviation for iterum was itm, whereas ¡¥it'means item, which means likewise, and is in fact used forrepetitious lists. Our merchant is calculating how much he's goingto make on the orders he's received, and he's listing thedeliveries he has to make. He has to deliver some bouquets of rosesof Provins, and that's the meaning of ¡¥r...s...chevaliers dePruins.' And where the colonel read ¡¥vainjance' (because he hadthe kadosch knights on his mind), you should read ¡¥jonchee.' Theroses were used to make either hats or floral carpets on feastdays. So here is how your Provins message should read:

"In Rue SaintJean:

36 sous for wagons ofhay.

Six new lengths of clothwith seal

to rue desBlancs-Manteaux.

Crusaders' roses to makea jonchee:

six bunches of six inthe six following places,

each 20 deniers, making120 deniers in all.

Here is theorder:

the first to theFort

item the second to thosein Porte-aux-Pains

item to the Church ofthe Refuge

item to the ChurchofNotre Dame, across the river

item to the old buildingof the Cathars

item to rue de laPierre-Ronde.

And three bunches of sixbefore the feast, in the whores' street.

"Because they, too, poorthings, maybe wanted to celebrate the feast day by makingthemselves nice little hats of roses." "My God," I said. "I thinkyou're right." "Of course I'm right. It's a laundry list, I tellyou." , "Wait a minute. This may very well be a laundry list, butthe first message really is in code, and it talks about thirty-sixinvisibles."

"True. The French text Ipolished off in an hour, but the other one kept me busy for twodays. I had to examine Trithemius, at both the Ambrosiana and theTrivulziana, and you know what the librarians there are like:before they let you put your hands on an old book, they look at youas if you were planning to eat it. But the first message, too, is asimple matter. You should have discovered this yourself. To beginwith, are you sure that ¡¥Les 36 inuisibles separez en six bandes'is in the same French as our merchant's? Yes; this expression wasused in a seventeenth-century pamphlet, when the Rosicruciansappeared in Paris. But then you reasoned the way your Diabolicalsdo: If the message is encoded according to the method ofTrithemius, it means that Trithemius copied from the Templars, andsince it quotes a sentence that was current in Rosicrucian circles,it means that the plan attributed to the Rosicrucians was noneother than the plan of the Templars. Try reversing the argument, asany sensible person would: Since the message is written inTri-themius's code, it was written after Trithemius, and since itquotes an expression that circulated among the seventeenth-centuryRosicrucians, it was written after the seventeenth century. So, atthis point, what is the simplest hypothesis? Ingolf finds theProvins message. Since, like the colonel, he's an enthusiast ofhermetic messages, he sees thirty-six and one hundred and twentyand thinks immediately of the Rosicrucians. And since he's also anenthusiast of cryptography, he amuses himself by putting theProvins message into code, as an exercise. So he translates hisfine Rosicrucian sentence using a Trithemiuscryptosystem."

"An ingeniousexplanation. But it's no more valid than the colonel's."

"So far, no. But supposeyou make one conjecture, then a second and a third, and they allsupport one another. Already you're more confident that you're onthe right track, aren't you? I began with the suspicion that thewords used by Ingolf were not the ones taken from Trithemius.They're in the same cabalistic Assyro-Babylonian style, but they'renot the same. Yet, if Ingolf had wanted words beginning with theletters that interested him, in Trithemius he could have found asmany as he liked. Why didn't he use those words?" "Well, why didn'the?"

"Maybe he neededspecific letters also in the second, third, and fourth positions.Maybe our ingenious Ingolf wanted a multicoded message; maybe hewanted to be smarter than Trithemius. Trithemius suggests fortymajor cryptosystems: in one, only the initial letters count; inanother, the first and third letters; in another, every otherinitial letter, and so on, until, with a little I effort, you caninvent a hundred more systems on your own. As I for the ten minorcry ptosy stems, the colonel considered only the first wheel, whichis the easiest. But the following ones work on the principle of thesecond wheel. Here's a copy of it for you. Imagine that the innercircle is mobile and you can turn it so that the letter A coincideswith any letter of the outer circle. You will have one system whereA is written as X, another where A is U, and so on... Withtwenty-two letters on each circle, you can produce not ten buttwenty-one cryptosystems. The twenty-second is no good, becausethere A is A..."

"Don't tell me that foreach letter of each word you tried all twenty-onesystems...."

"I had brains on myside, and luck. Since the shortest words have six letters, it'sobvious that only the first six are important and the rest are justfor looks. Why six letters? Suppose Ingolf coded the first letter,then skipped one, then coded the third, then skipped two and codedthe sixth. For the first letter I used wheel number 1, for thethird letter I used wheel number 2, and got a sentence.