Diotallevi

Diotallevi is a friend and collaborator of Jacopo Belbo and Casaubon whose worsening illness makes the imagined consequences of the Plan feel frighteningly physical. A treatment leaves him weak and visibly changed; in a later conversation, he turns from joking about the Plan to a grave warning that rewriting the Torah is not harmless play.

Illness and the Plan

In late November, Diotallevi’s condition takes a decided turn for the worse. He calls the office to say that he is going into the hospital. His doctor has told him there is nothing to worry about, though tests would be advisable. The medical uncertainty is enough to unsettle Belbo and Casaubon, who connect the illness to the Plan despite recognizing that the connection is irrational.

Their unease is compounded by a shared sense of complicity. Earlier, they had kept silent together and withheld information from De Angelis; now they fear they have talked too much. They tell each other that the guilt is silly, but cannot shake it. For a month or more, they stop discussing the Plan, as if silence might halt the chain of imagined consequences.

After roughly two weeks away, Diotallevi returns to say, nonchalantly, that he has asked Garamond for sick leave. He has been prescribed treatment requiring visits to the hospital every two or three days, and expects it to leave him weak. Casaubon observes that he already seems scarcely capable of becoming weaker: Diotallevi’s face is as white as his hair. His illness therefore stands in sharp contrast to the conspiratorial abundance of the Plan, bringing the friends’ speculative play back to the fragile body in front of them.

Warning and Torah

Diotallevi tells his friends to forget the stories, calling them bad for their health and joking that the Rosicrucians are taking revenge. Later, Belbo finds him still more drastically changed: he has lost nearly all the hair on his head, eyebrows, and lashes, and looks like a billiard ball. Belbo asks whether they can discuss his own situation. Diotallevi replies that he has no situation, only needs, redirecting the conversation from Belbo’s troubles to a matter he considers more fundamental.

He explains that the Torah, like a human body, has limbs, joints, and organs. He then invokes the story of Rabbi Meir, Rabbi Akiba, and Rabbi Ismahel: a scribe must be cautious because the work is divine, and omitting or adding a single letter can destroy the whole world. Diotallevi applies this warning directly to the friends’ activity. They tried to rewrite the Torah without attending to whether they had added too many letters or left too few.

Belbo protests that they were joking. Diotallevi rejects the defense: the Torah is not something to joke about. The exchange gives the friends’ playful accumulation of correspondences a moral and spiritual weight they had tried to evade. What had seemed like invented connections now resembles careless alteration of a structure whose smallest parts, in Diotallevi’s account, are consequential.

Narrative Role

Diotallevi’s illness does not establish that the Plan has supernatural force; the friends themselves recognize the guilt they attach to it as irrational. Instead, his deterioration intensifies their uncertainty, making their invented system feel dangerous without resolving whether it has caused anything. His own warning about the Rosicrucians’ revenge retains the tone of a joke, while his appeal to the Torah is delivered as a serious rebuke.

His physical decline also changes the balance of the conversation. Belbo arrives wanting to discuss his personal situation, but Diotallevi’s response turns attention to need, responsibility, and the limits of play. The contrast between the elaborate Plan and the precise discipline of copying a sacred text exposes the group’s central risk: treating every connection as material to manipulate, without knowing what their manipulations may mean.