Rodin

Rodin is the imagined secret general of the Jesuits, a figure who moves from nineteenth-century conspiracy fiction into Casaubon’s delusion as the embodiment of a plot against the world. His changing identity makes him at once a villain within the conspiratorial history and evidence of how such histories are manufactured: a character can seem to have existed across centuries when stories and suspicions are repeatedly made to confirm one another.

Fictional Origins and the Jesuit Plot

Rodin enters the account through Eugène Sue’s novels. In Le Juif errant, he is the evil Monsieur Rodin, presented as the quintessence of a Jesuit world conspiracy. The investigators’ reading of Sue then takes them beyond that familiar villain: in the final chapter of Les Mystères du peuple, they find what appears to them to be a blueprint for the later Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Sue stages the revelation as a document sent by Father Roothaan, a historical superior of the Society of Jesus, to Rodin. The document’s supposed plot is exposed by Rodolphe de Gerolstein, a character from Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris, to other characters who oppose despotism and defend democracy.

The resemblance is presented as a discovery made by the investigators, not as proof that the fictional text records an actual Jesuit conspiracy. They notice that Sue attributes to the Jesuits the maxim “The end justifies the means,” a maxim later associated with the Protocols. Rodin thus belongs to a chain of accusations in which an alleged conspiracy changes its target and apparent authors: accounts of hidden power can be redirected from one group to another while retaining the same dramatic structure of a secret plan threatening Europe and the world.

Rodin in Casaubon’s Vision

Rodin’s fullest appearance comes after Casaubon, in his delusion, imagines that he has completed the Great Work. A figure arrives in the doorway, wearing the black habit of the Jesuits, and Casaubon initially misidentifies him as Crétineau. The stranger then claims an older and more intimate connection with Casaubon’s imagined Saint-Germain. He recalls encounters around the deathbed of Guillaume Postel, an episode in the Bastille, and the secret discussions of d’Holbach and Condorcet. These remembered histories make Rodin seem to span successive eras, but they are presented inside Casaubon’s delusion, not as an independently verified biography.

When Casaubon recognizes him, Rodin declares himself the Jesuits’ secret general and an adversary who will not be caught by the trapdoor that supposedly disposed of others. He claims that his Society invented every crime and evil stratagem before its enemies could, in the service of a God who justifies the means. He further asserts that the Jesuits have made crowned heads fall and have pursued world dominion for centuries, seeking a secret that has driven history for five hundred years. His speech gathers the recurring materials of the Plan—secret societies, historical reversals, hidden power, and a final world-changing secret—into a single theatrical accusation.

Casaubon’s narration intensifies the apparition into a confrontation with evil: Rodin’s ambition appears to him as the accumulated sacrilege and thirst for power of the history he has been constructing. But the scene’s framing matters. The narrative first names Casaubon’s state as delusion, and the grand claims that follow belong to the vision. Rodin is therefore not a reliable witness to the secret history; he is the imagined adversary through whom Casaubon’s conspiratorial system speaks at its most absolute.

From an Accusation to a Self-Confirming System

The novel places Rodin’s fiction within a broader circulation of conspiracy stories. In the investigators’ reconstruction, the Plan is attributed in turn to neo-Templars, Freemasons, Jesuits, and their opponents. The targets shift, while the plot’s underlying form persists. Rodin’s fictional Jesuit villain can accordingly be taken up as a ready-made explanation for a world supposedly governed by secret designs, just as other groups are made to occupy the same role in competing accounts.

Against this history, the novel offers the possibility of a secret society whose plot would be to spread the rumor that a universal plot exists. The proposition turns conspiracy back on itself: the alleged hidden group need not control every event if its real effect is to make people interpret events as evidence of hidden control. A separate explanation for the appeal of conspiracy is that it gives blame a destination. People who cannot accept their failures or the disorder of events may blame an external enemy; dictatorships, in turn, benefit from naming an enemy who can bind followers together. Rodin’s absolute villainy embodies that explanatory convenience, but the narrative’s account of it describes a pattern of attribution, not evidence that Rodin or his supposed organization exists.

The Plan’s authors initially treat their extravagant connections as parody. As they gather material, however, the repeated habit of linking everything to everything else becomes automatic. Casaubon later distinguishes the three men’s differing degrees of involvement: he becomes addicted, Diotallevi corrupted, and Belbo converted. The distinction between pretending to believe and believing narrows with practice. In this light, Rodin is not merely a character whose story is mistaken for history; he is the kind of figure the Plan’s habits of association can generate and then accept as confirmation.

The Empty Secret and Rodin’s Narrative Function

The Plan’s invented existence becomes consequential when others believe it. Casaubon recognizes that people identify fragments of their own confused mythologies as episodes in the men’s invented scheme, joining those fragments through analogy, resemblance, and suspicion. Once believers act on the Plan, it becomes real in its consequences, even though the original design was fabricated. Rodin’s appearance dramatizes this conversion: the Jesuit conspirator assembled from Sue, political polemic, and Casaubon’s visions seems to return as the living author of the very history those materials have taught Casaubon to expect.

The imagined pursuit of a secret also explains why the Plan can keep expanding without reaching a final answer. A disclosed secret might disappoint; a secret that remains withheld can be enlarged indefinitely. At the ritual before the Pendulum, Belbo’s refusal to reveal a secret convinces his captors that it must be genuine: the more firmly he denies possessing one, the more they treat the denial as proof. The search for that secret has held the conspirators together despite excommunications, internal fights, and coups; knowing it would both disappoint them and end the condition that binds them. Aglie, whose identity as Saint-Germain depends on the aura of mystery, wants Belbo to whisper the secret to him alone, preserving his own charisma by keeping universal revelation at bay.

Rodin gives this mechanism its most threatening face. He speaks as if the hidden order, its villain, and its ultimate secret were already settled facts, while the novel shows how such certainty is built from fictions, borrowed accusations, and the refusal to accept an empty answer. His place in the story is therefore double: within Casaubon’s vision he is the final enemy of the supposed Great Work; in the larger account he exposes the danger of treating an endlessly interpretable pattern as proof of a single concealed design.