Casaubon's access to Abulafia

Casaubon’s access to Abulafia is a decisive turn in the investigation: by entering “NO” in response to the computer’s polite password question, he unlocks Jacopo Belbo’s private files, only to find that access to information brings no reliable way to judge it. The machine opens; certainty does not. What follows joins a password discovery to a broader chain of disputed documents, showing how easily a genuine code, a copy, and an eager interpretation can be folded into the Plan.

The Password and the Opening of the Files

Casaubon begins with the only file already printed and decides to inspect the numbered disks. He knows Belbo has mentioned a password and has guarded Abulafia’s secrets. On loading the machine, he finds the question, “Do you have the password?” Its courteous phrasing seems characteristically Belbo’s, but the computer will not volunteer anything: the information is inside it, inaccessible until given the right word.

Casaubon responds not with a remembered password but with an act of irritated defiance. He types “NO.” The screen fills with words, lines, and codes; he has broken into Abulafia. His triumph is immediate and physical: he dances, claps, sings an old army song, then washes his face before returning to the files. The blunt negative is thus both the key to the archive and a small comic reversal: a refusal to supply the password becomes the password.

Belbo’s Last Files and Casaubon’s Uncertainty

Casaubon prints the files in reverse order, beginning with what Belbo wrote just before fleeing to Paris. As the printer works, he eats and drinks whiskey. When it stops, the pages leave him aghast. He cannot decide whether they contain an extraordinary revelation or the ravings of a man writing under exceptional pressure.

That uncertainty is sharpened by the circumstances of Belbo’s confinement. Casaubon considers that Belbo had been cut off from the world for three days, writing in a fog of alcohol, tobacco, and terror. The files may be true or false; their author has promised to call in the morning, and Casaubon has no immediate means of testing what he has read. On Thursday night, June 21, after staring at the screen and printer since morning, he is left waiting, with his head swimming. Abulafia has supplied material, but not the judgment needed to separate testimony from delirium.

The scene also reframes the password in retrospect. Casaubon later recognizes that Belbo’s choice of “NO” carried a significance he failed to understand in the moment. His earlier celebration of having won gives way to the knowledge that Belbo had grasped something about the answer that Casaubon only understood afterward. The machine’s opening therefore has a delayed meaning: the key does not merely admit Casaubon to a store of information; it points toward a distinction he has not yet learned to make.

The Document Trail and the Problem of Originals

The material Casaubon encounters connects Abulafia’s private archive to the disputed papers that first drew the investigators toward the Plan. Colonel Ardenti’s account of finding a handwritten sheet in an old book belonging to Edouard Ingolf offers one example of how a document becomes evidence. Ardenti says that the note’s paper and ink suggested it had been written late in Ingolf’s life; in its margin he noticed “Provins 1894.” He took the paper without telling Mademoiselle Ingolf, reasoning that she had never found it and that he had suffered defeat enough. His account makes the document’s survival depend not just on discovery but on concealment and self-justification.

Ardenti then presents a photocopy rather than the parchment he calls the original. Casaubon objects that Ingolf’s copy was not the original, but Ardenti insists that when originals no longer exist, the last copy is the original. He treats the transcription as true because he can see no way the truth could be otherwise. The claim does not establish the copy’s accuracy; it exposes how conviction can take the place of a verifiable chain of transmission. In this account, an absent original becomes a reason to elevate the surviving version, not a reason for caution.

The page itself contains two texts. The first is a demoniacal litany, a parody of a Semitic language. Ardenti says that he tried one of the forty major cryptosystems described by Trithemius, counting only the first letter of each word. That produced nonsense, so he moved to a second stage: using the wheel for one of Trithemius’s ten minor systems, he shifted each letter back by one place to encode and forward by one to decode. He reports that this yielded the French sentence “Les 36 inuisibles separez en six bandes,” or thirty-six invisibles divided into six groups. The procedure gives the message a concrete cryptographic appearance, but the interpretation of what it means remains separate from the act of decoding it.

Later Reassessment and Narrative Significance

Casaubon later supplies a simpler explanation for the striking phrase. The French wording, he notes, belongs to the language of a seventeenth-century pamphlet from the period when the Rosicrucians appeared in Paris. Rather than infer that Trithemius had learned a Templar code and that the Templars had anticipated Rosicrucian language, Casaubon reverses the sequence: a later enthusiast such as Ingolf could have found the Provins message, associated its numbers with Rosicrucian ideas, and encoded his own sentence with a Trithemius system as an exercise. Casaubon admits that this ingenious account is no more proven than Ardenti’s, but it demonstrates how the same clues can support opposed narratives.

The same interpretive habit governs Casaubon’s reading of the Rosicrucian manifestoes. He treats their apparent absurdities and contradictions not as grounds to doubt the theory, but as evidence that the texts must be read through an assumed grid, with some passages covered and others privileged. The manifestoes then seem to confirm a Plan of Provins involving a hidden treasure, a coming historical change, and a great work. Yet the grid itself is an assumption: without it, the documents do not announce the Plan in a verifiable way. The episode makes Abulafia’s access consequential precisely because it does not resolve this problem. The files and documents multiply; the interpretive method that turns them into proof remains vulnerable to the same circularity that made the Plan persuasive.