The Three Knights held a ceremony at the Music Academy and interrogated Belbo

The ceremony at the Conservatoire is the moment when the secret orders’ elaborate claims become physical coercion. Gathered beneath the Pendulum to confront Colonel Ardenti, their leaders stage an inquiry into what he knows, summon apparent proof through the Fox triplets, and finally seize Belbo as a sacrificial victim. The ritual’s transformations expose both the group’s hunger for confirmation and the violence that lies behind its ceremonial language.

A hidden assembly in the nave

As midnight approached, Casaubon found the staircase and descended toward the post from which he meant to watch the gathering. In the nave, dim lights moved among sounds of shuffling and objects being dragged. At the statue of Gramme, the cubic pedestal had been opened like a gangplank, revealing a concealed passage through which a lantern-bearing man emerged. Others hurried in from the choir, preparing the space before the expected arrival.

The assembly combined the trappings of a secret fraternity with the apparatus of a traveling spectacle. Among the people moving through the nave were the small figures associated with Madame Olcott’s Freaks Mignons and the armored giants Alex and Denys, who waited near the great bulk of the Obeissante. Casaubon recognized Bramanti from their earlier encounter in Piedmont: he now wore a scarlet tunic, white cape, and miter. He threw something onto the brazier, filling the room with thick smoke, while Casaubon, without the agogo he had associated with the rites in Rio, covered his nose and mouth with a handkerchief. The haze seemed to multiply Bramanti and make the Pendulum swing in several directions at once.

Bramanti opened the proceedings with a chant of Hebrew letter names, answered by the crowd’s invocation of a series of names. The liturgy gave the gathering a solemn surface, but its declared purpose was also one of exclusion. Bramanti announced that the attendees belonged to the One Order, an Unknown Order to which they had supposedly always belonged without knowing it. The assembly swore anathema against profaners of the Secret and those who had made a spectacle of rites and mysteries, then denounced a long succession of rival societies and claimed traditions. Its identity was asserted less through a shared practice than through the repudiation of everyone else who claimed secret authority.

The inquiry into Ardenti

Aglie entered in a blue pinstripe suit, leading Lorenza Pellegrini by the hand. Pale and dazed, dressed in a white, semitransparent tunic, she was taken to the brazier and left beside it with the giants supporting her. Aglie then addressed the assembled knights. He said they should have met on the night of June 23, 1945, and explained that, after six hundred years of error, they had found someone who knew. The source of that knowledge troubled him: the prisoner, he said, claimed to have learned it from Ardenti, who had been summoned to answer for his silence.

Ardenti appeared among the assembly, raven-haired as before but now doddering. The Pendulum marked a boundary he could not cross as Aglie questioned him. Aglie presented the gathering as a confrontation between the prisoner and those who knew the history behind his claims; Salon likewise said that another informed person had disappeared, and that the meeting could bring the prisoner face to face with those who knew, as well as make those people confront the group. The language of inquiry therefore concealed a struggle over who could control the account of the secret.

Madame Olcott interrupted Aglie’s authority. Casaubon recognized her from the poster at the Librairie Sloane and from the earlier encounter in Piedmont. She ordered Alex and Denys to bring the prisoner forward. The crowd approved, and Aglie gripped the arms of his throne as his companions handed Lorenza to the Freaks Mignons. Madame Olcott had three chairs placed between the statue of Pascal and the Obeissante, then seated the Fox triplets—Theo, Leo, and Geo—in them. Her intervention shifted control of the ceremony away from Aglie and toward a rival claim to demonstrate the truth through mediums.

Mediumship and disputed proof

Madame Olcott signaled for the rite to begin. The music turned shrill and dissonant; the dancers rose, spread rigid arms, and spun with their faces lifted, while the light around the brazier dimmed and lanterns were extinguished. In the darkened nave, the Fox triplets began to produce a whitish foam from their mouths. Madame Olcott coaxed them onward, while the dancers sang and shook and the men made convulsive, deathlike noises.

The scene recalls the novel’s earlier account of possession in Afro-Brazilian rites, but it does not make the ceremonies identical. In the explanation Casaubon heard in Brazil, initiates in different cults entered trances and were possessed by higher beings: orixás in Candomblé, spirits of the departed in Umbanda. Amparo had once been told by a pai-de-santo that she had the qualities of a medium after she reacted to the pontos. Aglie later interpreted that possibility through his distinction between mysticism and initiation: the mystic undergoes an experience that becomes visible, while the initiate supposedly controls hidden forces. At the Conservatoire, the assembly reverses that proposed relation. The mediums’ bodies are made into a public demonstration, and the people claiming authority over the rite compete to define what the demonstration proves.

The manifestations also bring the question of truth into conflict with the mechanics of performance. Geo clung to a form he had secretly produced, but it fell with him and dissolved on the floor. He continued vomiting sticky matter, then stiffened and died. Leo tried to reabsorb the owl associated with his manifestation; when it turned against its creator, the owl vanished in muck and Leo collapsed, choking. Madame Olcott urged the surviving medium to speak, calling for Kelley, even as the sequence of apparent marvels ended in injury and death. The scene does not resolve the supernatural claims by offering reliable proof. Instead, it shows how the assembly’s demand for a visible sign makes bodies and staged effects instruments in a dangerous dispute.

The rite turns against Belbo

Aglie returned to the ambulatory, wiped his brow, took a white pill, and asked the brothers to recover their composure. He dismissed Madame Olcott’s display as cheap tricks and asked for an hour alone with the prisoner. But Pierre, who had followed the proceedings from the throne, rejected this proposal and declared that only human sacrifice would suffice. The change was immediate: a gathering ostensibly convened to question a prisoner converted the demand for knowledge into a demand for a victim.

The giants seized Belbo, who had watched the scene in a daze, and brought him before Pierre. Pierre jumped up, placed the chair on the table, and pushed the giants toward the center of the choir. He caught the passing Pendulum’s wire and stopped the sphere, staggering under its recoil. The giants lifted Belbo onto the chair. One wrapped the wire twice around his neck while the other held the sphere, then set it at the table’s edge. Bramanti rushed to the improvised gallows and began an exorcistic chant. Belbo stood upright with the wire around his neck; without the giants holding him, even a single step could send him from the unstable chair and tighten the noose.

The ceremony’s concluding image draws together its central reversals. The Pendulum, which had marked the boundary separating Ardenti from his interrogators, becomes the means by which Belbo is placed in mortal danger. A rite that denounced the making of spectacle turns its own bodies, sacred objects, and commands into spectacle. And a group claiming to seek the hidden truth does not establish its authority by understanding the evidence: it tries to compel that authority through a human sacrifice. The gathering’s inquiry has thus become a scene of imminent execution, with Belbo suspended between the group’s theatrical claims and the physical consequences of its power.