The Swiss-born English agent Paulus Lesieur wrote in a dispatch of 17 November 1610 that Rudolf ‘ought to be walled up in a cloister with a necromancer, an alchemist, a painter and a whore’.8 This slander echoes a vignette in what is perhaps the first roman à clef in European literature.
— Jun 14, 2025 04:08AM
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