Fictional History of Thibaut De Castries
"The ancient Egyptians only buried people in their pyramids. We are living in ours." - De Castries
Leiber provides little background about Thibaut De Castries. When De Castries arrived in San Francisco in 1900, he had already written Megapolisomancy. The most commonly accepted rumor about his life prior to 1900 was that he had escaped from the Franco-Prussian War as a teenager, fleeing Paris in a balloon with his dying father, his father's mistress (who allegedly later became his own), and a black panther that his father had tamed. A competing rumor was that his father was a member of the Carbonari and De Castries himself was a boy aide-de-camp to Giuseppe Garibaldi.
While living in San Francisco at 607 Rhodes, he became an associate of authors Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, and later Clark Ashton Smith, as well as poet George Sterling. For a while he amassed a minor cult following among the bohemians of the city, including London and Bierce, but his practices apparently were too esoteric to maintain interest for long, and his occult society, the Hermetic Order of the Onyx Dusk, collapsed. From the similarity between the names, it is obvious that Lieber had learned about the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and modelled De Castries' society as a darker version of that occult order.
De Castries was often believed to have a mistress, rumored to be the same woman that fled with him from Paris. However, this woman was only observed from a distance, and may in fact have been a paramental companion, as De Castries often described her as his spy on cities.
As De Castries aged, he became increasingly paranoid, and according to Smith's diary, claimed to have used megapolisomancy to destroy his former acolytes. He also sought out as many copies as possible of Megapolisomancy and destroyed them. After his death, he was cremated and his ashes buried on Corona Heights in San Francisco.
Although some believed Thibault De Castries to be H. P. Lovecraft's associate Adolphe De Castro, De Castries died well before De Castro, and there is no evidence other than a nominal similarity in name to connect the two.
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