Additional Note 1
Taxil had been the proprietor of an Anti-Clerical Library and president of the Anti-Clerical League, but in 1885 he experienced a conversion similar to that which had led Doinel to abandon the Universal Gnostic Church . After receiving absolution from Pope Leo XIII, Taxil returned to print to attack the Church's enemies, above all the Masons. As well as La France chrétienne , Taxil also established a Union of Catholic Patriots and an Academy of Saint John , both opposed not only to Masons but also to the Jews and the English. Taxil was however disgraced in 1896-7 after admitting to a large audience at the Geographical Society that the Miss Diana Vaughan and the Palladism that he had been denouncing for years were both made up. André and Beaufils, Papus, pp. 124-5 and 136, James, Ésotérisme et Christianisme, p. 105, and Le Forestier, Occultisme en France, pp. 88-89.

Additional Note 2
From Séché, Les muses françaises , p. 167:

La Course

O bête impatiente! et partons pour ailleurs
Hors la turpide loi du valet, lâche et ivre,
Dont le fouet insolent commande la maison.

From "Le Missel de Notre-Dame des Solitudes" (1908).

Additional Note 3
All shaykhs derive their official authority from an earlier shaykh, going back in a known line to the Prophet Muhammad; the system somewhat resembles Apostolic succession in the Catholic Church. A name derived from an especially famous shaykh is applied to the groups of shaykhs succeeding him: the name Qadiriyya, for example, comes from Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, who died in Baghdad in 1166, and whose immediate successors established the first major Sufi order in the sense of group (during the five centuries between the death of the Prophet and the twelfth century, there were numerous Sufis, but none of them established formal organizations). After the twelfth century Qadiri groups were established throughout the Muslim world, but soon became organizationally independent of each other; the Qadiriyya with which Eberhardt was in contact, for example, was led by a Shaykh Lashmi al-Qadiri, and had little in common save the name and some details of its special religious practice with the Qadiriyya of, say, Damascus. On the other hand, the other order with which Eberhardt was in contact, the Rahmaniyya, was of much more recent origin, named after Muhammad ibn Abd al-Rahman, who had died in Algeria in 1794. Ibn Abd al-Rahman had spent much of his life following the Khalwati order in Cairo (the Khalwati lineage is almost as ancient as the Qadiriyya), but he become so well known in Algeria that after his death his own Algerian Khalwati group became known in his honor as the Rahmaniyya.