Abstract: According to the Port-Royal historian Godefroy Hermant, the work of La Mothe Le Vayer, De la Vertu des païens (1641), was part of a conspiracy against Christian morality. A comparison between this text and one of its little-mentioned sources, the Apologie pour tous les grands personnages qui ont été faussement soupçonnés de magie (1625), by Gabriel Naudé, reveals the intellectual context behind the term “cabal” and a similarly ambiguous mode of writing with regard to Christianity and its moral codes.
