Everything documented.
Nothing declared.

He thought he was not dying yet.

In May 1840, already gravely ill, Paganini received a priest sent to give him the last rites.

He refused. Not because he was proclaiming some dark faith. He simply thought he was not dying yet.

A week later he was dead of an internal haemorrhage, with almost no voice left. Father Caffarelli reported to the bishop that the violinist intended to refuse the sacraments. On the strength of that report, the Church refused burial in consecrated ground.

That explains the administrative decision. It does not explain the ground it fell on.

Because, before dying, Paganini already carried another name.

The hand explained part of the prodigy.

A doctor who examined Paganini recorded something strange: his hand was not particularly large. It was extraordinarily flexible.

The joints moved in unusual ways. The fingers reached positions that seemed incompatible with a normal hand.

Today we can discuss medical hypotheses. In a nineteenth-century audience, nobody had that vocabulary.

The same body that widened the limits of technique also charged another price. From 1823 on, Paganini was treated with mercury in enormous doses, combined with opium. He lost every tooth; the jaw deteriorated. By July 1839 he had not a single tooth left and could barely eat. Modern analysis of his hair found mercury in the strands.

The hand explained the technique.
The treatment explained part of the ruin.
Neither of them explained the legend.

Paganini played the guitar.

Not as a curiosity.

Between 1801 and 1804 he studied the instrument seriously. It was no hobby: 43 Ghiribizzi, 37 sonatas and 24 further pieces for solo guitar — a decomposable count of 104 works. Almost all of his chamber music was written with the guitar inside it.

But he almost never performed on it in public. The violin belonged to the stage. The guitar stayed close to the private circle.

One of them built the legend. The other stayed almost hidden inside it.

There is even a physical object running through this story: between 1831 and 1838, Vuillaume lent him a guitar by Grobert, of Mirecourt. Paganini signed the soundboard; the instrument later passed to Hector Berlioz, who signed beside him. The instrument is today at the Musée de la Musique in Paris, catalogued as item E.375.

The man died.
The sound went on.

The story only reaches the guitar because somebody went after the documents.

Nando Valle is a lawyer and a guitarist. He read about the nine burials, found the number strange, and did what one does with a strange case file: he went after the sources. The six chapters above are what he found.

There is a personal reason the subject felt familiar. In 1993 and 1994, from sixteen to eighteen years old, he read several books by Éliphas Lévi and Aleister Crowley. He began with Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie; in 1994 he reached The Book of the Law. He says that, that year, he used to joke to whoever was around that he was a magician.

There is no independent verification possible for this. It is a personal account — and it stays marked as a personal account.

On the other side of the Atlantic, in 1993, Alan Moore turned forty and announced he had decided to become a magician. He took up the worship of Glycon, a snake-god whose material fraud had been known since antiquity. Moore knows this: for him, exposing the puppet does not remove the god; it merely moves the address to the imagination.

Valle says he had no idea who Alan Moore was.

Thirty-two years went by.
What remained was a doubt.

He remembered a passage about keys. And he remembered seven or eight, without ever being able to settle which of the two counts was right.