Banned in 1538, the Cymbalum mundi was almost completely forgotten until its rediscovery and republication in 1711. Those “esprits forts who came across it in the seventeenth century were unaware of its anti-Christian character (unlike Mersenne, who called its author “a rogue of the utmost impiety”). There was substantial curiosity about the work in the eighteenth century, but the same incomprehension remained. It was only in the nineteenth century, when Éloi Johanneau set out to decipher the dedication, “Thomas Du Clevier à Pierre Tryocan” (doubting Thomas to faithful Peter), that the Cymbalum mundi gained historical importance as a monument to “free thought” and, thanks to Nodier, as a literary masterpiece, the work of a singular genius.