The Calvinist scholar and pastor Simon Goulart, who published the most notable collection of propaganda material relating to the St Bartholomew massacre, including many Huguenot pamphlets, died in Geneva in 1628. He had first gone there in 1566, and had lived there since 1571. A professor of theology named Théodore Tronchin wrote the funeral oration. As an instance of Goulart's great reputation for learning, he reported that King Henri III, who was always ‘curious to know what was being said and written throughout his realm, so that in this way he might participate in the thoughts and counsels of all’, and who, on reading the Vindiciae, ‘most anxiously desired’ to discover the author's identity, made no progress in his investigations, and eventually turned in despair to Goulart, ‘from whom he believed nothing about the printing trade to be hidden’. According to Tronchin, Goulart knew the answer to the king's question, but kept the secret. It says something for the notoriety of the book that it is still impossible to give a definitive answer, despite the fact that most of the scholarly attention which the book has received over the last three centuries has been devoted to solving this celebrated literary conundrum. Before rehearsing the evidence again, I want to attempt to answer a different and arguably more important question: why had the king's interest been so aroused?