pudibundity

We are left with what, even as it exists, is by far his most ambitious attempt, and with one in which, considering all its actual features, one need not be taking things too seriously if one decides that he had an aim at something like a whole -- even if the legends [296] about further parts, actually seen and destroyed by a more than Byzantine pudibundity, are not taken as wholly gospel.

A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 From the Beginning to 1800 George Saintsbury 1889