CHAPTER I
THE POWER OF PREJUDICE
I
The mention of Cagliostro always suggests the marvellous, the mysterious, the unknown. There is something cabalistic in the very sound of the name that, considering the occult phenomena performed by the strange personality who assumed it, is curiously appropriate. As an incognito it is, perhaps, the most suitable ever invented. The name fits the man like a glove; and, recalling the mystery in which his career was wrapped, one involuntarily wonders if it has ever been cleared up. In a word, what was Cagliostro really? Charlatan, adventurer, swindler, whose impostures were finally exposed by the ever-memorable Necklace Affair in which he was implicated? Or “friend of humanity,” as he claimed, whose benefactions excited the enmity of the envious, who took advantage of his misfortunes to calumniate and ruin him? Knave, or martyr—which?
This question is more easily answered by saying what Cagliostro was not than what he was. It has been stated by competent judges—and all who have studied the subject will agree with them—that there is, perhaps, no other equally celebrated figure in modern history whose character is so baffling to the biographer. Documents and books relating to him abound, but they possess little or no value. The most interesting are frequently the most unreliable. The fact that material so questionable should provide as many reasons for rejecting its evidence—which is, by the way, almost entirely hostile—as for accepting it, has induced theosophists, spiritualists, occultists, and all who are sympathetically drawn to the mysterious to become his apologists. By these amiable visionaries Cagliostro is regarded as one of the princes of occultism whose mystical touch has revealed the arcana of the spiritual world to the initiated, and illumined the path along which the speculative scientist proceeds on entering the labyrinth of the supernatural. To them the striking contrasts with which his agitated existence was chequered are unimpeachable witnesses in his favour, and they stubbornly refuse to accept the unsatisfactory and contemptuous explanation of his miracles given by those who regard him as an impostor.
Unfortunately, greater weight is attached to police reports than to theosophical eulogies; and something more substantial than the enthusiasm of the occultists is required to support their contention. However, those who take this extravagant (I had almost said ridiculous) view of Cagliostro may obtain what consolation they can from the fact—which cannot be stated too emphatically—that though it is utterly impossible to grant their prophet the halo they would accord him, it is equally impossible to accept the verdict of his enemies.
In reality, it is by the evil that has been said and written of him that he is best known. In his own day, with very few exceptions, those whom he charmed or duped—as you will—by acts that in any case should have inspired gratitude rather than contempt observed a profound silence. When the Necklace Affair opened its flood-gates of ridicule and calumny, his former admirers saw him washed away with indifference. To defend him was to risk being compromised along with him; and, no doubt, as happens in our own times, the pleasure of trailing in the mud one who has fallen was too delightful to be neglected. It is from this epoch—1785—when people were engaged in blighting his character rather than in trying to judge it, that nearly all the material relating to Cagliostro dates. With only such documents, then, to hand as have been inspired by hate, envy, or simply a love of detraction, the difficulty of forming a correct opinion of him is apparent.
The portrait Carlyle has drawn of Cagliostro is the one most familiar to English readers. Now, though Carlyle’s judgments have in the main been upheld by the latest historians (who have had the advantage of information to which he was denied access), nevertheless, like everybody else, he made mistakes. In his case, however, these mistakes were inexcusable, for they were due, not to the lack of data, but to the strong prejudices by which he suffered himself to be swayed to the exclusion of that honesty and fairness he deemed so essential to the historian. He approached Cagliostro with a mind already biassed against him. Distasteful at the start, the subject on closer acquaintance became positively repugnant to him. The flagrant mendacity of the documentary evidence—which, discount it as he might, still left the truth in doubt—only served to strengthen his prejudice. It could surely be no innocent victim of injustice who aroused contempt so malevolent, hatred so universal. The mystery in which he masqueraded was alone sufficient to excite suspicion. And yet, whispered the conscience of the historian enraged at the mendacity of the witnesses he consulted, what noble ideals, what lofty aspirations misjudged, misunderstood, exposed to ridicule, pelted with calumny, may not have sought shelter under that mantle of mystery?
“Looking at thy so attractively decorated private theatre, wherein thou actedst and livedst,” he exclaims, “what hand but itches to draw aside thy curtain; overhaul thy paste-boards, paint-pots, paper-mantles, stage-lamps; and turning the whole inside out, find thee in the middle thereof!”
And suiting the action to the word, he clutches with an indignant hand at that metaphorical curtain; but in the very act of drawing it aside his old ingrained prejudice asserts itself. Bah! what else but a fraud can a Grand Cophta of Egyptian Masonry be? Can a Madame von der Recke, a Baroness d’Oberkirch, whose opinions at least are above suspicion, be other than right? The man is a shameless liar; and if he has been so shamelessly lied about in turn, he has only got what he deserved. And exasperated that such a creature should have been permitted even for a moment to cross the threshold of history, Carlyle dropped the curtain his fingers “itched to draw aside” and proceeded to empty all the vials of his wrath on Cagliostro.
In his brilliant essay, in the Diamond Necklace, in the French Revolution—wherever he meets him—he brands him as a “King of Liars,” a “Prince of Scoundrels,” an “Arch-Quack,” “Count Front of Brass-Pinch-beckostrum,” “Bubby-jock,” “a babbling, bubbling Turkey-cock,” et cetera. But such violence defeats its intention. When on every page the historian’s conscience is smitten with doubts that prejudice cannot succeed in stilling, the critical and inquisitive reader comes to the conclusion he knows less about the real Cagliostro at the end than he did at the beginning. He has merely seen Carlyle in one of his fine literary rages; it is all very interesting and memorable, but by no means what he wanted. As a matter of fact, in this instance Carlyle’s judgment is absolutely at sea; and the modern biographers of Cagliostro do not even refer to it.
Nevertheless, these writers have come pretty much to the same conclusion. M. Henri d’Alméras, whose book on Cagliostro is the best, speaking of the questionable evidence that so incensed Carlyle, declares “the historian, even in handling it with care, finds himself willy-nilly adopting the old prejudice. That is to say, every book written on Cagliostro, even under the pretext of rehabilitating him, can only be a book against him.” But while holding to the old conventional opinion, he considers that “a rogue so picturesque disarms anger, and deserves to be treated with indulgence.” D’Alméras pictures Cagliostro as a sort of clown, which is certainly the most curious view ever taken of the “Front of Brass,” and even more unjustifiable than Carlyle’s.
“What a good-natured, amusing, original rascal!” he exclaims. “The Figaro of Alchemy, more intelligent than Diafoirus, and more cunning than Scapin. And with what imperturbable serenity did he lie in five or six languages, as well as in a gibberish that had no meaning at all. To lie like that gives one a great superiority over the majority of one’s fellow-men. He did not lie because he was afraid to speak the truth, but because, as in the case of many another, falsehood was in him an excessive development of the imagination. He was himself, moreover, the first victim of his lies. By the familiar phenomenon of auto-suggestion, he ended by believing what he said from force of saying it. If he was successful, in a certain sense, he deserved to be.”
From all of which it may be gathered that whether Cagliostro is depicted as an Apostle of Light by his friends the occultists, or a rank impostor by his enemies, of whom Carlyle is the most implacable and d’Alméras the most charitably inclined, the real man has been as effectually hidden from view by prejudice as by the mystery in which he wrapped himself. But heavy though the curtain is that conceals him, it is perhaps possible for the hand that “itches” to draw it aside. As a matter of fact, no really honest attempt has ever been made to do so. It is true it is only a fleeting, somewhat nebulous, glimpse that can be obtained of this singular personality. There is, moreover, one condition to be observed. Before this glimpse can be obtained it is essential that some attempt should be made to discover, if possible, who Cagliostro was.
II
Considering that one has only to turn to the biographical dictionaries and encyclopedias to find it definitely asserted that “Count Cagliostro” was the best known of many aliases assumed by Giuseppe Balsamo, a Sicilian adventurer born in Palermo in 1743 or 1748, the above statement would appear to be directly contrary to recorded fact. For though biographical dictionaries and encyclopedias are notoriously superficial and frequently misleading, they are perhaps in this instance accurate enough for the purpose of casual inquiry, which is after all what they are compiled for. Indeed, this Balsamo legend is so plausible an explanation of the mystery of Cagliostro’s origin that, for lack of any other, it has satisfied all who are entitled to be regarded as authorities. The evidence, however, on which they have based their belief is circumstantial rather than positive.
Now circumstantial evidence, as everybody knows, is not always to be trusted. There are many cases on record of persons having been condemned on the strength of it who were afterwards found to be innocent. In this particular case, moreover, doubts do exist, and all “authorities” have admitted the fact. Those prejudiced against Cagliostro have agreed to attach no importance to them, those prejudiced in his favour the greatest. To the occultists they are the rock on which their faith in him is founded. Their opinion, however, may be ruled aside as untenable, for the doubts are entirely of a negative character, and suggest no counter-theory of identity whatever.
Nevertheless, since they exist they are worth examining—not so much for the purpose of questioning the accuracy of the “authorities” as to show how the Balsamo legend, which plays so important a part in the history of Cagliostro, originated.
It was not till Cardinal Rohan entangled him in the Diamond Necklace Affair that the name of Cagliostro hitherto familiar only to a limited number of people who, as the case might be, had derived benefit or suffered misfortune from a personal experience of his fabulous powers, acquired European notoriety.
The excitement caused by this cause célèbre, as is well known, was intense and universal. The arrest of the Cardinal in the Oeil-de-Boeuf at Versailles, in the presence of the Court and a great concourse of people from Paris, as he was about to celebrate mass in the Royal Chapel on Assumption Day, on the charge of having purchased a necklace for 1,600,000 livres for the Queen, who denied all knowledge of the transaction; the subsequent disappearance of the jewel and the suspicion of intent to swindle the jeweller which attached itself to both Queen and Cardinal; the further implication of the Countess de Lamotte, with her strangely romantic history; of Cagliostro, with his mystery and magic; and of a host of other shady persons—these were elements sensational enough to strike the dullest imagination, fire the wildest curiosity, and rivet the attention of all Europe upon the actors in so unparalleled a drama.
CARDINAL DE ROHAN
(From an old French print)
After the Cardinal, whose position as Grand Almoner of France (a sort of French Archbishop of Canterbury, so to speak) made him the protagonist of this drama, the self-styled Count Cagliostro was the figure in whom the public were most interested. The prodigies he was said to have performed, magnified by rumour, and his strange undecipherable personality gave him an importance out of all proportion to the small part he played in the famous Affair of the Necklace. Speculation as to his origin was naturally rife. But neither the police nor the lawyers could throw any light on his past. The evidence of the Countess de Lamotte, who in open court denounced him as an impostor formerly known as Don Tiscio, a name under which she declared he had fleeced many people in various parts of Spain, was too palpably untrustworthy and ridiculous to be treated seriously. Cagliostro himself did, indeed, attempt to satisfy curiosity, but the fantastic account he gave of his career only served—as perhaps he intended—to deepen its mystery.
The more it was baffled, the keener became the curiosity to discover a secret so cleverly guarded. The “noble traveller,” as he described himself with ridiculous pomposity on his examination, confessed that Cagliostro was only one of the several names he had assumed in the course of his life. An alias—he had termed it incognito—is always suspicious. Coupled, as it was in his case, with alchemical experiments, prognostications, spiritualist séances, and quack medicines, it suggested rascality. From ridicule to calumny is but a step, and for every voice raised in defence of his honesty there were a dozen to decry him.
On the day he was set at liberty—for he had no difficulty in proving his innocence—eight or ten thousand people came en masse to offer him their congratulations. The court-yard, the staircase, the very rooms of his house in the Rue St. Claude were filled with them. But this ovation, flattering though it was to his vanity, was intended less as a mark of respect to him than as an insult to the Queen, who was known to regard the verdict as a stigma on her honour, and whose waning popularity the hatred engendered by this scandalous affair had completely obliterated. Banished the following day by the Government, which sought to repair the prestige of the throne by persecuting and calumniating those who might be deemed instrumental in shattering it, Cagliostro lost what little credit the trial had left him. Whoever he was, the world had made up its mind what he was, and its opinion was wholly unfavourable to the “noble traveller.”
From France, which he left on June 21, 1786, Cagliostro went to England. It was here, in the following September, that the assertion was made for the first time by the Courier de l’Europe, a French paper published in London, that he was Giuseppe Balsamo. This announcement, made with every assurance of its accuracy, was at once repeated by other journals throughout Europe. It would be interesting, though not particularly important, to know how the Courier de l’Europe obtained its information. It is permissible, however, to conjecture that the Anglo-French journal had been informed of the rumour current in Palermo at the time of Cagliostro’s imprisonment in the Bastille that he was a native of that city, and on investigating the matter decided there were sufficient grounds for identifying him with Balsamo.
Be this as it may, it is the manner in which the statement made by the Courier de l’Europe appears to be confirmed that gives the whole theory its weight.
On December 2, 1876—dates are important factors in the evidence—Fontaine, the chief of the Paris police, received a very curious anonymous letter from Palermo. The writer began by saying that he had read in the Gazette de Leyde of September 25 an article taken from the Courier de l’Europe stating that the “famous Cagliostro was called Balsamo,” from which he gathered that the Balsamo referred to was the same who in 1773 had caused his wife to be shut up in Sainte Pélagie at Paris for having deserted him, and who had afterwards applied to the courts for her release. To confirm Fontaine in this opinion, he gave him in detail the history of this Balsamo’s career, which had been imparted to him on June 2 by the said Balsamo’s uncle, Antonio Braconieri, who was firmly convinced that his nephew, of whom he had heard nothing for some years, was none other than Cagliostro. As he learnt this the day after Cagliostro’s acquittal and release from the Bastille, the news of which could not have reached Palermo in less than a week, it proves that Braconieri’s conviction was formed long before the Press began to maintain it.
In fact the anonymous writer stated that this conviction was prevalent in Palermo as far back as the previous year, when the news arrived there of the arrest of Cagliostro in connection with the Diamond Necklace Affair.
He went on to say that he had personally ridiculed the report at the time, but having reflected on the grounds that Braconieri had given him for believing it “he had come to the conclusion that Count Cagliostro was Giuseppe Balsamo of Palermo or that Antonio Braconieri, his uncle, was a scoundrel worthy of being the uncle of M. le Comte de Cagliostro.” As it was not till November 2 that this somewhat ingenuous person sent anonymously to Fontaine the information he had received on June 2 from Braconieri, his reflections on the veracity of the latter, one suspects, were scarcely complimentary. However, such doubts as he might still have cherished were finally set at rest on October 31, when Antonio Braconieri met him in one of the chief thoroughfares of Palermo and showed him a Gazette de Florence which confirmed everything Braconieri had told him more than four months before. Hereupon, the anonymous individual, convinced at last beyond the shadow of a doubt that the “soi-disant Count Cagliostro was really Giuseppe Balsamo of Palermo,” decided to inform the chief of the Paris police of his discovery.
Such is the history of the proofs in favour of the Balsamo legend. Now to examine the proofs.
As the late M. Émile Campardon was the first to unearth this anonymous letter together with the official report upon it in the National Archives, and as his opinion is the one commonly accepted, it will be sufficient to quote what he has to say on the subject.
“The adventures,” he asks, “of Giuseppe Balsamo and those of Alessandro Cagliostro—do they belong to the history of the same career? Was the individual who had his wife shut up in Sainte Pélagie in 1773 the same who in 1786 protested so vehemently against the imprisonment of his wife?[3]
“Everything goes to prove it. The Countess Cagliostro was born in Rome; Balsamo’s wife was likewise a Roman. The maiden name of both was Feliciani.
“Madame Balsamo was married at fourteen; the Countess Cagliostro at the time of her marriage was still a child.
“Cagliostro stated at his trial that his wife did not know how to write; Madame Balsamo at her trial also declared she could not write.
“Her husband at any rate could. At the time of his petition against his wife Balsamo signed two documents which are still to be seen in the Archives. By comparing—as Fontaine had done—these two signatures with a letter written whilst in the Bastille by Cagliostro the experts declared the writing of Balsamo and that of Cagliostro to be identically the same.
“Furthermore, according to the statement of Antonio Braconieri, Balsamo had frequently written him under the name of Count Cagliostro. Nor had he invented the name, for Giuseppe Cagliostro of Messina, steward of the Prince of Villafranca, was Braconieri’s uncle, and consequently Giuseppe Balsamo’s great-uncle.
“If to these probabilities one adds certain minor resemblances—such as Cagliostro’s declaration that Cardinal Orsini and the Duke of Alba could vouch for the truth of the account he gave of himself, who were personages by whom Balsamo was known to have been employed; the fact that Cagliostro spoke the Sicilian dialect, and that Balsamo had employed magic in his swindling operations—it is scarcely credible that lives and characters so identical could belong to two different beings.”
The arguments in favour of this hypothesis are very plausible and apparently as convincing as such circumstantial evidence usually is. It is possible, however, as stated above, to question the accuracy of the conclusion thus reached for the following reasons.
(1) The basis of the supposition that the Countess Cagliostro and Madame Balsamo were the same rests entirely on coincidence.
Granted that both happened to be Romans, that the maiden name of both was Feliciani, that both were married extremely young, and that neither could write. The fact that both were Romans is no argument at all. Though their maiden name was Feliciani, it was a comparatively common one—there were several families of Feliciani in Rome, and for that matter all over Italy. Madame Balsamo’s father came from Calabria. Her Christian name was Lorenza. The statement that the Countess Cagliostro was likewise called Lorenza and changed her name to Seraphina, by which she was known, is based entirely on supposition. That both were married very young and that neither knew how to write, scarcely calls for comment. Italian women usually married in early girlhood, and very few, if any, of the class to which Seraphina Cagliostro and Lorenza Balsamo belonged could write.
SERAPHINIA FELICHIANI.
COMTESSE DE CAGLIOSTRO.
(From a very rare French print)
(2) The testimony of the experts as to the remarkable similarity between the writing of Balsamo and Cagliostro requires something more than an official statement to that effect to be convincing. At the time the experts made their report, the French Government were trying to silence the calumnies with which Marie Antoinette was being attacked by making the character of Cagliostro and others connected with the Necklace Affair appear as bad as possible. The Parisian police in the interest of the Monarchy, jumped at the opportunity of identifying the mysterious Cagliostro with the infamous Balsamo. The experts’ evidence is, to say the least, questionable.
(3) The fact that Giuseppe Balsamo had an uncle called Giuseppe Cagliostro is the strongest argument in favour of the identification theory. There is no reason to doubt Antonio Braconieri’s statement that he had received letters from his nephew signed “Count Cagliostro.” However, the writer of the anonymous letter declared that, desiring to prove Braconieri’s word as to the existence of Giuseppe Cagliostro of Messina, he discovered that there were two families of the name in that city. The prefix Cagli, moreover, is not unusual in Sicilian, Calabrian and Neapolitan names. The selection of it by Cagliostro as an incognito may have been accidental, or invented because of its peculiar cabalistic suggestion as suitable for the occult career on which he embarked, or it may have been suggested to him by some one of the name he had met when wandering about southern Italy. As his identification with Balsamo is based principally on coincidence, it is surely equally permissible to employ a coincidence as the basis of one of the many arguments in an attempt at refutation.
(4) As to the minor points of resemblance between Cagliostro and Balsamo given as “probabilities” for supposing them identical: in considering that Cagliostro used as references the names of Cardinal Orsini and the Duke of Alba, by whom Balsamo was known to have been employed at one time, the fantastic account he gave of himself at his trial should be remembered. One of the principal reasons for disbelieving him was the fact that these personages were dead and so unable to verify or deny his statement. Again, though the Sicilian dialect was undoubtedly Balsamo’s mother-tongue, no one could ever make out to what patois Cagliostro’s extraordinary abracadabra of accent belonged. But nothing can be weaker than to advance their use of magic and alchemy as a reason for identifying them. Magic and alchemy were the common stock-in-trade of every adventurer in Europe in the eighteenth century.
So much for criticism of the “official” proof.
There is, however, another reason for doubting the identity of the two men. It is the most powerful of all, and has hitherto apparently escaped the attention of those who have taken this singular theory of identification for granted.
Nobody that had known Balsamo ever saw Cagliostro.
The description of Balsamo’s features given by Antonio Braconieri resembles that which others have given of Cagliostro’s personal appearance as far as it goes. Unfortunately, it merely proves that both were short, had dark complexions, and peculiarly bright eyes. As for their noses, Braconieri described Balsamo’s as being écrasé; it is a much more forcible and unflattering term than has ever been applied to the by no means uncommon shape of Cagliostro’s nasal organ. There were many pictures of Cagliostro scattered over Europe at the time of the Necklace Affair. In Palermo, where the interest taken in him was great, few printsellers’ windows, one would imagine, but would have contained his portrait. Braconieri certainly is likely to have seen it; and had the resemblance to Balsamo been undeniable, he would surely have attached the greatest importance to it as a proof of the identity he desired to establish. As a matter of fact, he barely mentions it.
Again, one wonders why nobody who had known Balsamo ever made the least attempt to identify Cagliostro with him either at the time of the trial or when the articles in the Courier de l’Europe brought him a second time prominently before the public. Now Balsamo was known to have lived in London in 1771, when his conduct was so suspicious to the police that he deemed it advisable to leave the country. He and his wife accordingly went to Paris, and it was here that, in 1773, the events occurred which brought both prominently under the notice of the authorities. Six years after Balsamo’s disappearance from London, Count Cagliostro appeared in that city, and becoming involved with a set of swindlers in a manner that made him appear a fool rather than a knave, spent four months in the King’s Bench jail. How is it, one asks, that the London police, who “wanted” Giuseppe Balsamo, utterly failed to recognize him in the notorious Cagliostro?
Now granting that the police, as well as the persons whom Balsamo fleeced in London in 1771, had forgotten him in 1777, and that all who could have recognized him as Cagliostro in 1786, when the Courier de l’Europe exposed him, were dead, is it probable that the same coincidences would repeat themselves in Paris? If the Parisian police, who were doing their best to discover traces of Cagliostro’s antecedents in 1785 and 1786 had quite forgotten the Balsamo who brought the curious action against his wife in 1773, is it at all likely that the various people the Balsamos had known in their two-years’ residence in Paris would all have died in the meantime? People are always to be found to identify criminals and suspicious characters to whom the attention of the police is prominently drawn. But before the sort of Sherlock Holmes process of identification employed by the Courier de l’Europe and the Parisian police, not a soul was ever heard to declare that Cagliostro and Balsamo were the same.
******
To the reader who, knowing little or nothing of Cagliostro, takes up this book with an unbiassed mind, the above objections to the Balsamo legend may seem proof conclusive of its falsity. This would, however, be to go further than I, who attach much greater importance to these doubts than historians are inclined to do, care to admit. They merely show that it is neither right nor excusable to treat as a conviction what is purely a conjecture.
If this conclusion, wrapping as it does the origin and early life of Cagliostro once more in a veil of mystery, be accepted, it will go far to remove the prejudice which has hitherto made the answer to that other and more important question “What was Cagliostro?” so unsatisfactory.