Cagliostro

by W. R. H. Trowbridge

CHAPTER IV

THE CONQUEST OF THE CARDINAL

I

Of the difficulties that perpetually beset the biographer of Cagliostro, those caused by his frequent disappearances from sight are the most perplexing. It is possible to combat prejudice—to materialize, so to speak, rumour, to manipulate conflicting evidence, and even to throw light on that which is mysterious in his character. But when it is a question of filling up the gaps, of bridging the chasms in his career, one can only proceed by assumption.

Such a chasm, and one of the deepest, occurs between June 26, 1780, when Cagliostro suddenly fled from Warsaw, and September 19, when he arrived in Strasburg. Even rumour lost track of him during this interval. The Inquisition-biographer pretends to discover him for a moment at Frankfort-on-the-Main as a secret agent of the Illuminés, and, as an assumption, the statement is at once plausible and probable.

Cagliostro, as stated in a previous chapter, has always been supposed, on grounds that all but amount to proof, to have been at some period in his mysterious career connected with one of the revolutionary secret societies of Germany. This society has always been assumed to be the Illuminés.[18] If this assumption be true—and without it his mode of life in Strasburg is utterly inexplicable—his initiation could only have taken place at this period and, probably, at Frankfort, where Knigge, one of the leaders of the Illuminés, had his head-quarters.

As Knigge was a member of the Order of Strict Observance, in the lodges of which throughout Germany Cagliostro’s reputation as a wonder-worker stood high, he had undoubtedly heard of him, if he was not personally acquainted with him. Knigge, moreover, was just the man to appreciate the possibilities of such a reputation in obtaining recruits for Illuminism. Nothing is more reasonable, then, than to assume that certain members of the Illuminés made overtures at Frankfort to Cagliostro, who, one can imagine, would have readily accepted them as the means of recovering the influence and prestige he had lost in Poland.

His initiation, according to the Inquisition-biographer, took place in a grotto a short distance from the city. In the centre, on a table, was an iron chest, from which Knigge or his deputy took a manuscript. On the first page Cagliostro perceived the words “We, the Grand Masters of the Templars.” Then followed the formula of an oath written in blood, to which eleven signatures were appended, and which signified that Illuminism was a conspiracy against thrones. The first blow was to be struck in France, and, after the fall of the monarchy, Rome was to be attacked. Cagliostro, moreover, learnt that the society had ramifications everywhere, and possessed immense sums in banks in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, London, Genoa, and Venice. This money was furnished by an annual subscription of twenty-five livres paid by each member.

On taking the oath, which included a vow of secrecy, Cagliostro is presumed to have received a large sum, destined to defray the expenses of propaganda, and to have proceeded immediately, in accordance with instructions, to Strasburg, where he arrived on September 19, 1780.

II

From the nature of his entry into the capital of Alsace, it is certain that great pains had been taken in advance to excite public interest in him. The fabulous Palladium could not have been welcomed with greater demonstrations of joy. From early morning crowds of people waited on the Pont de Kœhl and on both banks of the Rhine for the arrival of a mysterious personage who was reported to go from city to city healing the sick, working miracles, and distributing alms. In the crowd speculations were rife as to his mysterious origin, his mysterious travels in strange and remote countries, and of the mysterious source of his immense wealth. Some regarded him as one inspired, a saint or a prophet possessed of the gift of miracles. To others, the cures attributed to him were the natural result of his great learning and occult powers. Yet another group saw in him an evil genius, a devil sent into the world on some diabolic mission. Among these, however—and they were not the least numerous—there were some more favourable to Cagliostro, and who, considering that after all he only did good, inferred logically that, if supernatural, he must be a good, rather than an evil, genius.

Suddenly, speculation was silenced by the approach of the being who had excited it. The rumbling of wheels, the clatter of hoofs, the cracking of whips was heard, and out of a cloud of dust appeared a carriage drawn by six horses, and accompanied by lacqueys and outriders in magnificent liveries. Within rode the Grand Cophta, the High Priest of Mystery, with his “hair in a net,” and wearing a blue coat covered with gold braid and precious stones. Bizarre though he was with his circus-rider’s splendour, the manner in which he acknowledged the vivats of the crowd[19] through which he passed was not without dignity. His wife, who sat beside him, sparkling with youth, beauty, and diamonds, shared the curiosity he excited. It was a veritable triumphal progress.

The advantage to which such an ovation could be turned was not to be neglected. Fond of luxury and aristocratic society though he was, Cagliostro was not the man to despise popularity in any form that it presented itself. Having lost the influence of the great, by means of whom he had counted to establish Egyptian Masonry, he was anxious to secure that of the masses. So great was the importance he attached to the interest he had aroused, he even took up his abode among them, “living first over a retail tobacconist’s named Quère, whose shop was in one of the most squalid quarters of the town, and later lodging with the caretaker of the canon of St. Pierre-le-Vieux.”

According to all reports, from the very day of his arrival in Strasburg he seemed to busy himself solely in doing good, regardless of cost or personal inconvenience. No one, providing he was poor and unfortunate, appealed to him in vain. Hearing that an Italian was in prison for a debt of two hundred livres, Cagliostro obtained his release by paying the money for him, and clothed him into the bargain. Baron von Gleichen, who knew him well, states that he saw him, on being summoned to the bed-side of a sick person, “run through a downpour in a very fine coat without stopping to take an umbrella.”

Every day he sought out the poor and infirm, whose distress he endeavoured to relieve not only with money and medicine, but “with manifestations of sympathy that went to the hearts of the sufferers, and doubled the value of the action.” Though his enemies did not hesitate to charge him with the most mercenary motives in administering his charities, they were obliged to admit the fact of them. Meiners, who thoroughly disliked him and considered him both a quack and a charlatan, was honest enough to acknowledge that he gave his services gratis, and even refused to make a profit on the sale of his remedies.

“For some time,” says this hostile witness, “it was believed that he shared with his apothecary the profits on the remedies he prescribed to his patients. But as soon as Cagliostro learnt that such suspicions were entertained, he not only changed his apothecary, but obliged the one he chose in his place, as I have been informed by several people, to sell his remedies at so low a price that the fellow made scarcely anything by the sale of them.

“He would take, moreover, neither payment nor present for his labour. If a present was offered him of a sort impossible to refuse without offence, he immediately made a counter present of equal or even of higher value. Indeed, he not only took nothing from his patients, but if they were very poor he supported them for months; at times even lodging them in his own house and feeding them from his own table.”

III

At first, only the poor received attention from Cagliostro. If a rich invalid desired his attendance he referred him to the regular doctors. Though such an attitude was well calculated to attract attention, it was not, as his enemies have declared, altogether prompted by selfish considerations. In the disdain he affected for the rich there was much real resentment. Through the rich and powerful, he had gained nothing but mortification and disgrace. The circumstances under which he was forced to flee from Warsaw must have wounded to the quick a nature in which inordinate vanity and generosity were so curiously blended. Of a certainty it was not alone the hope of turning Illuminism to the advantage of Egyptian Masonry that prompted him to join the Illuminés in his hour of humiliation. In Illuminism, whose aim, revolutionary though it was, like that of Egyptian Masonry, was also inspired with the love of humanity, Cagliostro had seen both a means of rehabilitation and revenge. Of studied vengeance, however, he was incapable; the disdain with which he treated the rich was the extent of his revenge. Indeed, susceptible as he was to flattery, it was not long before his resentment was altogether appeased. But though, in spite of his bitter experience, he was even once more tempted to court the favour of the great, he did so in quite a different manner. Henceforth, in pandering to their love of sensation, he took care to give them what he saw fit, and not, as before, what they demanded.

Particularly was this the case in the exhibitions he gave of his occult powers. If, as on previous occasions, he had recourse to artifice to obtain the effect he desired, it was not detected. It is evident that his unfortunate experiences in Warsaw had taught him the wisdom of confining himself solely to phenomena within his scope. No longer does one hear of séances arranged beforehand with the medium; of failures, exposures, and humiliations.

If from some of his prodigies the alchemists of the period saw in him a successor of the clever ventriloquist and prestidigitator Lascaris, from many others the mediums of the present day in Europe and America might have recognized in him their predecessor and even their master in table-turning, spirit-rapping, clairvoyance, and evocations. In a word, he was no longer an apprentice in magic, but an expert.

As the manifestations of the occult of which Cagliostro, so to speak, made a speciality were of a clairvoyant character, some idea of the manner in which he had developed his powers may be gathered from the following account by a contemporary of a séance he held in Strasburg with the customary colombe and carafe.

“Cagliostro,” says this witness, “having announced that he was ready to answer any question put to him, a lady wished to know the age of her husband. To this the colombe made no reply, which elicited great applause when the lady confessed she had no husband. Another lady demanded an answer to a question written in a sealed letter she held in her hand. The medium at once read in the carafe these words: ‘You shall not obtain it.’ The letter was opened, the purport of the question being whether the commission in the army which the lady solicited for her son would be accorded her. As the reply was at least indicative of the question, it was received with applause.

“A judge, however, who suspected that Cagliostro’s answers were the result of some trick, secretly sent his son to his house to find out what his wife was doing at the time. When he had departed the father put this question to the Grand Cophta. The medium read nothing in the carafe, but a voice announced that the lady was playing cards with two of her neighbours. This mysterious voice, which was produced by no visible organ, terrified the company; and when the son of the judge returned and confirmed the response of the oracle, several ladies were so frightened that they withdrew.”

At Strasburg he also told fortunes, and read the future as well as the past with an accuracy that astonished even the sceptical Madame d’Oberkirch. One of the most extraordinary instances he gave of his psychic power was in predicting the death of the Empress Maria Theresa.

“He even foretold the hour at which she would expire,” relates Madame d’Oberkirch. “M. de Rohan told it to me in the evening, and it was five days after that the news arrived.”

IV

It was, however, as a healer of the sick that Cagliostro was chiefly known in Strasburg. Sudden cures of illnesses, thought to be mortal or incurable, carried his name from mouth to mouth. The number of his patients increased daily. On certain days it was estimated that upwards of five hundred persons besieged the house in which he lodged, pressing one another to get in. From the collection of sticks and crutches left as a mark of gratitude by those who, thanks to his skill, no longer had need of them, it seemed as if all the cripples in Strasburg had flocked to consult him.

The Farmer-General Laborde declares that Cagliostro attended over fifteen thousand[20] sick people during the three years he stayed in Strasburg, of whom only three died.

One of his most remarkable cures was that of the secretary of the Marquis de Lasalle, the Commandant of Strasburg. “He was dying,” says Gleichen, “of gangrene of the leg, and had been given up by the doctors, but Cagliostro saved him.”

On another occasion he procured a belated paternity for Sarazin, the banker of Bâle, who afterwards became one of his most devoted adherents. No illness appeared to baffle him. The graver the malady the more resourceful he became. A woman about to be confined, having been given up by the midwives, who doubted even their ability to save her child, sent for him in her extremity. He answered the summons immediately, as was his custom, and after a slight examination guaranteed her a successful accouchement. What is more to the point, he kept his word.

This case is worthy of note as being the only one on record concerning which Cagliostro gave an explanation of his success.

“He afterwards confessed to me,” says Gleichen, “that his promise was rash. But convinced that the child was in perfect health by the pulse of the umbilical cord, and perceiving that the mother only lacked the strength requisite to bring her babe into the world, he had relied on the virtue of a singularly soothing remedy with which he was acquainted. The result, he considered, had been due to luck rather than skill.”

The most famous of all his cures was that of the Prince de Soubise, a cousin of Cardinal de Rohan. In this case, however, it was the rank of the patient, even more than the illness of which he was cured, that set the seal to Cagliostro’s reputation. The prince, it seems, had been ill for some weeks, and the doctors, after differing widely as to the cause of his malady, had finally pronounced his condition to be desperate. Thereupon the Cardinal, who had boundless confidence in Cagliostro’s medical skill, immediately carried him off in his carriage to Paris to attend his cousin, simply stating, on arriving at the Hôtel de Soubise, that he had brought “a doctor,” without mentioning his name, lest the family, influenced by the regular physicians, who regarded him as a quack, should refuse his services. It was, perhaps, a useless precaution, for, as the patient had just been given up by the doctors, the family were willing enough to suffer even a quack to do what he could.

Cagliostro at once requested all who were in the sick-room to leave it. What he did when he found himself alone with the prince was never known, but, after an hour, he called the Cardinal and said to him—

“If my prescription is followed, in two days Monseigneur will leave his bed and walk about the room. Within a week he will be able to take a drive, and within three to go to Court.”

When one has consulted an oracle, one can do no better than obey it. The family accordingly confided the prince completely to the care of the unknown doctor, who on the same day paid his patient a second visit. On this occasion he took with him a small vial containing a liquid, ten drops of which he administered to the sick man.

On leaving, he said to the Cardinal: “To-morrow I will give the prince five drops, the day after two, and you will see that he will sit up the same evening.”

The result more than fulfilled the prediction. The second day after this visit the Prince de Soubise was in a condition to receive some friends. In the evening he got up and walked about the room. He was in good spirits, and even had sufficient appetite to ask for the wing of a chicken. But, in spite of his insistence, it was necessary to refuse him what he so much desired, since an absolute abstention from solid food was one of the prescriptions of the “doctor.”

On the fourth day the patient was convalescent, but it was not till the evening of the fifth that he was permitted to have his wing of a chicken. “No one,” says Figuier, “in the Hôtel de Soubise had the least idea that Cagliostro was the doctor who attended the prince. His identity was only disclosed after the cure, when his name, already famous, ceased to be regarded any longer as that of a charlatan.”

V

The secret of these astonishing cures, by far the most wonderful of Cagliostro’s prodigies, has given rise to a great deal of futile discussion. For he never cured in public, like Mesmer; nor would he consent to give any explanation of his method to the doctors and learned academicians, who treated him with contempt born of envy—as the pioneers of science, with rare exceptions, have always been treated.

From the fact that he became celebrated at about the same time as Mesmer, many have regarded them as rivals, and declared that the prestige of both is to be traced to the same source. According to this point of view, Cagliostro, being more encyclopedic than Mesmer, though less scientific in manipulating the agent common to both, had in some way generalized magnetism, so to speak. His cures, however, were far more astonishing than Mesmer’s, for they were performed without passes or the use of magnets and magnetic wands. Neither did he heal merely by touching, like Gassner, nor by prayers, exorcisms, and the religious machinery by which faith is made active; though very probably the greater part of his success was due, like Mrs. Eddy’s, to the confident tone in which he assured his patients of the certainty of their recovery.

Cagliostro’s contemporaries, on the other hand, to whom the mechanism of Christian Science and the attributes of hypnotism—since so well tested by Dr. Charcot—were unknown, sought a material explanation of his cures in the quack medicines he concocted. The old popular belief in medicinal stones and magical herbs was still prevalent. One writer of the period pretended to know that Cagliostro’s “Elixir Vitæ” was composed of “magical herbs and gold in solution.” Another declared it to be the same as the elixir of Arnauld de Villeneuve, a famous alchemist of the Middle Ages, whose prescription consisted of “a mixture of pearls, sapphires, hyacinths, emeralds, rubies, topazes and diamonds, to which was added the scraping of the bones of a stag’s heart.”

Equally fantastic were the properties attributed to these panaceas by those who owed their restoration to health to Cagliostro. The following story, repeated everywhere—and believed, too, by many—gave the notoriety of a popular modern advertisement to the “Wine of Egypt.”

A great lady, who was also, unfortunately for her, an old one, and was unable to resign herself to the fact, was reported to have consulted Cagliostro, who gave her a vial of the precious liquid with the strictest injunction to take two drops when the moon entered its last quarter. Whilst waiting for this period to arrive the lady who desired to be rejuvenated shut up the vial in her wardrobe, and the better to insure its preservation informed her maid that it was a remedy for the colic. Fatal precaution! By some mischance on the following night, the maid was seized with the very malady of which her mistress had spoken. Remembering the remedy so fortuitously at hand she got up, opened the wardrobe, and emptied the vial at a draught.

The next morning she went as usual to wait on her mistress, who looked at her in surprise and asked her what she wanted. Thinking the old lady had had a stroke in the night, she said—

“Ah, madame, don’t you know me? I am your maid.”

“My maid is a woman of fifty,” was the reply, “and you——”

But she did not finish the sentence. The woman had caught a glimpse of her face in a mirror. The Wine of Egypt had rejuvenated her thirty years!

In an age unfamiliar with the cunning devices of the art of advertising and the universality of the pretensions of quack remedies, such encomiums lavished on “an extract of Saturn,” a “Wine of Egypt,” or an “Elixir Vitæ,” were calculated to damage the reputation of their inventor in the opinion of serious people even more than the bitter denunciations to which they were exposed. One of the charges of imposture on which the case against Cagliostro rests is that of manufacturing his remedies with the object of defrauding the public by attributing to them fabulous properties which he knew they did not possess. If this be admitted, then a similar accusation must be made against every maker of patent medicines to-day, which, in view of the law of libel and the fact that many persons have been restored to health by the concoctions of quacks whom the skilled physician has been powerless to heal, would be incredibly foolish.

To regard these remedies of Cagliostro with their ridiculous names and quixotic pretensions with the old prejudice is preposterous. Judged by the number and variety of his cures—and it is the only reasonable standard to judge them by—they were, to say the least, remarkable.

In the present day, it is no longer the custom to deride the knowledge of the old alchemists. The world has come to acknowledge that, in spite of the fantastic jargon in which they expressed themselves, they fully understood the uses of the plants and minerals of which they composed their drugs. Stripped of the atmosphere of magic and mystery in which they delighted to wrap their knowledge—and which, ridiculous as it may seem to-day, had just as much effect on the imagination in their benighted age as the more scientific mode of “suggestion” employed by the doctors of our own enlightened era—the remedies of a Borri or a Paracelsus are still deserving of respect, and still employed. Cagliostro is known to have made a serious study of alchemy, and it is very probable that his magic balsams and powders were prepared after receipts he discovered in old books of alchemy. Perhaps too, like all quacks—it is impossible to accord a more dignified title to one who had not the diploma of a properly qualified practitioner—he made the most of old wives’ remedies picked up haphazard in the course of his travels.

Without doubt the unparalleled credulity and superstition of the age contributed greatly to his success. Miracles can only succeed in an atmosphere favourable to the miraculous. In Europe, as the reader has seen—particularly in France—the soil had been well prepared for seed of the sort that Cagliostro sowed.

VI

The cure of the Prince de Soubise gave Cagliostro an immense prestige. “It would be impossible,” says the Baroness d’Oberkirch, “to give an idea of the passion, the madness with which people pursued him. It would appear incredible to any one who had not seen it.” On returning to Strasburg, “he was followed by a dozen ladies of rank and two actresses” who desired to have the benefit of his treatment. People came from far and wide to consult him; and many out of sheer curiosity. To these, whom he regarded as spies sent by his enemies, he was either inaccessible or positively rude.

Lavater, who came from Zurich, was treated with very scant courtesy. “If,” said Cagliostro, “your science [that of reading character by the features, by which he had acquired a European reputation] is greater than mine, you have no need of my acquaintance; and if mine is the greater, I have no need of yours.”

Lavater, however, was not to be repulsed by the inference to be drawn from such a remark. The following day he wrote Cagliostro a long letter in which, among other things, he asked him “how he had acquired his knowledge, and in what it consisted.” In reply Cagliostro limited himself to these words: In verbis, in herbis, in lapidibus, by which, as M. d’Alméras observes, he probably indicated correctly the nature and extent of his medical and occult lore. But Lavater, as credulous as he was inquisitive, impressed by the mystery in which Cagliostro enveloped his least action, read into his words quite another meaning. Believing firmly in the Devil—about whom he had written a book—the Swiss pastor returned home convinced that the Grand Cophta of Egyptian Masonry was “a supernatural being with a diabolic mission.”

LAVATER

(After the engraving by William Blake)

In nobody were the curiosity and admiration that he inspired greater than in the notorious Cardinal de Rohan. His Eminence was one of the darlings of Fortune, whose choicest favours had been showered on him with a lavish hand. Of the most illustrious birth, exceptionally handsome, enormously rich, and undeniably fascinating, no younger son ever started life under more brilliant auspices. The Church seemed to exist solely for the purpose of providing him with honours. Bishop of Strasburg, Grand Almoner of France, Cardinal, Prince of the Empire, Landgrave of Alsace—his titles were as numerous as the beads of a rosary. Nor were they merely high-sounding and empty dignities. From the Abbey of St. Waast, the richest in France, of which he was the Abbot, he drew 300,000 livres a year, and from all these various sources combined his revenue was estimated at 1,200,000 livres.

Nature had endowed him no less bounteously than Fortune. To the honours which he owed to the accident of birth, his intellect had won him another still more coveted. At twenty-seven he had been elected to the Académie Française, where, as he was particularly brilliant in conversation, it is not surprising that the Immortals should have “declared themselves charmed with his company.”

He possessed all the conspicuous qualities and defects which in the eighteenth century were characteristic of the aristocrat. High ecclesiastic that he was, he had nothing of the ascetic about him. Like so many of the great dignitaries of the Church under the ancien régime, he was worldly to the last degree. As he was not a hypocrite, he did not hesitate to live as he pleased. Appointed Ambassador to Vienna, he had scandalized the strait-laced Maria Theresa by his reckless extravagance and dissipation. The Emperor, to her disgust, “loved conversing with him to enjoy his flippant gossip and wicked stories.” “Our women,” she wrote to her Ambassador at Versailles, “young and old, beautiful and ugly, are bewitched by him. He is their idol.”

His character was a mosaic of vice and virtue. With him manners took the place of morals. “He possessed,” says Madame d’Oberkirch, “the gallantry and politeness of a grand seigneur such as I have rarely met in any one.” Madame de Genlis considered that, “if he was nothing that he ought to be, he was as amiable as it was possible to be.” In him vice lost all its grossness and levity acquired dignity. Anxious to please, he was also susceptible to flattery. “By my lording him,” says Manuel, who disliked him, “one can get from him whatever one desires.” At the same time he was obliged to confess that the Cardinal “had a really good heart.”

It was to his excessive good-nature that he owed most of his misfortunes. The entire absence of intolerance in his character caused him to be regarded as an atheist, but his unbelief, like his vices, was greatly exaggerated. Men in his position never escape detraction, but in the case of the Cardinal he deliberately invited it. Gracious to all, he was generous to a fault. He dispensed favour and charity alike without discernment, giving to the poor as readily and as bountifully as to his mistresses. Of these he had had many; the memoirs of the period contain strange, and often untranslatable, stories of his private life. For some years he was followed wherever he went by the beautiful Marquise de Marigny dressed as a page.

Besides his weakness for a pretty face, this splendid tare had a fondness amounting to passion for pomp and alchemy. “On state occasions at Versailles,” says Madame d’Oberkirch, “he wore an alb of lace en point à l’aiguille of such beauty that the assistants were almost afraid to touch it.” It was embroidered with his arms and device—the famous device of the Rohans, Roy ne puis, prince ne daigne, Rohan je suis. It was said to be worth a million livres.

In gratifying his taste for luxury, the cost was the last thing he considered. On going to Vienna as Ambassador he took with him two gala coaches worth 40,000 livres each; fifty horses, two equerries, two piqueurs, seven pages drawn from the nobility of Brittany and Alsace with their governors and tutors, two gentlemen-in-waiting, six footmen, whose scarlet and gold liveries cost him 4000 livres apiece, etc.

In France his style of living was still more extravagant. He spent vast sums on pictures, sculptures, and artistic treasures generally. Collecting illuminated missals was his speciality. At his episcopal palace at Saverne, near Strasburg, which he rebuilt after it was destroyed by fire in 1779 at a cost of between two and three million livres, he had a magnificent library. As printed books, according to Madame d’Oberkirch, were beneath his notice, his library was noted for its beautiful bindings, and above all for the missals ornamented with miniatures worth their weight in gold.

His principal pastime, however, was alchemy. At Saverne, besides his library, he had one of the finest laboratories in Europe. He was almost mad on the subject of the philosopher’s stone. The mention of the occult sciences at once arrested his attention; then, and only then, did the brilliant, frivolous Cardinal become serious.

Naturally, such a man could not fail to be impressed by the mysterious physician whose cures were the talk of Strasburg.

Shortly after Cagliostro’s arrival, Baron de Millinens, the Cardinal’s master of the hounds, called to inform him that his Eminence desired to make his acquaintance. But Cagliostro knowing, as he stated at his trial in the Necklace Affair, that the prince “only desired to see him from curiosity, refused to gratify him.” The answer he returned is famous, and thoroughly characteristic of him.

“If the Cardinal is ill,” he is reported to have said, “let him come to me and I will cure him; but if he is well, he has no need of me nor I of him.”

This message, far from affronting the Cardinal, only increased his curiosity. After having attempted in vain to gain admittance to the sanctuary of the new Esculapius, his Eminence had, or feigned, an attack of asthma, “of which,” says Cagliostro, “he sent to inform me, whereupon I went at once to attend him.”

The visit, though short, was long enough to inspire the Cardinal with a desire for a closer acquaintance. But Cagliostro’s disdainful reserve was not easily broken down. The advances of the Cardinal, however, were none the less flattering. At last, captivated by the persistency of the fascinating prelate, he declared in his grandiose way, to Rohan’s immense joy, that “the prince’s soul was worthy of his, and that he would confide to him all his secrets.”

The relation thus formed, whatever the motives that prompted it, soon ripened into intimacy. Needless to say, they had long, frequent, and secret confabulations in the Cardinal’s well-equipped laboratory. Cagliostro, with his wife, eventually even went to live at Saverne at the Cardinal’s request. He was bidden to consider the palace as his own, and the servants were ordered to announce him when he entered a room as “His Excellency M. le Comte de Cagliostro.”

The Baroness d’Oberkirch, on visiting Saverne while he was there, “was stunned by the pomp with which he was treated.” She was one of the few great ladies of Strasburg who refused to believe in him. To her he was merely an adventurer. On the occasions of her visit to Saverne the Cardinal, who had great respect for her, endeavoured to bring her round to his opinion. “As I resisted,” she said, “he became impatient.”

“Really, madame,” said he, “you are hard to convince. Do you see this?”

He showed me a large diamond that he wore on his little finger, and on which the Rohan arms were engraved. This ring was worth at least twenty thousand francs.

“It is a beautiful gem, monseigneur,” I said, “I have been admiring it.”

“Well,” he exclaimed, “it is Cagliostro who made it: he made it out of nothing. I was present during the whole operation with my eyes fixed on the crucible. Is not that science, Baroness? People should not say that he is duping me, or taking advantage of me. I have had this ring valued by a jeweller and an engraver, and they have estimated it at twenty-five thousand livres. You must admit that he would be a strange kind of cheat who would make such presents.”

I acknowledge I was stunned. M. de Rohan perceived it, and continued—

“This is not all—he can make gold! He has made in this very palace, in my presence, five or six thousand livres. He will make me the richest prince in Europe! These are no mere vagaries of the imagination, madame, but positive facts. Think of all his predictions that have been realized, of all the miraculous cures that he has effected! I repeat he is a most extraordinary, a most sublime man, whose knowledge is only equalled by his goodness. What alms he gives! What good he does! It exceeds all power of imagination. I can assure you he has never asked or received anything from me.”

But Cagliostro did not confine himself solely to seeking the philosopher’s stone for the Cardinal. For the benefit of his splendid host he displayed the whole series of his magical phenomena.

One day, according to Roberson—who professed to have obtained his information from “an eye-witness very worthy of credence”—he promised to evoke for the Cardinal the shade of a woman he had loved. He had made the attempt two or three times before without success. Death seemed to hesitate to come to the rendez-vous. The moon, perhaps, had not been propitious, or some great crime committed at the moment of evocation may have had an unfavourable effect. But on this occasion all the conditions on which success depended were united.

“The performance,” says Roberson, “took place in a small darkened room in the presence of four or five spectators who were seated far enough apart to prevent them from secretly communicating with one another. Wand in hand, Cagliostro stood in the middle of the room. The silence which he had commanded was so profound that even the hearts of those present seemed to stop beating. All at once the wand, as if drawn by a magnet, pointed to a spot on the wall where a vague, indefinite form was visible for a moment. The Cardinal uttered a cry. He had recognized—or believed he had, which amounted to the same thing—the woman he had loved.”

******

So great was the confidence that Rohan placed in Cagliostro that he treated him as an oracle. He constantly consulted him, and suffered himself to be guided entirely by his advice. As the consequences of this infatuation were in the end disastrous, it is customary to regard the Cardinal as the dupe of Cagliostro. Many, blinded by prejudice, have supposed that Cagliostro, having previously informed himself of the tastes, character, and vast wealth of the prince, came to Strasburg for the express purpose of victimizing him. It is even asserted that the Countess had her share in the subjugation of the Cardinal, and that while Cagliostro attacked his understanding, she laid siege to his heart.

The disdainful, almost hostile, attitude that Cagliostro adopted towards his patron at the beginning of their acquaintance was so well calculated to inflame Rohan’s curiosity that it is a matter of course to attribute it to design. The Abbé Georgel, who as a Jesuit thoroughly disliked the Grand Cophta of Egyptian Masonry, asserts that “he sought, without having the air of seeking it, the most intimate confidence of his Eminence and the greatest ascendency over his will.”

But this very plausible statement is not only unsupported by any fact, but is actually contrary to fact. The Cardinal was not Cagliostro’s banker, as has so often been stated. At his trial in the Necklace Affair Rohan denied this most emphatically. Moreover, it would have been utterly impossible for him, had he wished, to have supplied Cagliostro with the sums he spent so lavishly. In spite of his vast income, he had for years been head over ears in debt. If there were any benefits conferred, it was the Cardinal who received them.

“Cagliostro,” says Madame d’Oberkirch, “treated him, as well as the rest of his aristocratic admirers, as if they were under infinite obligation to him and he under none to them.”

This statement is the secret of the real nature of Cagliostro’s so-called conquest. It was not cupidity, but colossal vanity, that lured him into the glittering friendship that ruined him. The Cardinal, with his great name and position, his influence, and his undeniable charm, dazzled Cagliostro quite as much as he, with his miracles, his magic, and his mystery, appealed to the imagination of the Cardinal. Each had for the other the fascination of a flame for a moth. Each fluttered round the other like a moth; and each met with the proverbial moth’s fate. But the Cagliostro-flame only scorched the wings of his Eminence. It was in the flame of the Cardinal that Cagliostro perished.