Cagliostro

by W. R. H. Trowbridge

CHAPTER VI

THE DIAMOND NECKLACE AFFAIR

I

Few subjects have been more written about, more discussed than the Affair of the Diamond Necklace. The defences alone of those involved in this cause célèbre fill two big volumes. All the memoirs of the period contain more or less detailed accounts of it; in every history of France it occupies a chapter to itself; and as it suggests romance even more than history, novelists and dramatists alike have often exercised their imagination upon its entanglements.

To re-tell in detail this romance, to rehearse this drama in which the happiness and reputations of all who figure in it were destroyed, does not come within the scope of this book. For the chief interest it excites is focussed on the star—the Comtesse de Lamotte-Valois—who dominates the scene from first to last. It is only in the last act that Cagliostro appears. Nevertheless, the part he played was so important that a brief résumé of the action preceding his appearance is necessary to enable the reader to understand how he came to be involved in the imbroglio.

COUNTESS DE LAMOTTE

(After Robinet)

Nature had specially cast Madame de Lamotte for the part she played in this drama. Descended from the Valois through a natural son of Henry II, her family had sunk into a state of abject poverty. At her birth her father was reduced to poaching for a livelihood on his former ancestral estate. He eventually died in the Hôtel Dieu, the famous hospital for the indigent founded by Madame de Pompadour. Madame de Lamotte herself as a child was a barefoot beggar on the highway. It was in this condition that she first attracted the attention of the Marquise de Boulainvilliers, who out of pity gave her a home, educated her as well as her brother and sister, and afterwards obtained a small pension for them from Louis XVI.

Being naturally extremely precocious and intelligent, Jeanne de Saint-Remy, as she was called, did not neglect her opportunities. It was her misfortune, however, to derive but small profit from them. Having flirted with the wrong people—her benefactress’s husband and a bishop—she married the wrong man. Lamotte was good-looking, of a respectable family, and crippled with debt. Unable to support himself and his wife on his pay as a subaltern in the army, he resigned his commission, adopted the title of Count—to which he had a shadowy claim—added Valois to his name, and went to Paris to seek fortune, where the Countess made the most of her wits and her looks.

The expedient to which she most frequently resorted was to pester well-known people with petitions, in which she sought to have the claim she had set up to the lands of her ancestors recognized. As by some extraordinary coincidence the Crown had recently acquired these lands, she had, she hoped, only to find the right person to take up her cause to triumph in the end. Among those to whom she appealed was Cardinal de Rohan. His Eminence, who was both sympathetic and susceptible, manifested the greatest pity for the young and charming Countess whose condition was in such a contrast to her illustrious birth. He was amazed that the Court should so neglect a descendant of Henri II, and promised readily to support her claim. A few days later in his capacity as Grand Almoner of France, he sent his interesting protégée 2,400 livres as an earnest of his intention. As gratitude and necessity caused the suppliant to renew her visits frequently, the impression she produced on the Cardinal deepened. His pride as well as his sensuality urged him to protect a woman as fascinating and distinguished as she was unfortunate. He entered into her views, gave her advice; and even confided to her his own grievances and desires.

With all his splendour his Eminence was what is known as a disappointed man. It was his ambition to play a conspicuous part in affairs of state. To flatter him the sycophants who surrounded him were in the habit of comparing his abilities to those of Richelieu, Mazarin, and Fleury, the three great Cardinals who had governed France. It was more than his right, it was his duty, they told him, to become First Minister. In reality he was utterly unfitted for such a position, though not more so than Calonne and Loménie de Brienne, the last two ministers to govern the state under the ancien régime. Rohan, however, intoxicated by flattery, believed what he was told; and his desire for power developed into a passion, a fixed idea.

One obstacle alone stood between him and the pursuit of his ambition—Marie Antoinette; a fascinating and dazzling obstacle to this consecrated voluptuary, so dazzling that it became confused in his mind with the summit from which it kept him. He did not bear the Queen the slightest resentment for her animosity to him. He was aware that it had been imparted to her by her mother Maria Theresa, at whose instance he had been recalled from Vienna twelve years before. He felt certain that if he could but meet her, get into communication with her, he could win her esteem. Unfortunately Marie Antoinette’s contempt extended to Louis XVI. Versailles was thus closed to the Cardinal. He was never seen there but once a year, on Assumption Day, in his rôle of Grand Almoner, when he celebrated mass in the Royal Chapel.

The confidences of her protector gave the Countess de Lamotte more than an insight into his character. In the vanity and credulity they revealed, her alert and cunning mind saw a Golconda of possibilities which not only her necessity but her genius for intrigue urged her to exploit.[28] By circulating rumours of her friendship with the Queen, to which her frequent journeys to Versailles in search of some influential person to present her petition to the King gave weight, she had obtained credit from tradespeople. To cause this rumour to glide to the ears of his Eminence was easy. And as people generally believe what flatters them, when Madame de Lamotte spoke of the interest that the Queen took in him, an interest that circumstances compelled her to conceal, the dissipated, amorous Cardinal, too vain to dream any one would deceive him, listened and believed all he was told.

Thus began the famous series of violet-tinted letters which during May, June, and July, 1784, passed between Marie Antoinette and Rohan. This correspondence of which the Queen, needless to say, had not the least inkling, becoming as it proceeded less and less cold and reserved, inflamed all the desires that fermented in the heart of the Cardinal. In this way it was the simplest thing in the world for the Countess de Lamotte to induce him to send the Queen through her “60,000 livres out of the Almonry funds for a poor family in whom her Majesty was interested.”

As Marie Antoinette continued to be “short of cash,” Rohan, who was himself heavily in debt and had misappropriated into the bargain the funds of various institutions of which he was the trustee, was obliged to borrow the money the Queen was supposed to be in need of from the Jews. His Eminence, however, at length became restive under these incessant demands for money. He even began to suspect that the Queen might be playing him false, and in spite of all the Countess’s explanations demanded some visible proof of the interest she professed to manifest in him.

It was at this juncture, when it seemed as if the game was up, that Lamotte, walking in the garden of the Palais Royal, met by accident an unfortunate female whose face bore a perfect resemblance to that of the Queen.[29] To such an intrigante as the Countess, this resemblance was sufficient material out of which to forge a fresh chain for the Cardinal. On August 11, 1784, between ten and eleven at night, “the unfortunate female”—Mlle. Leguay, Baroness d’Oliva or whatever she called herself—having been carefully trained and paid to represent Marie Antoinette, gave the Cardinal, “disguised as a mousquetaire,” a meeting in the park of Versailles, a meeting which the Countess de Lamotte was careful to interrupt ere it began, giving his Eminence barely time to kiss the hand of the supposed Queen, who as she was hurried away flung the kneeling prelate a rose as a token of her affection and esteem.

To Rohan that fleeting vision of the Queen of France served as the proof he had demanded. Henceforth the dream of his diseased fancy enveloped him as in a veil. Obsessed by a single idea, he became the blind instrument of the consummate enchantress by whom he was bewitched. After his romantic rendezvous in the park of Versailles, he advanced confidently and triumphantly to the abyss into which he was destined to plunge, without looking to the right or to the left, and seeing nothing but his vision of the Queen as she had dropped the rose at his feet.

So complete was his thraldom, that later in the depth of his abasement, when he lay in the terrible solitude of the Bastille, charged with swindling a jeweller of a necklace, it was with difficulty that Rohan could bring himself to believe, not that he had been basely betrayed by the Queen, but duped by Madame de Lamotte. “I was completely blinded by the immense desire I had to regain the favour of the Queen,” he said at his trial, in reply to the observations of the judges how a man so cultivated, so intelligent, and even so able, as he unquestionably was—his embassy in Vienna had been a brilliant success—should have become the plaything of the Countess de Lamotte.

“His incredible credulity,” says the Duc de Lévis, “was really the knot of the whole affair.” However, it is not so incredible as it seems. The very fact of his intelligence partially explains it. As Suzanne says to Figaro in the Barber of Seville, “intellectual men are fools,” particularly when there is a woman in the case, and Madame de Lamotte was clever and fascinating enough to have turned the head of the Devil himself.

As a result of this strategy the Countess managed to mulct the Cardinal of 150,000 livres. The figure that she cut on this money confirmed the rumours of her intimacy with the Queen, a circumstance she did not fail to turn to account. By paying those whom she owed she obtained from them and others still greater credit, whereby the foundations of the vast structure of deceit in which she lived were still further strengthened and extended. She had no longer to ask for credit, it was offered to her, and people even came to implore her to use her boasted influence at Court in their behalf. Some silk merchants of Lyons, who desired the patronage of the Queen, sent her a case of superb stuffs valued at 10,000 livres.

It was in this way that she became acquainted with Böhmer, the maker of the famous necklace.

Except the Cardinal, it would be impossible to imagine a more ridiculous monomaniac than this Saxon Jew. For over ten years he had locked up his whole fortune in a “matchless jewel” for which he was unable to find a purchaser. Marie Antoinette, in particular, had been pestered to buy it, till her patience being exhausted she ordered Böhmer never to mention it to her again.[30] He obeyed her, but none the less continued to hope she would change her mind. In the course of ten years this hope became a fixed idea, which he sought to realize by hook or crook. Thus hearing that Madame de Lamotte had great influence with the Queen, Böhmer came, like the silk merchants of Lyons and others, to purchase it if possible.

It did not take the wily Countess long to gauge the credulity of her visitor, or to make up her mind that it was worth her while to exploit it. Needless to say, a woman clever enough to persuade the Grand Almoner of France that a fille de joie of the Palais Royal from whom he had received a rose in the park of Versailles was Marie Antoinette, would have no difficulty in getting possession of Böhmer’s necklace.

The Cardinal, who had been marking time, so to speak, at Saverne ever since his adventure, was hastily summoned to Paris to perform a service for her Majesty concerning which she enjoined the strictest secrecy. When Rohan, who had travelled post in a blizzard, discovered what the service was he was staggered. No wonder. The Queen, he was informed, wished him to be her security for the purchase of the necklace, for which she had agreed to pay 1,600,000 livres (£64,000) in four instalments of equal amounts at intervals of six months. Madame de Lamotte, however, succeeded in persuading him to affix his signature to the necessary documents—and in due course Böhmer’s “matchless jewel” was in her possession.

It did not take her long “to break it up,” as Marie Antoinette had advised Böhmer to do years before. Her manner of disposing of the diamonds, which she “picked from the setting with a knife,” was itself a romance. But it is impossible in so hurried a résumé of this imbroglio to enter into any particulars that have no connection whatever with Cagliostro.

The dénouement arrived six months later when the first instalment of 400,000 livres became due. Madame de Lamotte awaited it with perfect indifference. She had involved the Cardinal too deeply to have any fears for herself. The very peril to which he was exposed was her safety. At all costs Rohan would be obliged to pay for the necklace to prevent a scandal.

She made a mistake, however, in not informing him in time that the Queen was not in a position to pay the instalment, whereby as her security the liability devolved on him. For never dreaming that such a contingency was possible, he was utterly unprepared for it when it came. Crippled with debt, he was unable to put his hand on 400,000 livres at a moment’s notice. The difficulty he found in raising the sum made Böhmer so nervous that he consulted Madame Campan, one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. She informed the jeweller that he was mad if he imagined the Queen had bought his necklace. Hereupon Böhmer in great agitation rushed off to Madame de Lamotte, who coolly informed him she suspected he was being victimized.

“But,” she added reassuringly, “the Cardinal is, as you know, very rich; he will pay. Go to him.”

This was a master-stroke; for the Countess had as much reason to believe that Böhmer would take her advice as that the Cardinal, to avoid a scandal which meant his ruin, would assume the entire responsibility of the purchase of the necklace. Unfortunately, the distracted jeweller instead of going to the Cardinal tottered off to the King!

By a dramatic coincidence it was Assumption Day, the one day in the year on which the Cardinal was entitled to appear at Versailles, when as Grand Almoner he celebrated mass to which the Royal Family always went in state. He and the Court were waiting in the Oeil-de-Boeuf for the King and Queen to appear in order to accompany them to the Chapel of St. Louis, when a door opened and a chamberlain summoned his Eminence to the sovereign. Everybody knows what followed. Böhmer, having obtained an audience of Louis XVI, had related to that amazed monarch all the details of the transaction by which the necklace had been bought for the Queen. This story, repeated in the presence of Marie Antoinette, whose honesty and virtue it alike impugned, stung her to fury. Exasperated though she was by Böhmer’s assertion that she had purchased his necklace, which for ten years she had refused to do, she might nevertheless have excused him on the ground of his insanity. But when he charged her with having employed Rohan, whom she hated, to purchase the necklace through a confidante of whom she had never heard, she was transported with indignation. Forgetting that she was a Queen, which she did too often, she remembered only that she was a woman, and without thinking of the consequences, insisted that the Cardinal should be arrested and her reputation publicly vindicated. Louis XVI, whose misfortune it was to be guided by her when he shouldn’t, and never when he should—a misfortune that in the end was to cost him crown and life—at once ordered the arrest of the Grand Almoner, who, attired in his pontifical robes, was carried off then and there to the Bastille like a common criminal before the eyes of the entire Court.

The arrest of the Cardinal[31] was in due course followed by that of the Countess de Lamotte, Cagliostro and his wife, the “Baroness d’Oliva,” who had acted the part of the Queen in the park of Versailles, Réteaux de Vilette, who had forged the Queens letters to Rohan, and several others on whom suspicion had fallen. “The Bastille,” as Carlyle says, “opened its iron bosom to them all.”[32]

Such in brief is the story of the rape of the Diamond Necklace.

******

Marie Antoinette

(From a French print)

The trial that followed has been justly described as the prologue of the Revolution. To the calumnies it gave birth may be traced the hatred which engendered the Reign of Terror.

“Calumny,” says M. Chaix d’Est-Ange in his brilliant monograph on the Necklace Affair, “is common to all ages, but it has not always the same force and success. In times when public opinion is indifferent or feeble it is despised and powerless. At other periods more favourable to it, borne on the wings of passion it soars aloft strong, confident, and triumphant. If ever it was a power it was in the eighteenth century.”

“It was everywhere,” says de Goncourt, “under the roofs of courtiers and blackmailers alike, in the bureaux of the police themselves, and even at the side of the Queen.”

Given such a state of society Marie Antoinette could have done nothing so calculated to injure herself as to cause the arrest of the Cardinal. If he deserved the Bastille it was not necessary to send him there. Though she may be excused for regarding him as a “vulgar swindler who stole diamonds to pay his debts,” she should have remembered that he was also the head of one of the greatest houses in France. As soon as the news of his arrest was known there was but a single opinion in the salons of the nobility: “What, arrest the Grand Almoner of France in full pontificals before the whole Court for a bit of chiffon! Send a Rohan and the chief of the clergy to the Bastille! C’est trop!”

The malcontents of the Court recognized in this shameful disgrace the hand of the unpopular minister Breteuil, who was known to be the bitter enemy of the Cardinal.

“M. de Breteuil,” wrote Rivarol with truth, “has taken the Cardinal from the hands of Madame de Lamotte and crushed him on the forehead of the Queen, which will retain the marks.”

It was by his advice, indeed, that Louis XVI had been persuaded to gratify the rage of his reckless consort. The opportunity of ruining his enemy had been too great for Breteuil to resist. The weakness of the King, the unpopularity of the Queen and the faults of a blundering minister were thus alike accentuated.

“When a king has absolute power,” says Chaix d’Est-Ange, “it is without doubt at such a time as this that he should use it to stifle scandal.” The arrest of the Cardinal could only have been justified by his conviction. It was a question of his honour or the Queen’s. Thirty years before it would have been an easy matter to find him guilty, but the spirit of disrespect for a tyrannized and stupid authority which was beginning to assert itself everywhere made Rohan’s conviction extremely difficult, if not altogether impossible. For Louis XVI, from a mistaken sense of equity which was interpreted as weakness, allowed the Parliament to try him.

This was the height of folly. For sixty years there had been war between the Court and the Parliament. In the truce which had taken place on the accession of Louis XVI, the members had resumed their deliberations more imbued than ever with the spirit of resistance; embittered by a long exile they regarded their recall as a victory. Thus to give the Parliament the power of determining the guilt or innocence of the Cardinal, which was in reality that of the Queen herself, was to take an acknowledged enemy for a judge.

When the news of the Cardinal’s arrest reached the Parliament, one of the most popular members—he afterwards perished on the guillotine like most of them—cried out, rubbing his hands, “Grand and joyful business! A Cardinal in a swindle! The Queen implicated in a forgery! Filth on the crook and on the sceptre! What a triumph for ideas of liberty! How important for the Parliament!”

In such circumstances it is not surprising that the trial of the Cardinal and his co-accusés should become, as Mirabeau wrote, “the most serious affair in the kingdom.”

The great family of Rohan left no stone unturned to save the honour of their name. To assist them—but inspired by quite other motives—they had all the enemies of the Queen and the Ministry, as well as the people who considered the Cardinal the victim of despotism. Women in particular were all for la Belle Eminence. It was the fashion to wear ribbons half red and half yellow, the former representing the Cardinal, the latter the straw on which he was supposed to lie in the Bastille. Cardinal sur la paille was the name of the ribbon, which was worn even in the palace of Versailles itself.

To save the honour of the throne the Government was obliged to descend into the arena and fight the forces arrayed against it. The attention of the civilized world was thus riveted on the trial, which lasted nine months. No detail was kept secret, accounts were published daily in which the slightest incident was recorded. France and Europe were inundated with libels and calumnies in which the reputations of all concerned were torn to shreds.

Throw enough mud and some of it is sure to stick. It took more than half a century to cleanse the honour of Marie Antoinette of all suspicion of connivance in the theft of the necklace.

The mistrust that mystery and magic always inspire made Cagliostro with his fantastic personality an easy target for calumny. After having been riddled with abuse till he was unrecognizable, prejudice, the foster-child of calumny, proceeded to lynch him, so to speak. For over one hundred years his character has dangled on the gibbet of infamy, upon which the sbirri of tradition have inscribed a curse on any one who shall attempt to cut him down.

His fate has been his fame. He is remembered in history, not so much for anything he did, as for what was done to him. The Diamond Necklace Affair, in which the old régime and the new met in their duel to the death, was Cagliostro’s damnation. In judging him to-day, it is absolutely essential to bear in mind the unparalleled lack of scruple with which the Government and its enemies contested this trial.

II

Implicated in her swindle by the Countess de Lamotte, to whose accusations his close intimacy with the Cardinal gave weight, Cagliostro was arrested at seven in the morning by Inspector Brugnière, accompanied by Commissary Chesnon and eight policemen.

“He desired me,” says Cagliostro, who has described his arrest in detail, “to deliver up my keys, and compelled me to open my bureau, which I did. There were in it several of my remedies, amongst the rest six bottles of a precious cordial. Brugnière seized on whatever he took a fancy to, and the catchpoles he had brought with him followed his example. The only favour I asked was that I might be permitted to go in my own carriage to the place of my destination. This was refused. I then requested to be allowed the use of a cab; this also was denied. Proud of making a show of his prey to the thronging multitude, Brugnière insisted on my walking part of the way; and although I was perfectly submissive and did not make the least shadow of resistance he laid hold of me by the collar. In this way, closely surrounded by four sbirri, I was dragged along the Boulevards as far as the Rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth, where a cab appearing, I was mercifully thrust into it and driven the rest of the way to the Bastille.”

The admiration amounting almost to veneration that Cagliostro inspired was shared only by his followers—of whom, however, he could count several thousands, it is said, in Paris. On the other hand, the curiosity which he had excited was general and anything but reverent. The exaggerated enthusiasm of his followers, the incredible stories related of him, and the extreme seriousness with which he took himself made him ridiculous. If he was the chief subject of conversation in all classes in Paris, it was as a subject of mirth. In the drama of the Necklace Affair it was to him that the public looked to supply the comic relief. He was by common consent the clown, the funny man of the play, so to speak. He had but to appear on the scene to raise a laugh, his slightest gesture produced a roar, when he spoke he convulsed the house. But to Cagliostro his rôle was very far from comic. The consciousness of innocence is not necessarily a consolation in adversity. It poisons as often as it stimulates—according to the temperament. Cagliostro was utterly crushed by the blow that had fallen on him. The gloom of the Bastille, which the popular imagination haunted by old legends made deeper than it was, seemed to chill his very soul. He who had faced with “a front of brass” all the previous dangers and humiliations of his agitated existence was for the first time cowed. Illuminist, Egyptian Mason, Mystic Regenerator of Mankind—Revolutionist, in a word—he had no confidence in the justice of the power into whose hands he had fallen. He believed that he would be forgotten in his dungeon like so many others.

The severity with which he was treated was calculated to justify his fears.

“Were I left to choose,” he says, “between an ignominious death, and six months in the Bastille, I would say without hesitation, ‘Lead me on to the scaffold.’”

For five months he was not only in ignorance, but purposely misinformed, as to what was transpiring without his prison. During this time the beautiful Countess, less rigorously guarded, was confined near him without his knowledge. As soon as Brugnière had carried off her husband, Chesnon and the police, who had remained behind after searching for incriminating documents which they did not find, attached seals to the house and carried her off too, “half dead with fear,” to the Bastille. In response to Cagliostro’s repeated inquiries as to whether she shared his captivity, as he feared, his jailers “swore by their honour and God that she was not in the Bastille.”

This deception was even carried to the length of permitting him to write letters to her which never reached her, and to receive replies which she never wrote, “in which she assured him that she was taking steps to restore him to freedom.” As the Countess Cagliostro could not write, a friend was supposed to write the letters for her. In the same way if he wanted clothes or linen he would dispatch a line to his wife, and an official would go to his house and fetch what he required, bringing back a letter from the Countess calculated to make him believe that they had been sent by her.

At the same time the Cardinal was living in almost as much comfort as if he had been in his own palace. He occupied a spacious apartment, had three of his servants to wait on him, and saw as many people as he wished. The number of his visitors was so great that the drawbridge of the Bastille was kept lowered throughout the day. On one occasion he even “gave a dinner of twenty covers.”

As money—and Cagliostro had plenty of it—like rank, was able to purchase equal consideration in the Bastille, the contrast in the treatment of the two prisoners almost warrants the supposition that the jailers derived no little amusement from making sport of the sufferings of one who was alleged to be immune from those ills to which mere clay is prone. There are many people to whom a weeping Pierrot is as funny as a laughing one.

It was not till his despondency, on discovering as he eventually did that his wife was a prisoner like himself, threatened to affect his reason that the severity of his confinement was relaxed. To prevent him from committing suicide, Thiroux de Crosne, the minister who had issued the warrant for his arrest, advised de Launay, the Governor of the Bastille, “to choose a warder, likely to be sympathetic, to sleep in his cell.” He was also permitted, like the other prisoners, to have exercise and to select a lawyer to defend him.

The first use he made of this privilege was to petition the Parliament—“to release his wife from a dungeon, where a man himself had occasion for all his strength, all his fortitude, and all his resignation to struggle against despair.”

The Bastille was too massive a cage for so delicate a bird. Implicated without the shadow of a reason in the Necklace Affair the Countess Cagliostro began to imagine herself ill. She pined for her fine house, her admirers, her diamonds, her black mare Djérid, and the companionship of the man to whom she owed all that spelt happiness in her inoffensive, doll-like existence. Moved to pity less by the petition of Cagliostro than by the pleading of her lawyer, Polverit, and the eloquence of d’Epremenil, the most brilliant member of the Parliament, that body was finally persuaded to set her free without a trial after having been imprisoned seven months in the Bastille.

The release of the Countess Cagliostro, to which the Court was bitterly opposed, was the first reverse of the Government in the duel to which it had so foolishly challenged public opinion.

No sooner was the news known than friends and strangers alike came to congratulate her. For more than a week nearly three hundred people came daily to inscribe their names in the visitors’ book kept by the concierge.

“It is the perfection of good style,” says one of the newswriters of the period, “to have made a call on the Countess Seraphina.”

“Even the ‘nymphs’ of the Palais Royal,” says d’Alméras, “discreetly manifested their sympathy with the victim of arbitrary power on recognizing her as she walked one day in the gardens.”

III

Madame de Lamotte in the meantime, utterly undaunted by her imprisonment, was energetically preparing for the trial, which, in spite of all her efforts, was to end in her conviction. Her defence was a tissue of lies from beginning to end. She contradicted herself with brazen effrontery, accused Cagliostro, the Cardinal, and at last the Queen, of swindling Böhmer of the necklace. She did not hesitate to defame herself by declaring that she had been the mistress of the Cardinal—which was as false as the rest of her evidence—and, as each lie became untenable, took refuge in another, even admitting that she was lying “to shelter an exalted personage.” In only one thing was she consistent; to the end she asserted her complete innocence. Her object was to confuse the issue and so wriggle herself free.

In the first of her mémoires justificatifs, which were printed and sold in accordance with the legal custom of the day, she boldly charged Cagliostro with the robbery of the necklace. He was represented as an impostor to make him the more easily appear a swindler. To penetrate the mystery in which he had wrapped his origin she invented for him a low and shameful past, which the editor of the Courier de l’Europe and the Inquisition-biographer afterwards merged into Giuseppe Balsamo’s. She ridiculed his cures, and cited the Medical Faculty as witnesses of the deaths he had caused. She declared his disinterestedness and his generosity to be a fraud, and accused him of practising in private the vices he denounced in public. Having stripped him of the last stitch of respectability she proceeded to expose the woman who passed as his wife, and whose liaisons with the Cardinal and others she declared he encouraged. As for the wonders he was said to perform they were not even worthy of the name of tricks; only fools were taken in by them. In fine, to Madame de Lamotte, the Grand Cophta was nothing but “an arch empiric, a mean alchemist, a dreamer on the philosophers stone, a false prophet, and a Jew who had taken to pieces the necklace which he had beguiled the Cardinal, over whom he had gained an incredible influence, to entrust to him, in order to swell a fortune unheard of before.”

This mémoire—the first of many which the various persons implicated in the Affair rained upon the public—was to an impatient world the signal that the battle had begun. Excitement, already at fever heat, was intensified by the boldness, directness and violence of Madame de Lamotte’s denunciation. It was felt that to justify himself Cagliostro would be obliged to clear up the mystery of his past. Never before had the “Grand Coffer,” as he was called by a police official who unwittingly confounded the title and the fortune of the restorer of Egyptian Masonry, roused curiosity to so high a pitch. The recollection of his reputed prodigies gave to his expected self-revelation the character of an evocation, so to speak; and the public, as ready to mock as it had formerly been to respect him, awaited his defence as a sort of magic séance at which all the tricks of necromancy were to be explained.

Cagliostro employed to defend him Thilorier, one of the youngest and most promising advocates of the Parisian bar. Perhaps no cause célèbre in history has ever called forth a more brilliant display of legal talent than the Diamond Necklace Affair. Of all the mémoires or statements that were published by the advocates engaged in the case that of Thilorier created the greatest sensation.

Warned by the tumult occasioned by the rush of purchasers who had besieged the house of Madame de Lamotte’s advocate on the publication of her mémoire, Thilorier took the precaution to secure eight soldiers of the watch to guard his door. Within a few hours tens of thousands of copies were scattered over Paris, and large editions were dispatched to the principal cities of Europe. It was regarded as a romance after the style of the Arabian Nights rather than the serious defence of a man whose liberty and very life were at stake. Everywhere people read it with a sort of amused bewilderment, and “Thilorier himself,” says Beugnot, “who was a man of infinite wit, was the first to laugh at it.”

As a masterpiece of irony, clearness, dignity, and wit it was equalled only by Blondel’s defence of the “Baroness d’Oliva.” But its chief merit lay not so much in the piquancy of its literary style as in its portrayal of Cagliostro. Those who read this fantastic document felt that they not only saw the man but could hear him speak. Thilorier had drawn his hero to the life.

Beginning with a high-flown and egotistical recapitulation of his sufferings and virtues Cagliostro proceeded to refute “those imputations (as to his origin) which in any other circumstance he would have treated with contempt” by relating “with candour” the history of his life. As a specimen of his grandiloquence it is worth quoting at some length.

“I cannot,” he says, “speak positively as to the place of my nativity, nor to the parents who gave me birth. All my inquiries have ended only in giving me some great notions, it is true, but altogether vague and uncertain, concerning my family.

“I spent the years of my childhood in the city of Medina in Arabia. There I was brought up under the name of Acharat, which I preserved during my progress through Africa and Asia. I had my apartments in the palace of the Muphti Salahaym. It is needless to add that the Muphti is the chief of the Mahometan religion, and that his constant residence is at Medina.

“I recollect perfectly that I had then four persons attached to my service: a governor, between fifty-five and sixty years of age, whose name was Althotas,[33] and three servants, a white one who attended me as valet de chambre and two blacks, one of whom was constantly about me night and day.

“My governor always told me that I had been left an orphan when only about three months old, that my parents were Christians and nobly born; but he left me absolutely in the dark about their names and the place of my nativity. Some words, however, which he let fall by chance have induced me to suspect that I was born at Malta. Althotas, whose name I cannot speak without the tenderest emotion, treated me with great care and all the attention of a father. He thought to develop the talent I displayed for the sciences. I may truly say that he knew them all, from the most abstruse down to those of mere amusement. My greatest aptitude was for the study of botany and chemistry.

“By him I was taught to worship God, to love and assist my neighbours, and to respect everywhere religion and the laws. We both dressed like Mahometans and conformed outwardly to the worship of Islam; but the true religion was imprinted in our hearts.

“The Muphti, who often visited me, always treated me with great goodness and seemed to entertain the highest regard for my governor. The latter instructed me in most of the Eastern languages. He would often converse with me on the pyramids of Egypt, on those vast subterraneous caves dug out by the ancient Egyptians, to be the repository of human knowledge and to shelter the precious trust from the injuries of time.

“The desire of travelling and of beholding the wonders of which he spoke grew so strong upon me, that Medina and my youthful sports there lost all the allurements I had found in them before. At last, when I was in my twelfth year, Althotas informed me one day that we were going to commence our travels. A caravan was prepared and we set out, after having taken our leave of the Muphti, who was pleased to express his concern at our departure in the most obliging manner.

“On our arrival at Mecca we alighted at the palace of the Cherif. Here Althotas provided me with sumptuous apparel and presented me to the Cherif, who honoured me with the most endearing caresses. At sight of this prince my senses experienced a sudden emotion, which it is not in the power of words to express, and my eyes dropped the most delicious tears I have ever shed in my life. His, I perceived, he could hardly contain.

“I remained at Mecca for the space of three years; not a day passed without my being admitted to the sovereign’s presence, and every hour increased his attachment and added to my gratitude. I sometimes surprised his gaze riveted upon me, and turned to heaven with every expression of pity and commiseration. Thoughtful, I would go from him a prey to an ever-fruitless curiosity. I dared not question Althotas, who always rebuked me with great severity, as if it had been a crime in me to wish for some information concerning my parents and the place where I was born. I attempted in vain to get the secret from the negro who slept in my apartment. If I chanced to talk of my parents he would turn a deaf ear to my questions. But one night when I was more pressing than usual, he told me that if ever I should leave Mecca I was threatened with the greatest misfortunes, and bid me, above all, beware of the city of Trebizond.

“My inclination, however, got the better of his forebodings—I was tired of the uniformity of life I led at the Cherifs court. One day when I was alone the prince entered my apartment; he strained me to his bosom with more than usual tenderness, bid me never cease to adore the Almighty, and added, bedewing my cheeks with his tears: ‘Nature’s unfortunate child, adieu!’

“This was our last interview. The caravan waited only for me and I set off, leaving Mecca, never to re-enter it more.

“I directed my course first to Egypt, where I inspected those celebrated pyramids which to the eye of the superficial observer only appear an enormous mass of marble and granite. I also got acquainted with the priests of the various temples, who had the complacence to introduce me into such places as no ordinary traveller ever entered before. The next three years of my progress were spent in the principal kingdoms of Africa and Asia. Accompanied by Althotas, and the three attendants who continued in my service, I arrived in 1766 at the island of Rhodes, and there embarked on a French ship bound to Malta.

“Notwithstanding the general rule by which all vessels coming from the Levant are obliged to enter quarantine, I obtained on the second day leave to go ashore. Pinto, the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, gave us apartments in his palace, and I perfectly recollect that mine were near the laboratory.

“The first thing the Grand Master was pleased to do, was to request the Chevalier d’Aquino, of the princely house of Caramanica, to bear me company and do me the honours of the island. It was here that I first assumed European dress and with it the name of Count Cagliostro; nor was it a small matter of surprise to me to see Althotas appear in a clerical dress with the insignia of the Order of Malta.

“I have every reason to believe that the Grand Master Pinto was acquainted with my real origin. He often spoke to me of the Cherif and mentioned the city of Trebizond, but never would consent to enter into further particulars on the subject. Meanwhile he treated me with the utmost distinction, and assured me of very rapid preferment if I would consent to take the cross. But my taste for travelling and the predominant desire of practising medicine, induced me to decline an offer that was as generous as it was honourable.

“It was in the island of Malta that I had the misfortune of losing my best friend and master, the wisest as well as the most learned of men, the venerable Althotas. Some minutes before he expired, pressing my hand, he said in a feeble voice, ‘My son, keep for ever before your eyes the fear of God and the love of your fellow-creatures; you will soon be convinced by experience of what you have been taught by me.’

“The spot where I had parted for ever from the friend who had been as a father to me, soon became odious. I begged leave of the Grand Master to quit the island in order to travel over Europe; he consented reluctantly, and the Chevalier d’Aquino was so obliging as to accompany me. Our first trip was to Sicily, from thence we went to the different islands of the Greek Archipelago, and returning, arrived at Naples, the birthplace of my companion.

“The Chevalier, owing to his own private affairs, being obliged to undertake a private journey, I proceeded alone to Rome, provided with a letter of credit on the banking house of Signor Bellone. In the capital of the Christian world I resolved upon keeping the strictest incognito. One morning, as I was shut up in my apartment, endeavouring to improve myself in the Italian language, my valet de chambre introduced to my presence the secretary of Cardinal Orsini, who requested me to wait on his Eminence. I repaired at once to his palace and was received with the most flattering civility. The Cardinal often invited me to his table and procured me the acquaintance of several cardinals and Roman princes, amongst others, Cardinals York and Ganganelli, who was afterwards Pope Clement XIV. Pope Rezzonico, who then filled the papal chair, having expressed a desire of seeing me, I had the honour of frequent private interviews with his Holiness.

“I was then (1770) in my twenty-second year, when by chance I met a young lady of quality, Seraphina Feliciani, whose budding charms kindled in my bosom a flame which sixteen years of marriage have only served to strengthen. It is that unfortunate woman, whom neither her virtues, her innocence, nor her quality of stranger could save from the hardships of a captivity as cruel as it is unmerited.”

From this stage of his Odyssey, beyond citing as references certain persons by whom he was known in the various countries through which he passed, Cagliostro was very reticent as to his doings. From Rome he arrived at Strasburg at a bound, whence he proceeded to his imprisonment in the Bastille with almost equal speed. His confession, rendering as it did his country and parentage more mysterious than ever, was received with derision. The credulous public, which had swallowed so easily all the extravagant stories concerning his supernatural powers refused to believe in this fantastic account of a mysterious childhood passed in Mecca and Medina, of caravans and pyramids, of tolerant Muphtis and benignant Grand Masters of Malta. It was not that the credulity of the eighteenth century had its limit but that calumny had mesmerized it, so to speak. Cagliostro’s prestige had been submerged in the Necklace Affair; the blight of the Bastille had fallen on the fame of the Grand Cophta and all his works.

As the manner in which he stated his ignorance of his birth seemed to leave it to be inferred that he knew more than he wished to say, it was determined to give him a father. While his enemies agreed with the Countess de Lamotte that he was the son of a Neapolitan coachman, his friends declared him to be the offspring of the illicit loves of the Grand Master Pinto and a princess of Trebizond. To account for the meeting of this singular pair it was gravely asserted that a Maltese galley had captured a Turkish pleasure-boat with several young ladies of distinction on board, one of whom had exchanged hearts with Pinto, who, prevented by his vow of celibacy from making her his wife, had sent her back to her disconsolate parents, and that to frustrate their rage at the condition in which she had returned she had caused her child as soon as it was born to be spirited away to Arabia, which accounted for the mysterious warning Acharat had received from the black slave “to beware of Trebizond.”

Ridicule, however, soon disposed of this agreeable fable, and substituted instead the popular Balsamo legend in which just as much as it has pleased subsequent biographers to accept of Cagliostro’s confession has been included. As to whether he spoke the truth wholly or partly or not at all, the present writer, confronted with his mysterious and fantastic character on the one hand and the assertions based on the prejudice of a century on the other, is unable to express any opinion. It seems, however, hard to believe that any man placed in so serious a situation as Cagliostro, and one which, moreover, had thoroughly shaken his courage, would have ventured to invent a story calculated to increase the suspicion it was his object to allay. To the present generation, accustomed by the press to infinitely greater improbabilities, Cagliostro’s adventures in Mecca and Medina have at least lost the air of incredibility.

IV

As may be surmised from the cursory account of the Diamond Necklace Affair already given, Cagliostro had no difficulty in proving his innocence. The mere comparison of the dates of the various incidents of the imbroglio with his own whereabouts at the time was sufficient to vindicate him.

Throughout the whole of 1784, while the Cardinal was corresponding, as he supposed, with the Queen, meeting her in the park of Versailles, and purchasing the necklace, Cagliostro was in Bordeaux and Lyons. He did not arrive in Paris till January 30, 1785; it was on February 1 that the Cardinal gave the necklace to Madame de Lamotte to hand to the Queen. Accordingly, if Cagliostro had ever even seen the necklace, it could only have been between January 30 and February 1 when Böhmer had already obtained the Cardinal’s guarantee in exchange for his precious jewel. This, however, he denied. “It was not,” he said, “till a fortnight before the Cardinal was arrested that he informed me for the first time of the transaction about the necklace.”

But Cagliostro was not content with merely establishing his innocence. Madame de Lamotte’s attack on his character had deeply wounded him in his most sensitive spot—his vanity—and pride would not suffer him to ignore her gibes.

She had described him as “an arch empiric, a mean alchemist, a dreamer on the philosopher’s stone, a false prophet, and a profaner of the true religion.”

“Empiric,” he said, refuting each epithet in turn, not without a certain dignity; “this word I have often heard without knowing exactly what it meant. If it means one who without being a doctor has some knowledge of medicine and takes no fee, who attends to rich and poor alike and receives no money from either, then I confess I am an empiric.

“Mean alchemist. Alchemist or not, the epithet mean is applicable only to those who beg or cringe, and it is well known whether Count Cagliostro ever asked a favour of any one.

“Dreamer on the philosopher’s stone. Whatever my opinion may be concerning the philosopher’s stone, I have kept it to myself and never troubled the public with my dreams.

“False prophet. Not always so. Had the Cardinal taken my advice he would not be in the position in which he now finds himself. I told him more than once that the Countess de Lamotte was a deceitful, intriguing woman, and to beware of her.

“Profaner of the true religion. This is more serious. I have respected religion at all times. My life and my outward conduct I freely submit to the inquiries of the law. As to what passes inwardly God alone has a right to call me to account.”

Cagliostro also took advantage of the occasion to deny the oft-repeated assertion that he was a Jew.

“My education,” he said, “as I have already declared, was that of a child born of Christian parents. I never was a Jew or a Mahometan. These two religions leave on their sectaries an outward and indelible mark. The truth, therefore, of what I here advance may be ascertained; and rather than let any doubt remain on this affair, I am ready, if required, to yield to a verification more shameful for him who exacts it than for the person who submits to it.”[34]

When he was confronted with Madame de Lamotte the scene in court was in the highest degree comic. The Countess, who had an unbounded contempt for the occult in general, covered the séances of Cagliostro with ridicule. She described one at which she had been present as a swindle, and reproached him with having exploited the credulity of the Cardinal by the most vulgar methods and for the most sordid motives. His Eminence, she asserted, was so bewitched that he consulted Cagliostro on “the pricking of a thumb,” which made her “regret she did not live in those blessed times when a charge of sorcery would have led him to the stake.”

But while she attempted to overwhelm the unfortunate creature she had chosen to saddle with her own guilt, he dexterously turned the tables upon her. Assuming that her calumnies were inspired by the desire to clear herself rather than hatred, “he forgave her the tears of bitterness she had caused him to shed.”

“Do not imagine,” he said, with the air of sublime bombast that was characteristic of him, “that my moderation is a piece of mere affectation. From the bottom of the abyss into which you have plunged me I shall raise my voice to implore in your behalf the clemency of the laws; and if, after my innocence and that of my wife is acknowledged, the best of kings should think an unfortunate stranger who had settled in France on the faith of his royal word, of the laws of hospitality, and of the common rights of nations is entitled to some indemnity, the only satisfaction I shall require will be that his Majesty may be pleased, at my request, to pardon and set at liberty the unfortunate Countess de Lamotte. However guilty she may be supposed, she is already sufficiently punished. Alas! as I have been taught by sad experience, there is no crime ever so great but may be atoned for by six months in the Bastille!”

Blague or conviction, at such a moment, it would be churlish to inquire. When one is fighting for life and liberty one readily avails oneself of any weapon that comes to hand. At least so thought Madame de Lamotte. Failing further abuse of which she had been deprived by a riposte as unexpected as it was subtle, she picked up a candlestick. Hurled at the head of her adversary, it “hit him in the stomach,” to the amusement of the court, the judges and Madame de Lamotte herself, who remarked to her counsel that “if he wished to render the scene still more amusing he had but to give her a broomstick.”

But neither abusive epithets nor candlesticks are arguments. Finding herself on the wrong road, the Countess made haste to leave it for another. It was no longer Cagliostro who had stolen the necklace, but the Cardinal.

At last, after more than nine months, the famous affair came to an end. On May 30, 1786, all the accused were summoned before the Parliament. When Cagliostro arrived, tricked out as usual like a mountebank in a coat of green silk embroidered with gold, and his hair falling in little tails on his shoulders, the whole assemblage burst into a laugh. But to him it was anything but an occasion for merriment; he was serious to the point of solemnity.

“Who are you?” asked the president.

“An illustrious traveller,” was the reply. Then with imperturbable gravity he began in his loud, metallic voice, which Madame d’Oberkirch compared to a “trumpet veiled in crape,” to repeat the story of his life.

At the mention of Trebizond the laughter redoubled. This made him nervous, and either unconsciously from old habit, or in the hope of exciting an interest favourable to his cause, he related his adventures in a jargon composed, says Beugnot, “of all known languages as well as those which never existed.” The gibberish he employed rendered him and his story still more fantastic. The laughter in the court was so loud that at times the voice of the speaker was drowned. Even the judges were convulsed. At the finish the president seemed to be on the point of complimenting “Nature’s unfortunate child.” It was evident that Cagliostro had won the sympathy of those on whom his fate depended. Of the verdict of the mob there was no doubt. He took the cheers with which he was greeted on being driven back to the Bastille as a premonition of his acquittal. One writer says he displayed the joy he felt “by throwing his hat into the air.”

******

On the following day (May 31) the Parliament pronounced the verdict. The Cardinal and Cagliostro were unanimously acquitted—the innocence of the latter had been acknowledged by all implicated in the trial, even in the end by the Countess de Lamotte herself.[35]

The verdict was immensely popular. “I don’t know what would have befallen the Parliament,” said Mirabeau, “had they pronounced otherwise.” The fish-wives—the same who later were the Furies of the Revolution—forcibly embraced the judges and crowned them with flowers. In the street the name of the Cardinal was cheered to the echo. The ovation he received, however, was inspired less from any desire of the populace to acclaim him personally than to affront the Queen.

It was also to the violent hatred of the Court that Cagliostro owed the reception accorded him. His account of the scenes that took place on his deliverance from captivity would do credit to the lachrymose romances of the “age of sensibility.”

“I quitted the Bastille,” he says, “about half-past eleven in the evening. The night was dark, the quarter in which I resided but little frequented. What was my surprise, then, to hear myself acclaimed by eight or ten thousand persons. My door was forced open; the courtyard, the staircase, the rooms were crowded with people. I was carried straight to the arms of my wife. At such a moment my heart could not contain all the feelings which strove for mastery in it. My knees gave way beneath me. I fell on the floor unconscious. With a shriek my wife sank into a swoon. Our friends pressed around us, uncertain whether the most beautiful moment of our life would not be the last. The anxiety spread from one to the other, the noise of the drums was no longer heard. A sad silence followed the delirious joy. I recovered. A torrent of tears streamed from my eyes, and I was able at last, without dying, to press to my heart ... I will say no more. Oh, you privileged beings to whom heaven has made the rare and fatal gift of an ardent soul and a sensitive heart, you who have experienced the delights of a first love, you alone will understand me, you alone will appreciate what after ten months of torture the first moment of bliss is like!”

Both Cagliostro and the Cardinal were obliged to show themselves at the windows of their respective houses before the crowds, which were cheering them and hissing the name of the Queen, could be induced to disperse.

To Marie Antoinette, whose popularity was for ever blasted by the trial, the verdict of the Parliament was an insult—as it was meant to be—which intolerable though it was, she would have been wise to have borne in silence. But it was her fate to the last to hold the honour of the woman higher than the majesty of the Queen. Having made the blunder of arresting the Cardinal and suffering the Parliament to try him, the King, advised by her, now committed the folly of showing his resentment of the verdict, which had after all, in the eye of the law, cleared his consort of complicity in the swindle. On June 2, the day after his release from the Bastille, Rohan was stripped of all his Court dignities and functions, and exiled to one of his abbeys in Auvergne. At the same time, Cagliostro was also ordered to leave Paris with his wife within a week, and France within three.

The news no sooner became known than an immense concourse of people flocked to manifest their disapproval in front of the house of the Grand Cophta. But if he mistook their demonstration of hatred of the Queen as a sign of sympathy for himself, popularity under such conditions was too fraught with danger for him to take any pleasure in it. Terrified lest the Government should seize the opportunity of thrusting him back into the Bastille, he came out on the balcony of his house and entreated the mob to withdraw quietly, and then hurriedly left Paris.

He went first to Passy, whither he was followed by a small band of his most faithful adherents, who during the few days he remained there mounted guard in the house in which he had taken shelter. A fortnight later he embarked from Boulogne with his wife for England. Upwards of five thousand people are said to have witnessed his departure, many of whom demanded and received his farewell blessing on their knees. France, on a page of whose history he had indelibly printed his name, never saw him more.

******

There is an old and uncorroborated report that he who had always been so punctilious in the discharge of his liabilities left Paris without paying his rent. It appears to have arisen from the action that he afterwards brought against the magistrate Chesnon and de Launay, the governor of the Bastille, to recover property valued at 100,000 livres which he declared had been stolen from his house during his imprisonment and for which he sought to hold them responsible. His failure to substantiate the charge gave it the appearance of having been trumped up. Whether it had any basis in fact it is impossible to say, but there can be no doubt from the manner in which the police turned his house upside down at the time he and his wife were arrested, as well as from the carelessness with which the official seals were affixed, that many valuable articles might easily have been spirited away in the confusion by unscrupulous servants and even by the police themselves.

If Cagliostro, however, failed to pay his rent the proprietor of the house certainly took the matter very lightly. “His house,” says Lenôtre, “remained closed till the Revolution. In 1805 the doors were opened for the first time in eighteen years when the owner sold the Grand Cophta’s furniture by auction.” Surely a very long time to wait to indemnify oneself for unpaid rent?

A curious interest attaches to this house, which is still standing, though long since shorn of its splendour in the days when the Cardinal and the aristocracy of the old régime came to assist at Cagliostro’s magic séances. Yet in the meantime it has not been without a history. In 1855 the doors of the gateway were removed during some process of repair and replaced by doors which had formerly done service at the Temple where the Royal Family were incarcerated after the fall of the monarchy. They may be still seen with their heavy bolts and huge locks.

What a fatality—the doors of Marie Antoinette’s prison closing Cagliostro’s house! History has her irony as well as her romance.