FOOTNOTES:
[1] Prior to the present volume no complete biography of Cagliostro has been published in English.
[2] La Mort de la Reine: Les suites de l’affaire du collier. Translated into English under the title of Cagliostro and Company.
[3] On hearing that his wife had been arrested as well as himself in connection with the Necklace Affair, Cagliostro manifested the wildest grief.
[4] This book is now very rare. The French version is the more available. It is entitled: Vie de Joseph Balsamo connu sous le nom de Comte Cagliostro, extraite de la procédure instruite contre lui à Rome en 1790; traduite d’après l’original italien, imprimé à la Chambre Apostolique.
[5] About £30.
[6] To infer from this, however, as many writers have done, that Casanova’s evidence proves Cagliostro and Balsamo to be the same is absurd. He never met the Cagliostros in his life. In stating that they were the Balsamos whom he had met in 1770 he merely repeats what he had read in the papers. His Memoirs were not written till many years later.
[7] Cagliostro, however, ignored this threat, which one can scarcely believe he would have done had he had any reason to fear it. Nor did Pergolezzi put it into effect; and it was not till ten years later, when Cagliostro returned to London thoroughly discredited, that the Editor of the Courier de l’Europe got wind of it in some way and twisted it into his Balsamo theory of accounting for the mysterious Cagliostro. Whether Pergolezzi was living at the time is unknown; in any case the threat which Cagliostro now ignored contained no mention of Balsamo.
[8] Were all the suppositions on which the general opinion of Cagliostro is based as reasonable as the present, there would be no cause for complaint on that score.
[9] One of the symbols of the Masons was a cross on which were the letters L.P.D. which were interpreted by the priests to mean Lilia Pedibus Destrue, Trample the Lilies under-foot.
[10] This statement rests solely on the word of the Editor of the Courier de l’Europe, who cited it as one of his reasons for identifying Cagliostro with Balsamo. The latter, it may be recalled, had passed as a colonel in the Prussian service during the time he was connected with the forger Agliata.
[11] His diploma, for which he paid five guineas, was formerly in the celebrated collection of autographs belonging to the Marquis de Châteaugiron.
[12] As mentioned in the previous chapter, the Order of the Knights Templar was suppressed in the fourteenth century by Pope Clement V, Jacques Molay, the Grand Master, being burnt alive by King Philip the Fair of France.
[13] Schröpfer’s name is generally associated with this prediction. As he died, however, in 1774, nearly five years before—a date easily ascertainable—some idea may be gathered of the slight importance most writers on Cagliostro have attached to accuracy.
[14] The stories told of Swedenborg are quite as fantastic as any concerning Cagliostro. “He was walking,” says Brittan in The Shekinah, “one day along Cheapside with a friend, a person of great worth and credit (who afterwards related the incident), when he was suddenly seen to bow very low to the ground. To his companion’s question as to what he was about, Swedenborg replied by asking him if he had not seen Moses pass by, and that he was bowing to him.”
[15] The “magic” nail held by the child has a strong family resemblance to Mesmer’s baquet divinatoire. The famous discovery of Mesmer, it is scarcely needless to say, was merely an attempt to explain scientifically powers the uses of which had been known to alchemists from time immemorial.
[16] As all the above-mentioned rumours—which, be it understood, were voiceless till the Diamond Necklace Affair—are hostile, it may be inferred that Cagliostro’s visit to St. Petersburg was, to say the least, a failure. This impression is confirmed by the fact that on the publication of the Countess von der Recke’s book, the Empress Catherine caused it to be translated into Russian.
[17] This seems to have been suggested to de Luchet by the Courier de l’Europe, which stated that Cagliostro, on becoming a Freemason, described himself as “Colonel of the Brandenburg regiment.”
[18] As an agent of the Illuminés, Cagliostro would have been quite free to found lodges of Egyptian Masonry. Many Egyptian Masons were also Illuminés, notably Sarazin of Bâle, the banker of both societies. In joining the Illuminés, therefore, Cagliostro would not only have furthered their interests, but have received every assistance from them in return.
[19] The story that it was interrupted by the sudden appearance of Marano, furiously demanding of Cagliostro the sixty ounces of gold that Giuseppe Balsamo had defrauded him of years before in Palermo, is a pure invention of the Marquis de Luchet.
[20] Motus, another contemporary, gives the number as “over fifteen hundred.”
[21] This charge is cited by Carlyle as an instance of the baseness of Cagliostro’s character. But as a matter of fact, the charge, like most of the others made against him, proves on investigation to be without any foundation. It was the Baron de Planta, one of the Cardinal’s secretaries, who gave the much-talked-of midnight suppers at Saverne, “when the Tokay flowed like water.” It is extremely doubtful whether Cagliostro even tasted the Tokay; his contemporaries frequently mention with ridicule his abstemiousness. Referring to his ascetic habits, Madame d’Oberkirch says contemptuously that “he slept in an arm-chair and lived on cheese.”
[22] This libel attracted considerable attention, and great use was made of it in Cagliostro’s lifetime by his enemies. Republished during the Necklace Affair, the Parliament of Paris ordered its suppression as “injurious and calumnious.” The editor of the Courier de l’Europe afterwards quoted it in his bitter denunciation of Cagliostro, and advanced it as proof of his identity with Giuseppe Balsamo. It has since generally been admitted to be a malicious invention.
[23] To doubt these statements on the score of a popular prejudice in favour of regarding Cagliostro as a liar who never by any chance spoke the truth is quite ridiculous. Not only is there no proof on which to base this assertion, but there is not even the least suggestion that Cagliostro was ever considered a liar by his contemporaries before the Editor of the Courier de l’Europe—himself the biggest of liars and knaves—took advantage of the passions let loose by the Diamond Necklace Affair to brand him as such.
[24] A cryptic reference to the Secret Societies, which were the real source of his wealth. The great success of Egyptian Masonry, of which the above-mentioned gentlemen were the bankers, more than compensated him for what he lost by the suppression of the Illuminés in 1784, the year before he came to Paris.
[25] De Luchet’s fantastic account of the visit paid by Cagliostro and his wife to Saint-Germain in Germany, and their subsequent initiation by him into the sect of the Rosicrucians, of which he was supposed to be the chief, is devoid of all authenticity.
[26] D’Alméras and Funck-Brentano—the latter extremely careless when writing of Cagliostro—never so much as mention Carlyle.
[27] If it be true that the Count and Countess Cagliostro were really Giuseppe and Lorenza Balsamo, surely the remarkable change in the appearance, not to speak of the character, of both, must be regarded as the most astonishing of all Cagliostro’s prodigies. The impression he produced from the accounts given above was totally different from that which Balsamo was said to have produced. As for his wife, it is preposterous to expect any one to believe that the pretty demirep Lorenza would have looked as girlish and fresh as the Countess Seraphina after fifteen years of the sort of life she led with Giuseppe. As vice and hardship have never yet been regarded as aids to beauty, those who persist in pinning their faith to the Balsamo legend will perhaps assent to the suggestion that Cagliostro’s remedies possessed virtues hitherto denied them.
[28] It is the custom to brand the Countess de Lamotte as infamous, and judged by moral standards she certainly was. The amazing spirit and inventions she displayed, however, give a finish to her infamy that suggest the artist as well as the mere adventuress.
[29] All contemporaries are agreed on this point. “Same figure, same complexion, same hair, a resemblance of physiognomy of the most striking kind,” says Target, who defended the Cardinal at his trial.
[30] Marie Antoinette is said to have told Böhmer she could not afford to buy it, but with her well-known extravagance and passion for diamonds one cannot help thinking she would have found the means had the necklace really appealed to her. The fact that Böhmer could find no purchaser suggests that he had as little taste as brains. The Cardinal, who like the Queen knew a beautiful object when he saw it, thought the necklace anything but a beautiful ornament, and when told that the Queen wanted it, wondered what she could see in it.
[31] The Cardinal was arrested on the 15th, and Cagliostro on the 23rd August, 1785.
[32] Lamotte alone succeeded in escaping.
[33] The existence of Althotas is now generally conceded. A plausible attempt has been made to identify him with a certain Kölmer from whom Weishaupt received lessons in magic, and who was said to be a Jutland merchant who had lived some years in Memphis and afterwards travelled through Europe pretending to initiate adepts in the ancient Egyptian Mysteries. He was known to have visited Malta in the time of the Grand Master Pinto.
[34] Henry Swinburne, in his Memoirs of the Courts of Europe describing his meeting with Cagliostro, declares that there was “nothing Jewish” about him.
[35] One, de Soudak, in an interesting review of M. Funck-Brentano’s L’Affaire du Collier, in the Paris Temps, April 1, 1902, is the only modern writer who has ventured to question this verdict. The value of his opinion may be judged from an article by him in the Revue Bleue, 1899, in which he attempts to identify a mysterious Frenchwoman who died in the Crimea in 1825 with the Countess de Lamotte, who died in London 1791, after escaping from the Salpêtrière, to which she had been condemned for life. Her sentence—the judges were unanimous in finding her guilty—also included being “whipped naked by the executioner, branded on the shoulders with the letter V. (voleuse), and the confiscation of all her property.” The sentences of the others implicated in this affair need not concern us here.
[36] The Lettre au peuple français was dated the 20th June 1786. As stated in the previous chapter, Breteuil was the deadly enemy of Cardinal de Rohan, and encouraged Marie Antoinette in demanding his arrest of the King.
[37] Nearly all who have written on Cagliostro have erred in stating that the letter contained the “predictions that the Bastille would be destroyed, its site become a public promenade, and that a king would reign in France who would abolish lettres de cachet and convoke the States General”—all of which actually occurred three years later in 1789. The predictions are the invention of the Inquisition-biographer to whose short-comings, to put it mildly, attention has frequently been called. Cagliostro merely says that if in the future he was permitted to return to France he would only do so “provided the Bastille was destroyed and its site turned into a public promenade.” A copy of this letter, now become very rare, is to be seen in the French National Archives.
[38] Many attempts were made at this very time to kidnap the Count de Lamotte, who alone of all “wanted” in the Necklace Affair succeeded in escaping. On one occasion his murder was even attempted. The Countess de Lamotte herself, who escaped from the Salpêtrière to London and published the vilest of all the calumnies against Marie Antoinette perished in jumping out of a window to elude capture. Numerous instances of the kidnapping of French subjects in England by the French police are cited by Brissot in his Memoirs.
[39] Both of whom had recently been decoyed to France, where they had at once been imprisoned.
[40] Theveneau de Morande: Etude sur le XVIIIᵉᵐᵉ Siècle par Paul Robiquet. By his contemporaries the name of Morande was never mentioned without an abusive epithet. Brissot, meeting him for the first time in a restaurant in London, “shuddered instinctively at his approach.”
[41] Morande had one redeeming quality. Royalist to the core, he served the French Court loyally till the fall of the monarchy. Imprisoned during the Revolution, he escaped the guillotine by an accident, and having returned to his native town, retired into a respectable obscurity.
[42] Whether Thilorier had come to England at the request of Cagliostro or not is uncertain, but it is now known that he wrote Cagliostro’s replies to Morande’s charges.
[43] Perhaps Pergolezzi?
[44] Cagliostro’s pretended transmission of his supernatural powers, as previously stated, was nothing more than the discovery that the so-called “psychic” faculty, instead of being confined to a few exceptional people, as was till then generally believed, existed in a more or less developed state in everybody. Before his time, and in fact till many years after, the “psychic” faculty was so little understood that the above phenomenon, familiar enough to spirit-rappers and planchette-writers of the present day, was believed to be the work of the powers of darkness whose manifestations inspired terror, of which familiarity has apparently robbed them now-a-days.
[45] One of his followers, de Vismes, was induced to come to London from Paris on purpose to act as a decoy.
[46] Liber memorialis de Caleostro dum esset Roberetti contains an account of Cagliostro’s doings in Rovoredo.
[47] The Moniteur, however, was subsequently informed by its Roman correspondent that he had received bills of exchange from both London and Paris.
[48] The abolition of their Order was but temporary. It had been forced upon the Pope by sovereigns whose power in an atheistical age had increased as his declined. The Jesuits continued to exist in secret, and to inspire and control the Papacy.
[49] To justify the attitude they adopted the Inquisition-biographer was accordingly obliged to blacken the character of Cagliostro by attributing to him the infamous reputation of Balsamo as a means of emphasizing the odious lives of Freemasons in general.
[50] The Roman correspondent of the Moniteur states that at each examination of Cagliostro and his wife, the rack was displayed.
[51] In the Bastille he also asked for fresh linen, which was given him. If he dressed like a mountebank, he was at least always scrupulously clean.
[52] Difesa del Pontificato romano e della Chiesa catholica, by P. N. M. Pallavicino, Rome 1686.
[53] San Leo is now a well-conducted Italian state prison.
[54] “These facts,” says Schlosser in his History of the Eighteenth Century, “were unknown to Goethe.” The same statement may also be applied to Carlyle.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.