This curiosity of a monarch whose throne was being undermined to a purely physical problem, would make those smile who expected him to be engrossed with politics.
But he concentrated himself on this private speculation and returned to see the mesmerizer and the medium.
In the mesmeric slumber Andrea's wondrous beauty was displayed in its entire splendor. She who had in her youth enthralled Louis XV. now enchanted his successor.
Gilbert turned his head away, sighing: he could not resist the prompting to give his adored this degree of supernal beauty; and now more unhappy than Pygmalion, for he knew how insensible was the lovely statue, he was frightened by his own work.
Gilbert knew how to own his ignorance, like all superior men. He knew what he could do, but not the wherefore.
"Where did you study the art? under Mesmer?" asked the King.
"I saw the most astonishing phenomena ten years before that German came into France. My master was a more amazing man, superior to any you can name, for I have seen him execute surgical operations of incredible daring. No science was unknown to him. But I ought not to utter his name before your Majesty."
"I should like to hear it, though it was Satan's itself."
"My lord, you honor me almost with a friend's confidence in speaking thus. My master was Baron Balsamo, afterwards Count Cagliostro."
"That charlatan!" exclaimed Louis, blushing, for he could not help remembering the plot of the Diamond's Necklace, in which Cagliostro had figured as friend of Cardinal Rohan and consequently enemy of Marie Antoinette. The King believed his wife but the world thought that she had participated in the fraud on the court jewelers. We have related the story according to our lights in the volume of this series entitled "The Queen's Necklace."