“You seem to stick to your idea about this petty officer?”
“Gilbert,” said the soothsayer, extending his hand towards Robespierre, “as truly as that man will re-erect the scaffold of Charles Stuart, so truly will ‘this one'”—he indicated the lieutenant of the line regiment—“will re-erect the throne of Charlemagne.”
“Then our struggle for liberty is useless,” said Gilbert discouraged.
“Who tells you that he may not do as much for us on his throne as the other on his scaffold?”
“Will he be the Titus, or Marcus Aurelius, the god of peace consoling us for the age of bronze?”
“He will be Alexander and Hannibal in one. Born amid war, he will thrive in war-fare and go down in warring. I defy you to calculate how much blood the clergy and nobles have made Robespierre lose by his fits of spite against them; take all that these nobles and priests will lose, multiply upon multiplications, and you will not attain the sea of blood this man will shed, with his armies of five hundred thousand men and his three days’ battles in which hundreds of cannon-shots will be fired.”
“And what will be the outcome of all this turmoil—all this chaos?”
“The outcome of all genesis, Gilbert. We are charged to bury this Old World. Our children will spring up in a new one. This man is but the giant who guards the door. Like Louis XIV., Leo X. and Agustus, he will give his name to the era unfolding.”
“What is his name?” inquired Gilbert, subjugated by Cagliostro’s convinced manner.
“His name is Buonaparte; but he will be hailed in History as Napoleon. Others will follow of his name, but they will be shadows—the dynasty of the first Charlemagne lasted two hundred years; of this second one, a tithe: did I not tell you that in a hundred years the Republic will have the empire of France?”