Many of the miraculous cures which Cagliostro performed in Germany spread widely, and in Russia he was soon surrounded by the curious. Lorenza played her own part admirably; she answered discreetly and naturally, making the most outrageous statements with apparently complete unconsciousness. The physician-chemist, besides his healing powers, had his reputation as an alchemist and adept of the arcane sciences. The supposed restoration in a miraculous manner of the infant child of an illustrious nobleman to health exalted him to the pinnacle of celebrity, and his extravagant pretensions, assisted, as they powerfully were, by the naïve beauty of his wife, were beginning to be taken seriously, but the combined result of an amour between Lorenza and Prince Poternki, Prime Minister and favourite of the Czarina, Catherine, and the discovery that the nobleman’s child had been apparently changed, caused them to depart hastily with immense spoils towards the German frontier.
They tarried at Warsaw for a time, and there the Italian biographer tells us that Cagliostro made use of all his artifices to deceive a prince to whom he was introduced, and who was exceedingly anxious to obtain, with the help of the pretended magician, the permanent command of a devil. Cagliostro puffed him up for a long time with the expectation of gratifying this preposterous ambition, and actually procured presents from him to the amount of several thousand crowns. The prince at length perceiving that there was no hope of retaining one of the infernal spirits in his service, wished to make himself master of the earthly affections of the countess, but in this too he was disappointed, the lady positively refusing to comply with his desires. Finding himself thus balked in both his attempts, he abandoned every sentiment but revenge, and intimidated our adventurer and his wife so much by his menaces that they were obliged to restore his presents.
The veracity of this account is not, however, beyond suspicion, and other of his biographers represent Cagliostro proceeding directly to Francfurt and thence to Strasbourg, into which, more wealthy and successful than ever, he made a triumphal entry. The distinguished visitor, the Rosicrucian, the alchemist, the physician, the sublime count, had been expected since early morning by the bourgeois of the old town, and the following extraordinary account in the Dictionnaire des Sciences Occultes has been given by an anonymous biographer.
“On the 19th of September 1780, in a public-house just outside Strasburg, surrounded by a group of humble tipplers, who stared from the little window at the vast crowd collected below them, there might have been remarked the countenance of a bald and wrinkled man, some eighty years of age, and evidently of southern origin; this was the goldsmith Marano. Successive failures, and debts which he did not see fit to liquidate, had forced him to leave Palermo, and he had established himself in his former trade at Strasbourg. Like the rest of the townsfolk he had come out to behold the phenomenal personage whose arrival was expected, and who made a greater sensation than many a powerful monarch. He had come by way of Germany from Varsovia, where he had amassed immense riches, said popular rumour, by the transmutation of base metals into gold, for he was possessed of the secret of the philosophic stone, and had all the incalculable talents of an alchemist.”
“By my faith,” said a hatter, “I am indeed happy since I am destined to behold this illustrious mortal, if indeed he be a mortal.”
“’Tis asserted,” added a druggist, “that he is a son of the Princess of Trebizond, and that he has withal the fine eyes of his mother.”
“Also that he is a lineal descendant of Charles Martel,” said a town clerk.
“He dates still further back,” put in a rope-maker, “for he took part in the marriage feast of Cana.”
“Beyond doubt then, he is the wandering Jew!” exclaimed Marano.
“Still better, some credible persons assert that he was born before the deluge.”