The good man did so, and told all to the Secretary of the Inquisitors of State. A warrant was therefore issued on that same morning of the sixth of May by the Supreme Tribunal to its own officer Cristofoli, to go thither (to Riomarin), accompanied by the Capitan Grande and twenty-four men. Having entered that apartment, where he surprised a nobleman who guarded the place, he (Cristofoli) discovered a lodge of freemasons.
Emanuele Cicogna [the distinguished historian] copied this on the twenty-fourth of August 1855, from two codices existing in his collection.
On the following day, the Inquisitors publicly burned the black garments, the utensils, the ‘conjuring books,’ as they are described, and
Mutinelli, Ult.
all the booty Cristofoli had confiscated, while the populace, believing that it was all a case of witchcraft, danced round the fire and cheered for Saint Mark.
The persons implicated were treated with the greatest indulgence, and Malamani observes that in the whole affair it was the furniture that got the worst of it.
About the same time Cristofoli made a vain attempt to arrest the notorious Cagliostro.
This man, whose real name was Giuseppe Balsamo, was born in Palermo on the eighth of June 1743. His youth was wild and disreputable. He tried being a monk, but soon tired of it, and threw his frock to the nettles, as the French say, in Caltagirone, in Sicily; after that he lived by theft, by coining false money, and by every sort of imposture. In Rome he married a girl of singular beauty, Lorenza Feliciani, who became his tool in all his intrigues.
The French freemasons made use of the singularly intelligent couple to propagate the doctrines of the revolution. Pretending to change hemp into silk, and every metal into gold, and selling marvellous waters for restoring the aged to youth and beauty, the two got into many excellent houses, changing their names and their disguises whenever they were compromised.
Balsamo arrived in Venice in 1787 or 1788, under the name of Count Cagliostro, and began an active revolutionary campaign, to the great annoyance