Cagliostro was born Joseph Balsamo, in Palermo, Italy, June 8th, 1743. His parents were in humble circumstances and he started his career as a novice in the Convent of Benfratelli, from which he was expelled for incorrigibility. Then he plunged into a life of dissipation and cleverly planned, ofttimes brilliantly executed crimes. He fled Palermo after forging theatre tickets and a will, and duping a goldsmith out of sixty pieces of gold. At Messina he fell in with an alchemist named Althotas, a man of some learning who spoke a variety of languages. These two adventurers travelled in Egypt, and when Althotas died Cagliostro went to Naples and Rome, where he married a beautiful girdle-maker named Seraphinia Feliciani. This woman shared both his triumphs and his disgrace. In 1776 they arrived in London, where he announced himself as the Count di Cagliostro. The title was assumed, the name was borrowed from his mother’s side of the house. Here for the first time Cagliostro announced himself also a worker of miracles or wonders.
He exhibited two mysterious substances, “Materia Prima,” with which he transmuted all baser metals into gold, and “Egyptian Wine,” with which he claimed to prolong life. His wife, who was just past twenty, he declared was more than sixty, her youthful appearance being due to the use of his elixir. He founded a spurious Egyptian rite in connection with the Masonic order which has been recognized as a blot upon Masonic history, and he claimed thousands of Masonic dupes. All over the Continent he and his beautiful wife travelled, now healing the poor for nothing, now duping the rich, but always living in a most picturesque, voluptuous fashion. He dipped into spiritualism and mesmerism, but wherever he went his converts followed after.
In 1789, while in Rome, he was seized by that invincible power, the Holy Inquisition, and was condemned to death. Later Pope Pius VI. changed the sentence to life imprisonment. Confinement made him more daring than ever. He asked for a confessor, and when a Capuchin monk was permitted to enter his cell in this capacity Cagliostro endeavored to choke him and escape in his robes. The monk fought for his life so effectually that it was he, and not Cagliostro, who escaped. Cagliostro was literally buried alive in a subterranean dungeon, as punishment for his final offence, and his wife immured herself in a Roman convent, where she died in 1794.
In Paris, perhaps, Cagliostro enjoyed his greatest triumphs of charlatanism, and it is not remarkable that the appearance of his seal in the midst of Robert-Houdin’s trick should seem almost uncanny to the royal family.
But to return to the disappearing-handkerchief trick. Robert-Houdin did not invent this trick. It was presented by a number of conjurers before Robert-Houdin was known in the world of magic. Robert-Houdin simply employed the trick familiar to both his predecessors and contemporaries and redressed it to tickle the fancy of his royal patron.
In England this trick was known among old conjurers as “The Ne Plus Ultra of the Cabalistic Art.” In 1826 one M. Félix Testot, who claimed to be a compatriot of Robert-Houdin, presented the trick in the British provinces, and one of his bills I am reproducing because it shows that the trick he offered the provincial Britons and the trick which Robert-Houdin offered the royal family at St. Cloud were identical. It also proves that London had seen the trick; and what London had seen, Paris, including Robert-Houdin, had heard of.