The Old and the New Magic

by Henry Ridgely Evans

Cagliostro was at the height of his fame, when suddenly he was arrested and thrown into the Bastille. He was charged with complicity in the affair of the diamond necklace. Here is his own account of the arrest: “On the 22d of August, 1785, a commissaire, an exempt, and eight policemen entered my home. The pillage began in my presence. They compelled me to open my secretary. Elixirs, balms, and precious liquors all became the prey of the officers who came to arrest me. I begged the commissaire to permit me to use my carriage. He refused! The agent took me by the collar. He had pistols, the stocks of which appeared from the pockets of his coat. They hustled me into the street and scandalously dragged me along the boulevard all the way to the rue Notre Dame du Nazareth. There a carriage appeared which I was permitted to enter to take the road to the Bastille.”

What was this mysterious affair of the diamond necklace which led to his incarceration in a state prison? In brief the story is as follows:

The court jewelers, Böhmer and Bassange, had in their possession a magnificent diamond necklace, valued at 1,800,000 livres, originally designed for the ivory neck of the fair but frail Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis XV. But Louis—“the well beloved”—died before the necklace was completed; the Sultana went into exile, and the unlucky jewelers found themselves with the diamond collar on their hands, instead of on the neck of Du Barry. They were obliged to dispose of it, or become bankrupt. Twice Böhmer offered it to Marie Antoinette, but she refused to purchase it, or permit her husband, Louis XVI., to do so, alleging that France had more urgent need of war ships than jewels. Poor Böhmer, distracted at her refusal to buy the necklace, threatened to commit suicide. The matter became food for gossip among the quid nuncs of the Court. Unfortunate necklace! it led to one of the most romantic intrigues of history, involving in its jeweled toils a Queen, a cardinal, a courtesan and a conjurer. Living at the village of Versailles at the time was the Countess de la Motte, an ex-mantua maker and {65} a descendant of an illegitimate scion of the Valois family who had committed a forgery under Louis XIII. Her husband was a sort of gentleman-soldier in the gendarmerie, a gambler, and a rake. Madame de la Motte-Valois, boasting of the royal blood that flowed in her veins, had many times petitioned the King to assist her. A small pension had been granted, but it was totally inadequate to supply her wants. She wished also to gain a foothold at Versailles and flutter amidst the butterfly-countesses of the Salle de l’Oeil-de-Boeuf. Looking about for a noble protector, some one who could advance her claims, she pitched upon the Cardinal de Rohan, who was the Grand Almoner of the King. He supplied her with money, but accomplished very little else for her. Though Grand Almoner and a Cardinal, Louis de Rohan was persona non grata at the court. He was cordially detested by Marie Antoinette not only because of his dissolute habits, but on account of slanderous letters he had written about her when she was still a Dauphiness. This coldness on the part of the Queen caused the Cardinal great anguish, as he longed to be Prime Minister, and sway the destinies of France through the Queen like a second Richelieu, Fleury or Mazarin. More than that, he loved the haughty Antoinette. All these things he confided to Madame de la Motte. When the story of Böhmer and the diamond necklace was noised abroad, Madame de la Motte conceived a plot of wonderful audacity. She determined to possess the priceless collar and make the Cardinal the medium of obtaining it. She deluded the Cardinal into the belief that she was in the Queen’s confidence. She asserted that Marie Antoinette had at last yielded to her pleadings for recognition as a descendant of the Valois and granted her social interviews. She confided to him that the Queen secretly desired to be reconciled to him. She became the pretended “go-between” between the Cardinal and the Queen, and delivered numerous little notes to him, signed “Antoinette de France.” Finally she arranged an interview for him, at night, in the park of Versailles, ostensibly with the Queen, but in reality with a young girl named d’Oliva who bore a remarkable resemblance to Marie Antoinette. The d’Oliva saw him only for a few moments and presented him with a rose. {66} The Cardinal was completely duped. “Madame de la Motte persuaded him,” says Greeven, “into the belief that the Queen was yearning for the necklace, but, as she could not afford it, he could assure himself of her favor by becoming security for the payment. She produced a forged instrument, which purported to have been executed by the Queen, and upon which he bound himself as security.” The necklace was delivered to the Cardinal, who handed it over to Madame de la Motte, to be given to Marie Antoinette. Thus it was, as Carlyle says, the collier de la reine vanished through “the horn-gate of dreams.”

But, asks the curious reader, what has all this to do with Cagliostro? What part had he to play in the drama? This: When the Countess de la Motte was arrested, she attempted to throw the blame of the affair upon the Cardinal and Cagliostro. She alleged that they had summoned her into one of their mystic séances. “After the usual hocus-pocus, the Cardinal made over to her a casket containing the diamonds without their setting and directed her to deliver them to her husband, with instructions to dispose of them at once in London. Upon this information Cagliostro and his wife were arrested. He was detained without hearing, from the 22d of August, 1785, until the 30th of January, 1786, when he was first examined by the Judges, and he was not set at liberty till the 1st of June, 1786.”

The trial was the most famous in the annals of the Parliament. Cagliostro and the Cardinal were acquitted with honor. The Countess de la Motte was sentenced to be exposed naked, with a rope around her neck, in front of the Conciergerie, and to be publicly whipped and branded by the hangman with the letter V (Voleuse—thief ) on each shoulder. She was further sentenced to life imprisonment in the prison for abandoned women. She escaped from the latter place, however, to London, where she was killed on the 23d day of August, 1791, by a fall from a window. The Count de la Motte was sentenced in contumacium. He was safe in London at the time and had disposed of the diamonds to various dealers. The d’Oliva was set free without punishment. The man who forged the letter for Madame de la Motte, her secretary, Villette, was banished for life. The Countess de Cagliostro was honorably discharged. {67}

The Cardinal was unquestionably innocent, as was fully established at the trial. His overweening ambition and his mad love for Marie Antoinette had rendered him an easy dupe to the machinations of the band of sharpers. But how about Cagliostro? The essayist Greeven seems to think that the alchemist was more or less mixed up in the swindle. He sums up the suspicions as follows: “First, his [Cagliostro’s] immense influence over the Cardinal, and his intimate relations with him render it impossible that so gigantic a fraud could have been practiced without his knowledge. Second, he was in league with the Countess for the purpose of deceiving the Cardinal, in connection with the Queen.”

MADAME DE LA MOTTE’S ESCAPE. (After an English print of 1790.)

M. Frantz Funck-Brentano writes: “The idea of implicating Cagliostro in the intrigue had been conceived, as Georgel says, with diabolical cunning. If Jeanne de Valois had in the first instance made a direct accusation against Cardinal de Rohan, no one would have believed in it. But there was something mysterious and suspicious about Cagliostro, and it was known what influence he exercised on the mind of the Cardinal. ‘The alchemist,’ she suggested, ‘took the necklace to pieces in order to increase by means of it the occult treasures of an unheard-of fortune.’ ‘To conceal his theft,’ says Doillot [Madame de la {68} Motte’s lawyer], ‘he ordered M. de Rohan, in virtue of the influence he had established over him, to sell some of the diamonds and to get a few of them mounted at Paris through the Countess de la Motte, and to get more considerable quantities mounted and sold in England by her husband.’ . . . Cagliostro had one unanswerable argument: the Cardinal had made his agreement with the jewelers on the 29th of January, 1785, and he, Cagliostro, had only arrived in Paris at nine in the evening of the 30th.”

Cagliostro refuted the charges with wonderful sang froid. He appeared in court “proud and triumphant in his coat of green silk embroidered with gold.” “Who are you? and whence do you come?” asked the attorney for the crown.