SAN LEO
In the eighteenth century the condition of the surroundings rendered it well-nigh inaccessible. The roads leading to San Leo were only practicable for horses in fine weather; in winter it was only approached on foot. To accentuate still further this isolation, the Papal government had taken care that those convicted of sedition or heretical doctrines, should find there an everlasting seclusion. An official, commissioned by Napoleon to visit and examine the Italian prisons, gives an account of the cells, which were partly in the old castle of San Leo itself and partly excavated out of the rock on which it stands.
“The galleries,” he reports, “which have been cut out of the solid rock, were divided into cells, and old dried-up cisterns had been converted into dungeons for the worst criminals, and further surrounded by high walls, so that the only possible egress, if escape was attempted, would be by a staircase cut in the rock and guarded night and day by sentinels.
“It was in one of these cisterns that the celebrated Cagliostro was interred in 1791. In recommending the Pope to commute the sentence of death, which the Inquisition had passed upon him, into perpetual imprisonment, the Holy Tribunal took care that the commutation should be equivalent to the death penalty. His only communication with mankind was when his jailers raised the trap to let food down to him. Here he languished for three years without air, movement, or intercourse with his fellow-creatures. During the last months of his life his condition excited the pity of the governor, who had him removed from this dungeon to a cell on the level with the ground, where the curious, who obtain permission to visit the prison, may read on the walls various inscriptions and sentences traced there by the unhappy alchemist. The last bears the date of the 6th of March, 1795.”[54]
This is the last definite trace of Cagliostro.
On the 6th October, 1795, the Moniteur states “it is reported in Rome that the famous Cagliostro is dead.” But when he died, or how, is absolutely unknown. “That his end was tragic,” says d’Alméras, “one can well suppose, and his jailers, to make sure that he should not escape, may have put him out of his misery.” The Moniteur speaks of the probability of such an end as being a topic of conversation in Rome. In any case, it seems impossible to believe that he could long have survived so terrible a doom, which, whatever his offence, was utterly disgraceful to the government that pronounced it.
This mysterious end, so in keeping with Cagliostro’s mysterious origin and personality, appeals to the imagination. Nothing excites curiosity like a mystery. Since his death there have been as many attempts to lift the veil in which his end is shrouded as were made in his lifetime to discover the secret of his birth. Of these specimens of sheer futility, Madame Blavatsky’s is the most interesting, the most unlikely, and the most popular among the believers in the supernatural who have allowed their imaginations to run riot on Cagliostro generally.
According to the equally extraordinary High Priestess of the Theosophists, Cagliostro escaped from San Leo, and long after his supposed death in 1795 was met by various people in Russia, even residing for some time in the house of Madame Blavatsky’s father, where “in the midst of winter he produced by magical power a plate full of fresh strawberries for a sick person who was craving it.”
Had Cagliostro survived his terrible sufferings in San Leo till 1797, when the French invaded the Papal States, he certainly would have been set at liberty. San Leo, to which the Pope’s troops had retired, was taken by the famous Polish legion under General Dombrowski. The first thing the officers did on entering the fortress was to inquire anxiously if Cagliostro, whom they regarded as a martyr in the cause of freedom, was living.