[2] La Mort de la Reine: Les suites de l’affaire du collier. Translated into English under the title of Cagliostro and Company.
[3] On hearing that his wife had been arrested as well as himself in connection with the Necklace Affair, Cagliostro manifested the wildest grief.
[4] This book is now very rare. The French version is the more available. It is entitled: Vie de Joseph Balsamo connu sous le nom de Comte Cagliostro, extraite de la procédure instruite contre lui à Rome en 1790; traduite d’après l’original italien, imprimé à la Chambre Apostolique.
[5] About £30.
[6] To infer from this, however, as many writers have done, that Casanova’s evidence proves Cagliostro and Balsamo to be the same is absurd. He never met the Cagliostros in his life. In stating that they were the Balsamos whom he had met in 1770 he merely repeats what he had read in the papers. His Memoirs were not written till many years later.
[7] Cagliostro, however, ignored this threat, which one can scarcely believe he would have done had he had any reason to fear it. Nor did Pergolezzi put it into effect; and it was not till ten years later, when Cagliostro returned to London thoroughly discredited, that the Editor of the Courier de l’Europe got wind of it in some way and twisted it into his Balsamo theory of accounting for the mysterious Cagliostro. Whether Pergolezzi was living at the time is unknown; in any case the threat which Cagliostro now ignored contained no mention of Balsamo.
[8] Were all the suppositions on which the general opinion of Cagliostro is based as reasonable as the present, there would be no cause for complaint on that score.
[9] One of the symbols of the Masons was a cross on which were the letters L.P.D. which were interpreted by the priests to mean Lilia Pedibus Destrue, Trample the Lilies under-foot.
[10] This statement rests solely on the word of the Editor of the Courier de l’Europe, who cited it as one of his reasons for identifying Cagliostro with Balsamo. The latter, it may be recalled, had passed as a colonel in the Prussian service during the time he was connected with the forger Agliata.
[11] His diploma, for which he paid five guineas, was formerly in the celebrated collection of autographs belonging to the Marquis de Châteaugiron.