[32] Lamotte alone succeeded in escaping.
[33] The existence of Althotas is now generally conceded. A plausible attempt has been made to identify him with a certain Kölmer from whom Weishaupt received lessons in magic, and who was said to be a Jutland merchant who had lived some years in Memphis and afterwards travelled through Europe pretending to initiate adepts in the ancient Egyptian Mysteries. He was known to have visited Malta in the time of the Grand Master Pinto.
[34] Henry Swinburne, in his Memoirs of the Courts of Europe describing his meeting with Cagliostro, declares that there was “nothing Jewish” about him.
[35] One, de Soudak, in an interesting review of M. Funck-Brentano’s L’Affaire du Collier, in the Paris Temps, April 1, 1902, is the only modern writer who has ventured to question this verdict. The value of his opinion may be judged from an article by him in the Revue Bleue, 1899, in which he attempts to identify a mysterious Frenchwoman who died in the Crimea in 1825 with the Countess de Lamotte, who died in London 1791, after escaping from the Salpêtrière, to which she had been condemned for life. Her sentence—the judges were unanimous in finding her guilty—also included being “whipped naked by the executioner, branded on the shoulders with the letter V. (voleuse), and the confiscation of all her property.” The sentences of the others implicated in this affair need not concern us here.
[36] The Lettre au peuple français was dated the 20th June 1786. As stated in the previous chapter, Breteuil was the deadly enemy of Cardinal de Rohan, and encouraged Marie Antoinette in demanding his arrest of the King.
[37] Nearly all who have written on Cagliostro have erred in stating that the letter contained the “predictions that the Bastille would be destroyed, its site become a public promenade, and that a king would reign in France who would abolish lettres de cachet and convoke the States General”—all of which actually occurred three years later in 1789. The predictions are the invention of the Inquisition-biographer to whose short-comings, to put it mildly, attention has frequently been called. Cagliostro merely says that if in the future he was permitted to return to France he would only do so “provided the Bastille was destroyed and its site turned into a public promenade.” A copy of this letter, now become very rare, is to be seen in the French National Archives.
[38] Many attempts were made at this very time to kidnap the Count de Lamotte, who alone of all “wanted” in the Necklace Affair succeeded in escaping. On one occasion his murder was even attempted. The Countess de Lamotte herself, who escaped from the Salpêtrière to London and published the vilest of all the calumnies against Marie Antoinette perished in jumping out of a window to elude capture. Numerous instances of the kidnapping of French subjects in England by the French police are cited by Brissot in his Memoirs.
[39] Both of whom had recently been decoyed to France, where they had at once been imprisoned.
[40] Theveneau de Morande: Etude sur le XVIIIᵉᵐᵉ Siècle par Paul Robiquet. By his contemporaries the name of Morande was never mentioned without an abusive epithet. Brissot, meeting him for the first time in a restaurant in London, “shuddered instinctively at his approach.”
[41] Morande had one redeeming quality. Royalist to the core, he served the French Court loyally till the fall of the monarchy. Imprisoned during the Revolution, he escaped the guillotine by an accident, and having returned to his native town, retired into a respectable obscurity.