Nevertheless, since they exist they are worth examining—not so much for the purpose of questioning the accuracy of the “authorities” as to show how the Balsamo legend, which plays so important a part in the history of Cagliostro, originated.
It was not till Cardinal Rohan entangled him in the Diamond Necklace Affair that the name of Cagliostro hitherto familiar only to a limited number of people who, as the case might be, had derived benefit or suffered misfortune from a personal experience of his fabulous powers, acquired European notoriety.
The excitement caused by this cause célèbre, as is well known, was intense and universal. The arrest of the Cardinal in the Oeil-de-Boeuf at Versailles, in the presence of the Court and a great concourse of people from Paris, as he was about to celebrate mass in the Royal Chapel on Assumption Day, on the charge of having purchased a necklace for 1,600,000 livres for the Queen, who denied all knowledge of the transaction; the subsequent disappearance of the jewel and the suspicion of intent to swindle the jeweller which attached itself to both Queen and Cardinal; the further implication of the Countess de Lamotte, with her strangely romantic history; of Cagliostro, with his mystery and magic; and of a host of other shady persons—these were elements sensational enough to strike the dullest imagination, fire the wildest curiosity, and rivet the attention of all Europe upon the actors in so unparalleled a drama.
CARDINAL DE ROHAN
(From an old French print)
After the Cardinal, whose position as Grand Almoner of France (a sort of French Archbishop of Canterbury, so to speak) made him the protagonist of this drama, the self-styled Count Cagliostro was the figure in whom the public were most interested. The prodigies he was said to have performed, magnified by rumour, and his strange undecipherable personality gave him an importance out of all proportion to the small part he played in the famous Affair of the Necklace. Speculation as to his origin was naturally rife. But neither the police nor the lawyers could throw any light on his past. The evidence of the Countess de Lamotte, who in open court denounced him as an impostor formerly known as Don Tiscio, a name under which she declared he had fleeced many people in various parts of Spain, was too palpably untrustworthy and ridiculous to be treated seriously. Cagliostro himself did, indeed, attempt to satisfy curiosity, but the fantastic account he gave of his career only served—as perhaps he intended—to deepen its mystery.
The more it was baffled, the keener became the curiosity to discover a secret so cleverly guarded. The “noble traveller,” as he described himself with ridiculous pomposity on his examination, confessed that Cagliostro was only one of the several names he had assumed in the course of his life. An alias—he had termed it incognito—is always suspicious. Coupled, as it was in his case, with alchemical experiments, prognostications, spiritualist séances, and quack medicines, it suggested rascality. From ridicule to calumny is but a step, and for every voice raised in defence of his honesty there were a dozen to decry him.
On the day he was set at liberty—for he had no difficulty in proving his innocence—eight or ten thousand people came en masse to offer him their congratulations. The court-yard, the staircase, the very rooms of his house in the Rue St. Claude were filled with them. But this ovation, flattering though it was to his vanity, was intended less as a mark of respect to him than as an insult to the Queen, who was known to regard the verdict as a stigma on her honour, and whose waning popularity the hatred engendered by this scandalous affair had completely obliterated. Banished the following day by the Government, which sought to repair the prestige of the throne by persecuting and calumniating those who might be deemed instrumental in shattering it, Cagliostro lost what little credit the trial had left him. Whoever he was, the world had made up its mind what he was, and its opinion was wholly unfavourable to the “noble traveller.”
From France, which he left on June 21, 1786, Cagliostro went to England. It was here, in the following September, that the assertion was made for the first time by the Courier de l’Europe, a French paper published in London, that he was Giuseppe Balsamo. This announcement, made with every assurance of its accuracy, was at once repeated by other journals throughout Europe. It would be interesting, though not particularly important, to know how the Courier de l’Europe obtained its information. It is permissible, however, to conjecture that the Anglo-French journal had been informed of the rumour current in Palermo at the time of Cagliostro’s imprisonment in the Bastille that he was a native of that city, and on investigating the matter decided there were sufficient grounds for identifying him with Balsamo.