(2) The testimony of the experts as to the remarkable similarity between the writing of Balsamo and Cagliostro requires something more than an official statement to that effect to be convincing. At the time the experts made their report, the French Government were trying to silence the calumnies with which Marie Antoinette was being attacked by making the character of Cagliostro and others connected with the Necklace Affair appear as bad as possible. The Parisian police in the interest of the Monarchy, jumped at the opportunity of identifying the mysterious Cagliostro with the infamous Balsamo. The experts’ evidence is, to say the least, questionable.

(3) The fact that Giuseppe Balsamo had an uncle called Giuseppe Cagliostro is the strongest argument in favour of the identification theory. There is no reason to doubt Antonio Braconieri’s statement that he had received letters from his nephew signed “Count Cagliostro.” However, the writer of the anonymous letter declared that, desiring to prove Braconieri’s word as to the existence of Giuseppe Cagliostro of Messina, he discovered that there were two families of the name in that city. The prefix Cagli, moreover, is not unusual in Sicilian, Calabrian and Neapolitan names. The selection of it by Cagliostro as an incognito may have been accidental, or invented because of its peculiar cabalistic suggestion as suitable for the occult career on which he embarked, or it may have been suggested to him by some one of the name he had met when wandering about southern Italy. As his identification with Balsamo is based principally on coincidence, it is surely equally permissible to employ a coincidence as the basis of one of the many arguments in an attempt at refutation.

(4) As to the minor points of resemblance between Cagliostro and Balsamo given as “probabilities” for supposing them identical: in considering that Cagliostro used as references the names of Cardinal Orsini and the Duke of Alba, by whom Balsamo was known to have been employed at one time, the fantastic account he gave of himself at his trial should be remembered. One of the principal reasons for disbelieving him was the fact that these personages were dead and so unable to verify or deny his statement. Again, though the Sicilian dialect was undoubtedly Balsamo’s mother-tongue, no one could ever make out to what patois Cagliostro’s extraordinary abracadabra of accent belonged. But nothing can be weaker than to advance their use of magic and alchemy as a reason for identifying them. Magic and alchemy were the common stock-in-trade of every adventurer in Europe in the eighteenth century.

So much for criticism of the “official” proof.

There is, however, another reason for doubting the identity of the two men. It is the most powerful of all, and has hitherto apparently escaped the attention of those who have taken this singular theory of identification for granted.

Nobody that had known Balsamo ever saw Cagliostro.

The description of Balsamo’s features given by Antonio Braconieri resembles that which others have given of Cagliostro’s personal appearance as far as it goes. Unfortunately, it merely proves that both were short, had dark complexions, and peculiarly bright eyes. As for their noses, Braconieri described Balsamo’s as being écrasé; it is a much more forcible and unflattering term than has ever been applied to the by no means uncommon shape of Cagliostro’s nasal organ. There were many pictures of Cagliostro scattered over Europe at the time of the Necklace Affair. In Palermo, where the interest taken in him was great, few printsellers’ windows, one would imagine, but would have contained his portrait. Braconieri certainly is likely to have seen it; and had the resemblance to Balsamo been undeniable, he would surely have attached the greatest importance to it as a proof of the identity he desired to establish. As a matter of fact, he barely mentions it.

Again, one wonders why nobody who had known Balsamo ever made the least attempt to identify Cagliostro with him either at the time of the trial or when the articles in the Courier de l’Europe brought him a second time prominently before the public. Now Balsamo was known to have lived in London in 1771, when his conduct was so suspicious to the police that he deemed it advisable to leave the country. He and his wife accordingly went to Paris, and it was here that, in 1773, the events occurred which brought both prominently under the notice of the authorities. Six years after Balsamo’s disappearance from London, Count Cagliostro appeared in that city, and becoming involved with a set of swindlers in a manner that made him appear a fool rather than a knave, spent four months in the King’s Bench jail. How is it, one asks, that the London police, who “wanted” Giuseppe Balsamo, utterly failed to recognize him in the notorious Cagliostro?

Now granting that the police, as well as the persons whom Balsamo fleeced in London in 1771, had forgotten him in 1777, and that all who could have recognized him as Cagliostro in 1786, when the Courier de l’Europe exposed him, were dead, is it probable that the same coincidences would repeat themselves in Paris? If the Parisian police, who were doing their best to discover traces of Cagliostro’s antecedents in 1785 and 1786 had quite forgotten the Balsamo who brought the curious action against his wife in 1773, is it at all likely that the various people the Balsamos had known in their two-years’ residence in Paris would all have died in the meantime? People are always to be found to identify criminals and suspicious characters to whom the attention of the police is prominently drawn. But before the sort of Sherlock Holmes process of identification employed by the Courier de l’Europe and the Parisian police, not a soul was ever heard to declare that Cagliostro and Balsamo were the same.

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