But the most bare-faced of all these problematic Balsamos is the Don Tiscio one, for whose existence “Dr.” Sacchi is responsible. Of Sacchi, be it said, nothing is known to his credit. Having some knowledge of surgery, and being in very low water, he appealed for assistance to Cagliostro, who found some work for him in his private hospital at Strasburg. But within a week he was dismissed for misconduct. Hereupon Sacchi published a book, or was said to have done so—for no one apparently but the Countess de Lamotte’s counsel in the Necklace Trial ever saw it—in which he denounced Cagliostro as a swindler by name of Don Tiscio who had adorned the pillory in Spain, and suffered other punishments of a kind Sacchi preferred not to mention. Notwithstanding, though no credence was attached to this statement when cited by the Countess de Lamotte, it was raked up again by the Courier de l’Europe with the addition that Balsamo now becomes Sacchi’s Don Tiscio.
Thus, after having been forger, swindler, blackmailer, souteneur, quack, pickpocket—all of the commonest type—Balsamo, on the word of a disreputable Sacchi, supported by a few singular coincidences, is saved without rhyme or reason from the gallows in Cadiz, on which he very probably perished, in order to be brought back to London as Count Cagliostro, a highly accomplished charlatan and past-master in wonder-working. An improbability that even the Inquisition-biographer is unable to pass over in silence.
“How,” he exclaims in amazement, “could such a man without either physical or intellectual qualities, devoid of education, connections, or even the appearance of respectability, whose very language was a barbarous dialect—how could he have succeeded as he did?”
How, indeed! The transformation is obviously so improbable that the puzzled reader will very likely come to the conclusion that, whoever Cagliostro may have been, he could certainly never have been Giuseppe Balsamo.
But enough of speculation; let us now turn our belated attention to the man whose career under the impenetrable incognito of Count Cagliostro is the subject of this book.
PART II
CHAPTER I
CAGLIOSTRO IN LONDON
I
Some time in July 1776—the exact date is unascertainable—two foreigners of unmistakable respectability, to judge by their appearance, if not of distinction, arrived in London and engaged a suite of furnished apartments in Whitcombe Street, Leicester Fields. They called themselves Count and Countess Cagliostro; and their landlady, who lost no time in letting everybody in the house, as well as her neighbours, know she had people of title as lodgers, added that she believed they were Italian, though so far as she could understand from the Count’s very broken English they had last come from Portugal. A day or two later she was able to inform her gossips, which no doubt she did with even greater satisfaction, that her foreign lodgers were not only titled but undoubtedly rich, for the Countess had very fine jewels and the Count was engaged in turning one of the rooms he had rented into a laboratory, as he intended to devote himself to the study of physics and chemistry, subjects, it seemed, in which he was keenly interested.