As it is impossible to verify either one or the other of these statements, the reader must be left to form his own conclusions.
Having once more regained his liberty, Cagliostro very wisely sought safety from further molestation by taking up his abode with his wife “in O’Reilly’s hotel,” where he resided during the remainder of his stay in London. On the recommendation of his friend he employed a lawyer by the name of James, through whom he succeeded in recovering the jewels which, it will be remembered, he had deposited with Saunders as bail in the first suit brought against him by Miss Fry. As he could, no doubt, have managed to decamp without returning the necklace or paying the costs of his trial as ordered by the arbitrator—the date named for the settlement was still some weeks off—it is, under the circumstances and considering all that has been said against him, decidedly to his credit that he remained and fulfilled his obligations.
He states—and there is no reason to disbelieve him—that O’Reilly and James, after the final settlement of his case, tried hard to persuade him “to commence an action against Aylett for perjury, another against Crisp for swindling, and one of blackmail against Fry, Scott, Reynolds and Broad,” He was, however, not to be beguiled into any such costly and uncertain undertakings.
“The injustices,” he says, “I had experienced rendered me unjust to myself, and attributing to the whole nation the faults of a few individuals I determined to leave a place in which I had found neither laws, justice, nor hospitality.”
Accordingly, having given O’Reilly, with whom he continued in close communication, a power of attorney to use in case of need, he left for Brussels “with no more than fifty pounds in cash and some jewels.”
He afterwards asserted that during the eighteen months he had resided in London he had been defrauded of 3000 guineas.
In this a hostile writer—with sheep-like fidelity to popular prejudice—sees “the native excellence of English talent, when the most accomplished swindler of the swindling eighteenth century was so hobbled, duped, and despoiled by the aid of the masterly fictions of English law.”
It is possible, however, to draw another and more sensible inference from this legal escroquerie of which Cagliostro was the dupe, than one based on mere prejudice. As his fame, needless to say, lies not in proved charges of embezzlement, but in the secrets of the crucible and the mysteries of Egyptian Masonry, it is clearly by his adventures in the laboratory and the lodge rather than by those which led him to the King’s Bench and the Bastille that he is to be judged. Since it is a question of swindling, it is perhaps just as well to bear in mind the character of these accomplished impostures to which so much obloquy has been attached. Accordingly, before attempting to draw aside the figurative curtain which conceals him, as Carlyle’s “hand itched” to do, it is essential to examine the fabric, so to speak, of the curtain itself—in other words, to get some idea of what was understood by the Occult in Cagliostro’s day.
As I have no intention of entering this labyrinth of perpetual darkness which none but an adept is capable of treading, I shall merely stand on the threshold. There, at any rate, it is light enough for the reader to see as much as is necessary for the present purpose.