If “Providence waited for Cagliostro at Brussels,” it was certainly Luck that met him on his arrival at Mittau.
As hitherto the cause of Egyptian Masonry does not appear to have derived any material benefit from the great interest he is said to have excited in Leipsic and other places, it seems reasonable to infer that the lodges he frequented were composed of bourgeois or uninfluential persons. At Mittau, however, the lodge to which he was admitted, addicted like the others to the study of the occult, consisted of people of the highest distinction who, advised in advance of the coming of the mysterious Count, were waiting to receive him with open arms.
The great family of von Medem in particular treated him with the greatest consideration, and in them he found at once congenial and influential friends. Marshal von Medem was the head of the Masonic lodge in Mittau, and from boyhood had made a special study of magic and alchemy, as had his brother Count von Medem. This latter had two very beautiful and accomplished daughters, the youngest of whom was married to the reigning Duke of Courland—a fact that could not fail to impress a regenerator of mankind in quest of powerful disciples.
It was, however, her sister Elisa, Count von Medem’s eldest daughter, who became the point d’appui of Cagliostro’s hopes.
The mystical tendencies of Elisa were entirely due to environment. She had grown up in an atmosphere in which magic, alchemy, and the dreams of Swedenborg were the principal topics of conversation. Familiarity, however, as the saying is, bred contempt. In her childhood she declared that the wonders of the supernatural which she heard continually discussed around her, “made less impression on her than the tale of Blue Beard, while a concert was worth all the ghosts in the world.” Nevertheless, the occult was not without a subtle effect on her mind. As a girl she had a decided preference for books of a mystic or religious character, her favourites being “Young’s Night Thoughts and the works of Lavater.”
Gifted with an exceptionally brilliant intellect, of which she afterwards gave unmistakable proof, she also possessed a most enthusiastic and affectionate nature—qualities that her husband, a Count von der Recke, alone appears to have neither recognized nor appreciated. Their union was of short duration: after six years of wedlock the Countess von der Recke, who had married at seventeen to please her father, obtained a divorce. She was amply compensated for what she had suffered by the affection she obtained from her family. Father, uncles, aunts, cousins seemed only to exist to study her wishes. Her sister, the Duchess of Courland, constantly sought her advice in political matters, and regarded her always as her dearest friend. But it was to her young brother to whom she was most deeply attached. Nor was he less devoted to her. Nearly of the same age, and possessing the same temperament and talents, the sympathy between them was such that “one was but the echo of the other.” They differed only in one respect. Equally serious and reflective, each longed to solve the “problems of existence”; but while the Countess von der Recke was led to seek their solution in the Bible, in the gospel according to Swedenborg, or in the correspondence she formed with Lavater, her brother thought they were to be found “in Plato and Pythagoras.” Death, however, prematurely interrupted his quest, carrying with him to the grave the ambition of his father and the heart of his sister.
It was at this moment, when she was overwhelmed with grief, that Count Cagliostro arrived in Mittau, with the reputation of being able to transmute metals, predict the future, and communicate with the unseen world. Might he not also evoke the spirits of the dead? In any case, such a man was not to be ignored. Mittau was a dead-and-alive place at the best of times, the broken-hearted Countess was only twenty-five, the “problems of existence” might still be solved—and workers of wonders, be they impostors or not, are not met every day. So the Countess von der Recke was determined to meet the “Spanish” Count, and—what is more to the point—to believe in him.
COUNTESS ELISA VON DER RECKE
(After Seibold)