The fact, moreover, that it took the Countess von der Recke five years to make up her mind that her “apostle of light” was an impostor, was perhaps due less to any absolute faith in Bode than to the changes that had taken place in herself during this period.
On recovering her health she became as pronounced a rationalist as she had formerly been a mystic. As this change occurred about the period of her meeting with Bode, it may possibly account for the change in her opinion of Cagliostro.
But if the manner in which the Countess came to regard Cagliostro as an impostor somewhat detracts from the importance to be attached to her opinion, the manner in which she made her opinion public was unworthy of a woman to whose character this opinion owes the importance attributed to it. For this “born fair saint” as Carlyle calls her, waited till the Diamond Necklace Affair, when Cagliostro was thoroughly discredited, before venturing to “expose” him.
V
Very curious to relate, all that is known of Cagliostro’s visit to St. Petersburg is based on a few contradictory rumours of the most questionable authenticity. This is all the more remarkable considering, as the Countess von der Recke herself states, that he left Mittau in a blaze of glory, regretted, honoured, and recommended to some of the greatest personages in Russia by the flower of the nobility of Courland.[16]
According to report, Cagliostro’s first act in St. Petersburg, as everywhere else he went, was to gain admission to one of the lodges of Strict Observance and endeavour to convert the members to the Egyptian Rite. As experience had taught him the futility of attempting to recruit adherents merely by expounding his lofty ideal of the regeneration of mankind, he had recourse to the methods he had adopted with such success in Mittau; but with the most humiliating result. For, being apparently unable to procure a suitable medium, he was forced to resort to an expedient which was discreditable in itself and unworthy of his remarkable faculties.
On this occasion his medium was a colombe, “the niece of an actress” in whose house the séance was held. There was the usual mumbo-jumbo, sword-waving passes, stamping of the feet, et cetera. The medium behind a screen gazed into a carafe of water and astonished the assembled company with what she saw there. But later in the evening while Cagliostro, covered with congratulations, was discoursing on the virtue of Egyptian Masonry and dreaming of fresh triumphs, the medium suddenly declared that she had seen nothing and that her rôle had been prepared beforehand by the Grand Cophta!
Cagliostro, as has been seen, was bold and resourceful when his situation seemed utterly untenable. That he would have seen his prestige destroyed in this way without attempting to save it is far from likely, and though the fact that St. Petersburg is the only city in which Cagliostro failed to establish a lodge of Egyptian Masonry may be regarded as proof of the futility of his efforts, the nature of other rumours concerning him leads one to suppose that he strove hard to regain the ground he had lost.
It was, no doubt, with this object that he turned his knowledge of medicine and chemistry to account. It is in St. Petersburg that he is heard of for the first time as a “healer.” According, however, to the vague and hostile rumours purporting to emanate from Russia at the time of the Diamond Necklace Affair he was a quack devoid of knowledge or skill.
“A bald major,” says the Inquisition-biographer, “entrusted his head to his care, but he could not make a single hair grow. A blind gentleman who consulted him remained blind; while a deaf Italian, into whose ears he dropped some liquid, became still more deaf.”