As a few months later Cagliostro was performing the most marvellous cures at Strasburg, and was for years visited by invalids from all over Europe, may we not assume that in this instance malice only published his failures and suppressed his successes?
These rumours, however, were by no means damaging enough to please the Marquis de Luchet, who had no scruples about inventing what he considered “characteristic” anecdotes. The following story drawn from his spurious Mémoires Authentiques is worth repeating, less as an illustration of his inventive powers than for the sake of nailing a popular lie.
“Death,” he writes, “threatened to deprive a Russian lady of an idolized infant aged two. She promised Cagliostro 5000 louis if he saved its life. He undertook to restore it to health in a week if she would suffer him to remove the babe to his house. The distressed mother joyfully accepted the proposal. On the fifth day he informed her there was a marked improvement, and at the end of the week declared that his patient was cured. Three weeks elapsed, however, before he would restore the child to its mother. All St. Petersburg rang with the news of this marvellous cure, and talked of the mysterious man who was able to cheat death of its prey. But soon it was rumoured that the child which was returned to the mother was not the one which had been taken away. The authorities looked into the matter, and Cagliostro was obliged to confess that the babe he restored was substituted for the real one, which had died. Justice demanded the body of the latter, but Cagliostro could not produce it. He had burnt it, he said, ‘to test the theory of reincarnation.’ Ordered to repay the 5000 louis he had received, he offered bills of exchange on a Prussian banker. As he professed to be a colonel in the service of the King of Prussia,[17] the bills were accepted, but on being presented for payment were dishonoured. The matter was therefore brought to the notice of Count von Goertz, the Prussian Envoy at St. Petersburg, who obtained an order for his arrest. This is the true explanation of his sudden departure.”
Rumour, however, differed widely from de Luchet. For at the same time that de Luchet declared Cagliostro to be posing as a Prussian colonel he is also said to have donned the uniform of a colonel in the Spanish service, and assumed the title of Prince de Santa Cruce. But far from being treated with the respect usually paid to any high-sounding title and uniform in Russia, this prince-colonel doctor excited the suspicions of M. de Normandez, the Spanish chargé d’affaires at the Russian Court, who demanded his passport as proof of his identity. To forge one would have been easy for Giuseppe Balsamo, who had a talent in that line, one would think. As he failed, however, to adopt this very simple expedient, M. d’Alméras, his latest and least prejudiced biographer, is forced to the conclusion that “he had long given up the profession of forger”—Freemasonry being responsible for his renunciation! The conception of Cagliostro as Balsamo reformed by Freemasonry is the most singular and unconvincing explanation ever offered of this strange man.
At any rate, the Prince de Santa Cruce could neither produce a passport nor forge one, and, hearing that a warrant was about to be issued for his arrest, he made haste to disappear. That such an adventurer was actually in St. Petersburg when Cagliostro was there is highly probable, and no doubt accounts for rumour confounding them several years later. But that Cagliostro, bearing letters of introduction from the greatest families in Courland, should have adopted any other name than that which he bore in Mittau is inconceivable.
Still more absurd is the rumour that the Empress Catherine, jealous of the attention that her favourite the great Potemkin—“a train-oil prince,” as Carlyle contemptuously styles him—paid to the Countess Cagliostro, offered her 20,000 roubles to quit the country. Catherine would certainly never have paid any one to leave her dominions; she had a much rougher way of handling those whose presence offended her. The Cagliostros, moreover, who went to Warsaw from St. Petersburg, arrived there in anything but an opulent condition.
There is yet another rumour, which is at least probable, to the effect that Cagliostro was forced to leave Russia by the intrigues of Catherine’s Scotch doctors, Rogerson and Mouncey, who were “so enraged that a stranger, and a pretended pupil of the school of Hermes Trismegistus to boot, should poach upon their preserves, that they contemplated a printed exposure of his quackery.” It was not the last time, as will be seen, that Cagliostro excited the active hostility of the medical faculty.
Strange to say, the Countess von der Recke, who, if any one, would have known the truth concerning his visit to St. Petersburg, fails to give any particulars. Perhaps there were none, after all, to give. She merely says: “On his way from St. Petersburg to Warsaw, Cagliostro passed through Mittau, but did not stop. He was seen by a servant of Marshal von Medem, to whom he sent his greeting.”
VI
In any case, the disgrace in which Cagliostro is supposed to have left St. Petersburg by no means injured him in the opinion of his former admirers in Courland, who, from their high position and close connection with the Russian official world, would have been well informed of all that befell him. For by one of them, as we are told on the best authority, he was furnished with introductions to Prince Adam Poninski and Count Moczinski, which he presented on his arrival in Warsaw.