“You will soon make a long journey, in course of which your carriage will meet with an accident, and, whilst you are waiting for the repairs to be made, the manner in which you are dressed will excite such merriment in the crowd that you will be pelted with apples. You will go from there to some famous watering-place, where you will meet a man of high birth, to whom you will shortly afterwards be wedded. There will be an attempt to prevent your marriage, which will cause you to be foolish enough to make over to him your fortune. You will be married in a city in which I shall be, and, in spite of your efforts to see me, you will not succeed. You are threatened with great misfortunes, but here is a talisman by which you may avoid them, so long as you keep it. But if you are prevented from making over your fortune to your husband in your marriage contract you will immediately lose the talisman, and, the moment you cease to have it, it will return to my pocket wherever I may be.’
“I do not know,” continues Laborde, “what confidence the King and the lady placed in these predictions, but I know that they were all fulfilled. I have had this on the authority of several persons, as well as the lady herself; also from Cagliostro, who described it in precisely the same words. I do not guarantee either its truth or its falsity, and, as I do not pretend to be an exact historian, I shall not indulge in the smallest reflection.”
CHAPTER IV
THE CONQUEST OF THE CARDINAL
I
Of the difficulties that perpetually beset the biographer of Cagliostro, those caused by his frequent disappearances from sight are the most perplexing. It is possible to combat prejudice—to materialize, so to speak, rumour, to manipulate conflicting evidence, and even to throw light on that which is mysterious in his character. But when it is a question of filling up the gaps, of bridging the chasms in his career, one can only proceed by assumption.
Such a chasm, and one of the deepest, occurs between June 26, 1780, when Cagliostro suddenly fled from Warsaw, and September 19, when he arrived in Strasburg. Even rumour lost track of him during this interval. The Inquisition-biographer pretends to discover him for a moment at Frankfort-on-the-Main as a secret agent of the Illuminés, and, as an assumption, the statement is at once plausible and probable.
Cagliostro, as stated in a previous chapter, has always been supposed, on grounds that all but amount to proof, to have been at some period in his mysterious career connected with one of the revolutionary secret societies of Germany. This society has always been assumed to be the Illuminés.[18] If this assumption be true—and without it his mode of life in Strasburg is utterly inexplicable—his initiation could only have taken place at this period and, probably, at Frankfort, where Knigge, one of the leaders of the Illuminés, had his head-quarters.
As Knigge was a member of the Order of Strict Observance, in the lodges of which throughout Germany Cagliostro’s reputation as a wonder-worker stood high, he had undoubtedly heard of him, if he was not personally acquainted with him. Knigge, moreover, was just the man to appreciate the possibilities of such a reputation in obtaining recruits for Illuminism. Nothing is more reasonable, then, than to assume that certain members of the Illuminés made overtures at Frankfort to Cagliostro, who, one can imagine, would have readily accepted them as the means of recovering the influence and prestige he had lost in Poland.
His initiation, according to the Inquisition-biographer, took place in a grotto a short distance from the city. In the centre, on a table, was an iron chest, from which Knigge or his deputy took a manuscript. On the first page Cagliostro perceived the words “We, the Grand Masters of the Templars.” Then followed the formula of an oath written in blood, to which eleven signatures were appended, and which signified that Illuminism was a conspiracy against thrones. The first blow was to be struck in France, and, after the fall of the monarchy, Rome was to be attacked. Cagliostro, moreover, learnt that the society had ramifications everywhere, and possessed immense sums in banks in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, London, Genoa, and Venice. This money was furnished by an annual subscription of twenty-five livres paid by each member.