The Farmer-General Laborde declares that Cagliostro attended over fifteen thousand[20] sick people during the three years he stayed in Strasburg, of whom only three died.
One of his most remarkable cures was that of the secretary of the Marquis de Lasalle, the Commandant of Strasburg. “He was dying,” says Gleichen, “of gangrene of the leg, and had been given up by the doctors, but Cagliostro saved him.”
On another occasion he procured a belated paternity for Sarazin, the banker of Bâle, who afterwards became one of his most devoted adherents. No illness appeared to baffle him. The graver the malady the more resourceful he became. A woman about to be confined, having been given up by the midwives, who doubted even their ability to save her child, sent for him in her extremity. He answered the summons immediately, as was his custom, and after a slight examination guaranteed her a successful accouchement. What is more to the point, he kept his word.
This case is worthy of note as being the only one on record concerning which Cagliostro gave an explanation of his success.
“He afterwards confessed to me,” says Gleichen, “that his promise was rash. But convinced that the child was in perfect health by the pulse of the umbilical cord, and perceiving that the mother only lacked the strength requisite to bring her babe into the world, he had relied on the virtue of a singularly soothing remedy with which he was acquainted. The result, he considered, had been due to luck rather than skill.”
The most famous of all his cures was that of the Prince de Soubise, a cousin of Cardinal de Rohan. In this case, however, it was the rank of the patient, even more than the illness of which he was cured, that set the seal to Cagliostro’s reputation. The prince, it seems, had been ill for some weeks, and the doctors, after differing widely as to the cause of his malady, had finally pronounced his condition to be desperate. Thereupon the Cardinal, who had boundless confidence in Cagliostro’s medical skill, immediately carried him off in his carriage to Paris to attend his cousin, simply stating, on arriving at the Hôtel de Soubise, that he had brought “a doctor,” without mentioning his name, lest the family, influenced by the regular physicians, who regarded him as a quack, should refuse his services. It was, perhaps, a useless precaution, for, as the patient had just been given up by the doctors, the family were willing enough to suffer even a quack to do what he could.
Cagliostro at once requested all who were in the sick-room to leave it. What he did when he found himself alone with the prince was never known, but, after an hour, he called the Cardinal and said to him—
“If my prescription is followed, in two days Monseigneur will leave his bed and walk about the room. Within a week he will be able to take a drive, and within three to go to Court.”
When one has consulted an oracle, one can do no better than obey it. The family accordingly confided the prince completely to the care of the unknown doctor, who on the same day paid his patient a second visit. On this occasion he took with him a small vial containing a liquid, ten drops of which he administered to the sick man.
On leaving, he said to the Cardinal: “To-morrow I will give the prince five drops, the day after two, and you will see that he will sit up the same evening.”