“My maid is a woman of fifty,” was the reply, “and you——”
But she did not finish the sentence. The woman had caught a glimpse of her face in a mirror. The Wine of Egypt had rejuvenated her thirty years!
In an age unfamiliar with the cunning devices of the art of advertising and the universality of the pretensions of quack remedies, such encomiums lavished on “an extract of Saturn,” a “Wine of Egypt,” or an “Elixir Vitæ,” were calculated to damage the reputation of their inventor in the opinion of serious people even more than the bitter denunciations to which they were exposed. One of the charges of imposture on which the case against Cagliostro rests is that of manufacturing his remedies with the object of defrauding the public by attributing to them fabulous properties which he knew they did not possess. If this be admitted, then a similar accusation must be made against every maker of patent medicines to-day, which, in view of the law of libel and the fact that many persons have been restored to health by the concoctions of quacks whom the skilled physician has been powerless to heal, would be incredibly foolish.
To regard these remedies of Cagliostro with their ridiculous names and quixotic pretensions with the old prejudice is preposterous. Judged by the number and variety of his cures—and it is the only reasonable standard to judge them by—they were, to say the least, remarkable.
In the present day, it is no longer the custom to deride the knowledge of the old alchemists. The world has come to acknowledge that, in spite of the fantastic jargon in which they expressed themselves, they fully understood the uses of the plants and minerals of which they composed their drugs. Stripped of the atmosphere of magic and mystery in which they delighted to wrap their knowledge—and which, ridiculous as it may seem to-day, had just as much effect on the imagination in their benighted age as the more scientific mode of “suggestion” employed by the doctors of our own enlightened era—the remedies of a Borri or a Paracelsus are still deserving of respect, and still employed. Cagliostro is known to have made a serious study of alchemy, and it is very probable that his magic balsams and powders were prepared after receipts he discovered in old books of alchemy. Perhaps too, like all quacks—it is impossible to accord a more dignified title to one who had not the diploma of a properly qualified practitioner—he made the most of old wives’ remedies picked up haphazard in the course of his travels.
Without doubt the unparalleled credulity and superstition of the age contributed greatly to his success. Miracles can only succeed in an atmosphere favourable to the miraculous. In Europe, as the reader has seen—particularly in France—the soil had been well prepared for seed of the sort that Cagliostro sowed.
VI
The cure of the Prince de Soubise gave Cagliostro an immense prestige. “It would be impossible,” says the Baroness d’Oberkirch, “to give an idea of the passion, the madness with which people pursued him. It would appear incredible to any one who had not seen it.” On returning to Strasburg, “he was followed by a dozen ladies of rank and two actresses” who desired to have the benefit of his treatment. People came from far and wide to consult him; and many out of sheer curiosity. To these, whom he regarded as spies sent by his enemies, he was either inaccessible or positively rude.
Lavater, who came from Zurich, was treated with very scant courtesy. “If,” said Cagliostro, “your science [that of reading character by the features, by which he had acquired a European reputation] is greater than mine, you have no need of my acquaintance; and if mine is the greater, I have no need of yours.”
Lavater, however, was not to be repulsed by the inference to be drawn from such a remark. The following day he wrote Cagliostro a long letter in which, among other things, he asked him “how he had acquired his knowledge, and in what it consisted.” In reply Cagliostro limited himself to these words: In verbis, in herbis, in lapidibus, by which, as M. d’Alméras observes, he probably indicated correctly the nature and extent of his medical and occult lore. But Lavater, as credulous as he was inquisitive, impressed by the mystery in which Cagliostro enveloped his least action, read into his words quite another meaning. Believing firmly in the Devil—about whom he had written a book—the Swiss pastor returned home convinced that the Grand Cophta of Egyptian Masonry was “a supernatural being with a diabolic mission.”