The disdainful, almost hostile, attitude that Cagliostro adopted towards his patron at the beginning of their acquaintance was so well calculated to inflame Rohan’s curiosity that it is a matter of course to attribute it to design. The Abbé Georgel, who as a Jesuit thoroughly disliked the Grand Cophta of Egyptian Masonry, asserts that “he sought, without having the air of seeking it, the most intimate confidence of his Eminence and the greatest ascendency over his will.”
But this very plausible statement is not only unsupported by any fact, but is actually contrary to fact. The Cardinal was not Cagliostro’s banker, as has so often been stated. At his trial in the Necklace Affair Rohan denied this most emphatically. Moreover, it would have been utterly impossible for him, had he wished, to have supplied Cagliostro with the sums he spent so lavishly. In spite of his vast income, he had for years been head over ears in debt. If there were any benefits conferred, it was the Cardinal who received them.
“Cagliostro,” says Madame d’Oberkirch, “treated him, as well as the rest of his aristocratic admirers, as if they were under infinite obligation to him and he under none to them.”
This statement is the secret of the real nature of Cagliostro’s so-called conquest. It was not cupidity, but colossal vanity, that lured him into the glittering friendship that ruined him. The Cardinal, with his great name and position, his influence, and his undeniable charm, dazzled Cagliostro quite as much as he, with his miracles, his magic, and his mystery, appealed to the imagination of the Cardinal. Each had for the other the fascination of a flame for a moth. Each fluttered round the other like a moth; and each met with the proverbial moth’s fate. But the Cagliostro-flame only scorched the wings of his Eminence. It was in the flame of the Cardinal that Cagliostro perished.
CHAPTER V
CAGLIOSTRO IN PARIS
I
Notwithstanding the immense vogue that Cagliostro enjoyed throughout the three years he passed in Strasburg, his life was by no means one of unalloyed pleasure. Many a discordant note mingled in the chorus of blessing and praise that greeted his ears. In the memoir he published at the time of the Diamond Necklace Affair, he speaks vaguely of certain “persecutions” to which he was constantly subjected.
“His good fortune, or his knowledge of medicine,” says Gleichen, “excited the hatred and jealousy of the doctors, who when they persecute are as dangerous as the priests. They were his implacable enemies in France, as well as in Poland and Russia.”
His marvellous cures wounded the amour propre of the doctors as much as they damaged their reputation. Everything that malice and envy could devise was done to decry him. They accused him of treating only such persons as suffered from slight or imaginary ailments, questioned the permanency of his cures, denied that he saved lives they had given up, and attributed every death to him. He was charged with exacting in secret the fees he refused in public. His liberality to the poor was ascribed to a desire to attract attention, his philanthropy was ridiculed, and the luxury in which he lived at Cagliostrano, as he called the fine villa he rented on the outskirts of the town—attached to which was a private hospital or “nursing-home,” where his poor patients were treated free of charge—was called ostentation.