“The admiration she excited,” says one writer, “was most ardent among those who had never seen her. There were duels over her, duels proposed and accepted as to the colour of her eyes, which neither of the adversaries knew, or as to whether a dimple was on her right cheek or on her left.”
Needless to say, scandal did not fail to attack her reputation. The enemies of Cagliostro were quick to accuse her of light conduct, and her husband of encouraging it. The Cardinal was popularly supposed to be her lover. The Countess de Lamotte asserted that she specially distinguished a Chevalier d’Oisemont among a crowd of admirers. But, as Gleichen says in reference to her supposed infidelity, “why suppose without proof?” Of Cagliostro’s devotion to her at least there is no doubt. So little is known of her character that it is impossible to speak of it with any certainty; but considering the admiration that all agree she inspired and the numerous temptations she had to desert him when fortune turned against him, the fact that she stuck to him to the end is a pretty strong argument in favour of both her fidelity and affection.
Owing to her girlish appearance, the age of the lovely Countess was a subject of considerable speculation. It is said, though with what truth cannot be stated, that “she occasionally spoke of a son who was a captain in the service of the Dutch government.” As this made her at least forty when she did not appear to be twenty, a credulous public was ready to see in her a living witness to the efficacy of her husband’s rejuvenating powders and elixir of life. De Luchet, who is responsible for the story, asserts that she added to her age expressly to advertise Cagliostro’s quack-medicines.[27]
Like Saint-Germain’s valet, she was also credited with a share of her husband’s supernatural endowments. According to certain unauthenticated information, she was the Grand Mistress of the Isis lodge for women, which among other conditions of membership included a subscription of one hundred louis. This lodge is said to have been composed of thirty-six ladies of rank, who joined it for the purpose of being taught magic by the wife of Cagliostro. The report widely circulated by de Luchet, of the obscene character of the “evocations,” is devoid of the least authenticity. It is doubtful, indeed, whether such a lodge ever existed at all. Madame de Genlis, who figures in de Luchet’s list of members, never so much as mentions the Cagliostros in her memoirs.
VI
Needless to say, Cagliostro did not fail to turn the prodigious furore he created to the account of Egyptian Masonry. Not long after his arrival in Paris a lodge was established at the residence of one of his followers in a room specially set apart for the purpose and furnished, says the Inquisition-biographer, “with unparalleled magnificence.” Here from time to time the “seven angels of the Egyptian Paradise, who stand round the throne of God—Anaël, Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, Uriel, Zobriachel, and Hanachiel” (with whom the Grand Cophta was a special favourite) “condescended to appear to the faithful.”
Cagliostro also opened another lodge in his own house, when the angels came at the bidding of other members besides the Grand Cophta. It was not long before similar phenomena were witnessed in all the Egyptian lodges. In a remarkable letter of an adept of the lodge at Lyons found in Cagliostro’s papers at the time of his arrest in Rome, the writer, in describing a ceremony held there, said that “the first philosopher of the New Testament appeared without being called, and gave the entire assembly, prostrate before the blue cloud in which he appeared, his blessing. Moreover” (adds the writer), “two great prophets and the legislator of Israel have given us similar convincing signs of their good-will.”
It is from Cagliostro’s ability “to transmit his powers,” as it was termed, that the singular phenomena of modern spiritualism were developed. In reality it was nothing more or less than the discovery of the “psychic”—the word must serve for want of a better—properties latent in every human being, and which in many are capable of a very high degree of development. This discovery, till then unimagined, was the secret of the veneration in which Cagliostro was regarded by his followers.
Notwithstanding the very high development to which Cagliostro’s own “psychic” powers had now attained, one gathers the impression from his own utterances that he never completely understood them. A link between the old conception of magic and the new theosophical theories, there are many indications that he regarded the phenomena he performed as direct manifestations of divine power. In an age of unbelief he always spoke of God with the greatest respect, even in circles in which it was the fashion to decry the goodness as well as the existence of the Supreme Being. Like all the mystics of the eighteenth century, he was deistic. “All duty, according to him,” says Georgel, “was based on the principle: Never do to others what you would not wish them to do to you.” One of the first things seen on entering his house in Paris was a slab of black marble on which was engraved in gold letters Pope’s Universal Prayer.
Historians who have been inclined to treat him leniently as the loyal agent of a revolutionary sect are horrified that he “should have effaced the dignity of the enthusiast behind the trickeries of the necromancer.” Louis Blanc, who preached a perpetual crusade against thrones and altars, and despised occultism, declares that Cagliostro’s phenomena “cast suspicion on his own ideals, and were a veritable crime against the cause he proclaimed to be holy, and which there was no necessity to associate with shameful falsehoods.”