This Masonic body was composed of members of Swedenborgian and Martinist lodges affiliated to Illuminism. Its character was at once occult and political. On the detection and suppression of the Illuminés, in 1784, the Philalètes, organized by Savalette de Langes, a revolutionary mystic, sought to finish in France the work which Weishaupt had begun in Germany. As an old Illuminé, Savalette de Langes was well acquainted with Cagliostro, and the importance he attached to him was so great that he desired to incorporate the sect of Egyptian Masonry in that of the Philalètes. He accordingly summoned a congress of Philalètes to which Cagliostro was invited to explain his doctrine.
The ambitions and aspirations of the Grand Cophta had kept pace with the steadily rising fortunes of Egyptian Masonry. He was quick to perceive the immense advantage to be derived from a union of the organization of which he was the head with that of the Philalètes, who were one of the most numerous and influential of the Masonic sects. But he had no intention of playing second fiddle to them, and in replying to their invitation he assumed that they were prepared to acknowledge the superiority of the Egyptian Rite. So with pompous condescension, which was as astute as it was bizarre, he informed them that “having deigned to extend to them his hand and consented to cast a ray of light upon the darkness of their Temple, he requested them as a sign of their submission to the truths of Egyptian Masonry to burn their archives.”
Though taken aback by such an answer, the Philalètes did not abandon the hope of coming to some satisfactory arrangement. But Cagliostro proved too clever for them, and in the series of interviews and negotiations which followed they were completely overawed and over-reached. For a moment it seemed as if Freemasonry in general was to be restored to “its original Egyptian character,” and that Cagliostro would realize his sublime ideal, perform the greatest of all his prodigies, and “evoke” the Revolution, which the noblest minds in Europe had dreamt of for a hundred years.
But life has her great ironies as well as her little ones. Suddenly, to the rapt enthusiast on the Pisgah-peak of his ambition the shadow of the Revolution did indeed appear. Not the benign genius it was fondly imagined to be before 1789: herald of freedom and the golden age; but the monstrous demon of calumny, hatred and terror: the shadow of the Revolution as it was to be, claiming its victims in advance.
Before the Philalètes and the Egyptian Masons could effect their union, the Diamond Necklace Affair was to destroy all Cagliostro’s dreams and projects.
CHAPTER VI
THE DIAMOND NECKLACE AFFAIR
I
Few subjects have been more written about, more discussed than the Affair of the Diamond Necklace. The defences alone of those involved in this cause célèbre fill two big volumes. All the memoirs of the period contain more or less detailed accounts of it; in every history of France it occupies a chapter to itself; and as it suggests romance even more than history, novelists and dramatists alike have often exercised their imagination upon its entanglements.
To re-tell in detail this romance, to rehearse this drama in which the happiness and reputations of all who figure in it were destroyed, does not come within the scope of this book. For the chief interest it excites is focussed on the star—the Comtesse de Lamotte-Valois—who dominates the scene from first to last. It is only in the last act that Cagliostro appears. Nevertheless, the part he played was so important that a brief résumé of the action preceding his appearance is necessary to enable the reader to understand how he came to be involved in the imbroglio.