“He desired me,” says Cagliostro, who has described his arrest in detail, “to deliver up my keys, and compelled me to open my bureau, which I did. There were in it several of my remedies, amongst the rest six bottles of a precious cordial. Brugnière seized on whatever he took a fancy to, and the catchpoles he had brought with him followed his example. The only favour I asked was that I might be permitted to go in my own carriage to the place of my destination. This was refused. I then requested to be allowed the use of a cab; this also was denied. Proud of making a show of his prey to the thronging multitude, Brugnière insisted on my walking part of the way; and although I was perfectly submissive and did not make the least shadow of resistance he laid hold of me by the collar. In this way, closely surrounded by four sbirri, I was dragged along the Boulevards as far as the Rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth, where a cab appearing, I was mercifully thrust into it and driven the rest of the way to the Bastille.”
The admiration amounting almost to veneration that Cagliostro inspired was shared only by his followers—of whom, however, he could count several thousands, it is said, in Paris. On the other hand, the curiosity which he had excited was general and anything but reverent. The exaggerated enthusiasm of his followers, the incredible stories related of him, and the extreme seriousness with which he took himself made him ridiculous. If he was the chief subject of conversation in all classes in Paris, it was as a subject of mirth. In the drama of the Necklace Affair it was to him that the public looked to supply the comic relief. He was by common consent the clown, the funny man of the play, so to speak. He had but to appear on the scene to raise a laugh, his slightest gesture produced a roar, when he spoke he convulsed the house. But to Cagliostro his rôle was very far from comic. The consciousness of innocence is not necessarily a consolation in adversity. It poisons as often as it stimulates—according to the temperament. Cagliostro was utterly crushed by the blow that had fallen on him. The gloom of the Bastille, which the popular imagination haunted by old legends made deeper than it was, seemed to chill his very soul. He who had faced with “a front of brass” all the previous dangers and humiliations of his agitated existence was for the first time cowed. Illuminist, Egyptian Mason, Mystic Regenerator of Mankind—Revolutionist, in a word—he had no confidence in the justice of the power into whose hands he had fallen. He believed that he would be forgotten in his dungeon like so many others.
The severity with which he was treated was calculated to justify his fears.
“Were I left to choose,” he says, “between an ignominious death, and six months in the Bastille, I would say without hesitation, ‘Lead me on to the scaffold.’”
For five months he was not only in ignorance, but purposely misinformed, as to what was transpiring without his prison. During this time the beautiful Countess, less rigorously guarded, was confined near him without his knowledge. As soon as Brugnière had carried off her husband, Chesnon and the police, who had remained behind after searching for incriminating documents which they did not find, attached seals to the house and carried her off too, “half dead with fear,” to the Bastille. In response to Cagliostro’s repeated inquiries as to whether she shared his captivity, as he feared, his jailers “swore by their honour and God that she was not in the Bastille.”
This deception was even carried to the length of permitting him to write letters to her which never reached her, and to receive replies which she never wrote, “in which she assured him that she was taking steps to restore him to freedom.” As the Countess Cagliostro could not write, a friend was supposed to write the letters for her. In the same way if he wanted clothes or linen he would dispatch a line to his wife, and an official would go to his house and fetch what he required, bringing back a letter from the Countess calculated to make him believe that they had been sent by her.
At the same time the Cardinal was living in almost as much comfort as if he had been in his own palace. He occupied a spacious apartment, had three of his servants to wait on him, and saw as many people as he wished. The number of his visitors was so great that the drawbridge of the Bastille was kept lowered throughout the day. On one occasion he even “gave a dinner of twenty covers.”
As money—and Cagliostro had plenty of it—like rank, was able to purchase equal consideration in the Bastille, the contrast in the treatment of the two prisoners almost warrants the supposition that the jailers derived no little amusement from making sport of the sufferings of one who was alleged to be immune from those ills to which mere clay is prone. There are many people to whom a weeping Pierrot is as funny as a laughing one.
It was not till his despondency, on discovering as he eventually did that his wife was a prisoner like himself, threatened to affect his reason that the severity of his confinement was relaxed. To prevent him from committing suicide, Thiroux de Crosne, the minister who had issued the warrant for his arrest, advised de Launay, the Governor of the Bastille, “to choose a warder, likely to be sympathetic, to sleep in his cell.” He was also permitted, like the other prisoners, to have exercise and to select a lawyer to defend him.
The first use he made of this privilege was to petition the Parliament—“to release his wife from a dungeon, where a man himself had occasion for all his strength, all his fortitude, and all his resignation to struggle against despair.”