The Bastille was too massive a cage for so delicate a bird. Implicated without the shadow of a reason in the Necklace Affair the Countess Cagliostro began to imagine herself ill. She pined for her fine house, her admirers, her diamonds, her black mare Djérid, and the companionship of the man to whom she owed all that spelt happiness in her inoffensive, doll-like existence. Moved to pity less by the petition of Cagliostro than by the pleading of her lawyer, Polverit, and the eloquence of d’Epremenil, the most brilliant member of the Parliament, that body was finally persuaded to set her free without a trial after having been imprisoned seven months in the Bastille.
The release of the Countess Cagliostro, to which the Court was bitterly opposed, was the first reverse of the Government in the duel to which it had so foolishly challenged public opinion.
No sooner was the news known than friends and strangers alike came to congratulate her. For more than a week nearly three hundred people came daily to inscribe their names in the visitors’ book kept by the concierge.
“It is the perfection of good style,” says one of the newswriters of the period, “to have made a call on the Countess Seraphina.”
“Even the ‘nymphs’ of the Palais Royal,” says d’Alméras, “discreetly manifested their sympathy with the victim of arbitrary power on recognizing her as she walked one day in the gardens.”
III
Madame de Lamotte in the meantime, utterly undaunted by her imprisonment, was energetically preparing for the trial, which, in spite of all her efforts, was to end in her conviction. Her defence was a tissue of lies from beginning to end. She contradicted herself with brazen effrontery, accused Cagliostro, the Cardinal, and at last the Queen, of swindling Böhmer of the necklace. She did not hesitate to defame herself by declaring that she had been the mistress of the Cardinal—which was as false as the rest of her evidence—and, as each lie became untenable, took refuge in another, even admitting that she was lying “to shelter an exalted personage.” In only one thing was she consistent; to the end she asserted her complete innocence. Her object was to confuse the issue and so wriggle herself free.
In the first of her mémoires justificatifs, which were printed and sold in accordance with the legal custom of the day, she boldly charged Cagliostro with the robbery of the necklace. He was represented as an impostor to make him the more easily appear a swindler. To penetrate the mystery in which he had wrapped his origin she invented for him a low and shameful past, which the editor of the Courier de l’Europe and the Inquisition-biographer afterwards merged into Giuseppe Balsamo’s. She ridiculed his cures, and cited the Medical Faculty as witnesses of the deaths he had caused. She declared his disinterestedness and his generosity to be a fraud, and accused him of practising in private the vices he denounced in public. Having stripped him of the last stitch of respectability she proceeded to expose the woman who passed as his wife, and whose liaisons with the Cardinal and others she declared he encouraged. As for the wonders he was said to perform they were not even worthy of the name of tricks; only fools were taken in by them. In fine, to Madame de Lamotte, the Grand Cophta was nothing but “an arch empiric, a mean alchemist, a dreamer on the philosophers stone, a false prophet, and a Jew who had taken to pieces the necklace which he had beguiled the Cardinal, over whom he had gained an incredible influence, to entrust to him, in order to swell a fortune unheard of before.”
This mémoire—the first of many which the various persons implicated in the Affair rained upon the public—was to an impatient world the signal that the battle had begun. Excitement, already at fever heat, was intensified by the boldness, directness and violence of Madame de Lamotte’s denunciation. It was felt that to justify himself Cagliostro would be obliged to clear up the mystery of his past. Never before had the “Grand Coffer,” as he was called by a police official who unwittingly confounded the title and the fortune of the restorer of Egyptian Masonry, roused curiosity to so high a pitch. The recollection of his reputed prodigies gave to his expected self-revelation the character of an evocation, so to speak; and the public, as ready to mock as it had formerly been to respect him, awaited his defence as a sort of magic séance at which all the tricks of necromancy were to be explained.
Cagliostro employed to defend him Thilorier, one of the youngest and most promising advocates of the Parisian bar. Perhaps no cause célèbre in history has ever called forth a more brilliant display of legal talent than the Diamond Necklace Affair. Of all the mémoires or statements that were published by the advocates engaged in the case that of Thilorier created the greatest sensation.