“The Chevalier, owing to his own private affairs, being obliged to undertake a private journey, I proceeded alone to Rome, provided with a letter of credit on the banking house of Signor Bellone. In the capital of the Christian world I resolved upon keeping the strictest incognito. One morning, as I was shut up in my apartment, endeavouring to improve myself in the Italian language, my valet de chambre introduced to my presence the secretary of Cardinal Orsini, who requested me to wait on his Eminence. I repaired at once to his palace and was received with the most flattering civility. The Cardinal often invited me to his table and procured me the acquaintance of several cardinals and Roman princes, amongst others, Cardinals York and Ganganelli, who was afterwards Pope Clement XIV. Pope Rezzonico, who then filled the papal chair, having expressed a desire of seeing me, I had the honour of frequent private interviews with his Holiness.
“I was then (1770) in my twenty-second year, when by chance I met a young lady of quality, Seraphina Feliciani, whose budding charms kindled in my bosom a flame which sixteen years of marriage have only served to strengthen. It is that unfortunate woman, whom neither her virtues, her innocence, nor her quality of stranger could save from the hardships of a captivity as cruel as it is unmerited.”
From this stage of his Odyssey, beyond citing as references certain persons by whom he was known in the various countries through which he passed, Cagliostro was very reticent as to his doings. From Rome he arrived at Strasburg at a bound, whence he proceeded to his imprisonment in the Bastille with almost equal speed. His confession, rendering as it did his country and parentage more mysterious than ever, was received with derision. The credulous public, which had swallowed so easily all the extravagant stories concerning his supernatural powers refused to believe in this fantastic account of a mysterious childhood passed in Mecca and Medina, of caravans and pyramids, of tolerant Muphtis and benignant Grand Masters of Malta. It was not that the credulity of the eighteenth century had its limit but that calumny had mesmerized it, so to speak. Cagliostro’s prestige had been submerged in the Necklace Affair; the blight of the Bastille had fallen on the fame of the Grand Cophta and all his works.
As the manner in which he stated his ignorance of his birth seemed to leave it to be inferred that he knew more than he wished to say, it was determined to give him a father. While his enemies agreed with the Countess de Lamotte that he was the son of a Neapolitan coachman, his friends declared him to be the offspring of the illicit loves of the Grand Master Pinto and a princess of Trebizond. To account for the meeting of this singular pair it was gravely asserted that a Maltese galley had captured a Turkish pleasure-boat with several young ladies of distinction on board, one of whom had exchanged hearts with Pinto, who, prevented by his vow of celibacy from making her his wife, had sent her back to her disconsolate parents, and that to frustrate their rage at the condition in which she had returned she had caused her child as soon as it was born to be spirited away to Arabia, which accounted for the mysterious warning Acharat had received from the black slave “to beware of Trebizond.”
Ridicule, however, soon disposed of this agreeable fable, and substituted instead the popular Balsamo legend in which just as much as it has pleased subsequent biographers to accept of Cagliostro’s confession has been included. As to whether he spoke the truth wholly or partly or not at all, the present writer, confronted with his mysterious and fantastic character on the one hand and the assertions based on the prejudice of a century on the other, is unable to express any opinion. It seems, however, hard to believe that any man placed in so serious a situation as Cagliostro, and one which, moreover, had thoroughly shaken his courage, would have ventured to invent a story calculated to increase the suspicion it was his object to allay. To the present generation, accustomed by the press to infinitely greater improbabilities, Cagliostro’s adventures in Mecca and Medina have at least lost the air of incredibility.
IV
As may be surmised from the cursory account of the Diamond Necklace Affair already given, Cagliostro had no difficulty in proving his innocence. The mere comparison of the dates of the various incidents of the imbroglio with his own whereabouts at the time was sufficient to vindicate him.
Throughout the whole of 1784, while the Cardinal was corresponding, as he supposed, with the Queen, meeting her in the park of Versailles, and purchasing the necklace, Cagliostro was in Bordeaux and Lyons. He did not arrive in Paris till January 30, 1785; it was on February 1 that the Cardinal gave the necklace to Madame de Lamotte to hand to the Queen. Accordingly, if Cagliostro had ever even seen the necklace, it could only have been between January 30 and February 1 when Böhmer had already obtained the Cardinal’s guarantee in exchange for his precious jewel. This, however, he denied. “It was not,” he said, “till a fortnight before the Cardinal was arrested that he informed me for the first time of the transaction about the necklace.”
But Cagliostro was not content with merely establishing his innocence. Madame de Lamotte’s attack on his character had deeply wounded him in his most sensitive spot—his vanity—and pride would not suffer him to ignore her gibes.
She had described him as “an arch empiric, a mean alchemist, a dreamer on the philosopher’s stone, a false prophet, and a profaner of the true religion.”