“I quitted the Bastille,” he says, “about half-past eleven in the evening. The night was dark, the quarter in which I resided but little frequented. What was my surprise, then, to hear myself acclaimed by eight or ten thousand persons. My door was forced open; the courtyard, the staircase, the rooms were crowded with people. I was carried straight to the arms of my wife. At such a moment my heart could not contain all the feelings which strove for mastery in it. My knees gave way beneath me. I fell on the floor unconscious. With a shriek my wife sank into a swoon. Our friends pressed around us, uncertain whether the most beautiful moment of our life would not be the last. The anxiety spread from one to the other, the noise of the drums was no longer heard. A sad silence followed the delirious joy. I recovered. A torrent of tears streamed from my eyes, and I was able at last, without dying, to press to my heart ... I will say no more. Oh, you privileged beings to whom heaven has made the rare and fatal gift of an ardent soul and a sensitive heart, you who have experienced the delights of a first love, you alone will understand me, you alone will appreciate what after ten months of torture the first moment of bliss is like!”
Both Cagliostro and the Cardinal were obliged to show themselves at the windows of their respective houses before the crowds, which were cheering them and hissing the name of the Queen, could be induced to disperse.
To Marie Antoinette, whose popularity was for ever blasted by the trial, the verdict of the Parliament was an insult—as it was meant to be—which intolerable though it was, she would have been wise to have borne in silence. But it was her fate to the last to hold the honour of the woman higher than the majesty of the Queen. Having made the blunder of arresting the Cardinal and suffering the Parliament to try him, the King, advised by her, now committed the folly of showing his resentment of the verdict, which had after all, in the eye of the law, cleared his consort of complicity in the swindle. On June 2, the day after his release from the Bastille, Rohan was stripped of all his Court dignities and functions, and exiled to one of his abbeys in Auvergne. At the same time, Cagliostro was also ordered to leave Paris with his wife within a week, and France within three.
The news no sooner became known than an immense concourse of people flocked to manifest their disapproval in front of the house of the Grand Cophta. But if he mistook their demonstration of hatred of the Queen as a sign of sympathy for himself, popularity under such conditions was too fraught with danger for him to take any pleasure in it. Terrified lest the Government should seize the opportunity of thrusting him back into the Bastille, he came out on the balcony of his house and entreated the mob to withdraw quietly, and then hurriedly left Paris.
He went first to Passy, whither he was followed by a small band of his most faithful adherents, who during the few days he remained there mounted guard in the house in which he had taken shelter. A fortnight later he embarked from Boulogne with his wife for England. Upwards of five thousand people are said to have witnessed his departure, many of whom demanded and received his farewell blessing on their knees. France, on a page of whose history he had indelibly printed his name, never saw him more.
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There is an old and uncorroborated report that he who had always been so punctilious in the discharge of his liabilities left Paris without paying his rent. It appears to have arisen from the action that he afterwards brought against the magistrate Chesnon and de Launay, the governor of the Bastille, to recover property valued at 100,000 livres which he declared had been stolen from his house during his imprisonment and for which he sought to hold them responsible. His failure to substantiate the charge gave it the appearance of having been trumped up. Whether it had any basis in fact it is impossible to say, but there can be no doubt from the manner in which the police turned his house upside down at the time he and his wife were arrested, as well as from the carelessness with which the official seals were affixed, that many valuable articles might easily have been spirited away in the confusion by unscrupulous servants and even by the police themselves.
If Cagliostro, however, failed to pay his rent the proprietor of the house certainly took the matter very lightly. “His house,” says Lenôtre, “remained closed till the Revolution. In 1805 the doors were opened for the first time in eighteen years when the owner sold the Grand Cophta’s furniture by auction.” Surely a very long time to wait to indemnify oneself for unpaid rent?
A curious interest attaches to this house, which is still standing, though long since shorn of its splendour in the days when the Cardinal and the aristocracy of the old régime came to assist at Cagliostro’s magic séances. Yet in the meantime it has not been without a history. In 1855 the doors of the gateway were removed during some process of repair and replaced by doors which had formerly done service at the Temple where the Royal Family were incarcerated after the fall of the monarchy. They may be still seen with their heavy bolts and huge locks.
What a fatality—the doors of Marie Antoinette’s prison closing Cagliostro’s house! History has her irony as well as her romance.