(From an old print)
Compromised by the dangerous manner in which Gordon had taken up his cause, Cagliostro hastened to disclaim all connection with him. In his letter to the Public Advertiser, in which he described his interview with Barthélemy, he referred to the ambassador, the Baron de Breteuil, and the King of France in terms of the greatest respect. Breteuil, however, did not forget him. A month later Barthélemy called in person upon him with a warrant signed by the King’s own hand, permitting him to return to France.
Cagliostro received it with profuse thanks, but he did not dare to avail himself of the privilege it accorded him.
“It is but natural,” he said, “for a man who has been nine months in the Bastille without cause, and on his discharge receives for damages an order of exile, to startle at shadows and to perceive a snare in everything that surrounds him.”
So suspicious did he become that when a friend, who was showing him the sights of London, suggested “an excursion down the Thames as far as Greenwich,” he at once scented danger.
“I did not know who to trust,” he says, “and I remembered the history of a certain Marquis de Pelleport and a certain Dame Drogard.”[39]
Needless to say, he was careful not to write any more letters or pamphlets “with a freedom rather republican.” Nevertheless he was a marked man, and Fate was getting ready her net to catch him.
II
Had Cagliostro come to England before his fame had been tarnished by the Necklace Affair, he would in all probability have been lionized by the best society as he was in France. But the unsavoury notoriety he had acquired, the hundred and one reports that were circulated to his discredit and believed, for people always listen more readily to the evil that is said of one than to the good, closed the doors of the aristocracy to him. Instead of floating on the crest of the wave he was caught in the under-current. With few exceptions the acquaintances he made were more calculated to lower him still further in the esteem of respectable society, than to clear him of the suspicion that attached to him. The mere association of his name with Lord George Gordon’s would alone have excited mistrust. But the injury he received from the questionable manner in which Gordon sought to befriend him was trifling compared with the interest that the Editor of the Courier de l’Europe took in him.
Theveneau de Morande, to give this individual a name, was one of the greatest blackguards of his time—the last quarter of the eighteenth century produced many who equalled him in infamy but none who surpassed him. The son of a lawyer at Arnay-le-Duc in Burgundy, where he was born in 1741, Theveneau de Morande “was,” as M. Paul Robiquet truly says in his brilliant study of him, “from the day of his birth to the day of his death utterly without scruple.”[40] When a boy he was arrested for theft in a house of ill-fame. Compelled to enlist or be sent to prison he chose the former alternative, but did not serve long. In response to his entreaties his father obtained his discharge on condition that he would reform. Instead, however, of returning home as he promised, Morande went to Paris, where his dissolute life led him to the prison of For-l’Evêque. Hereupon his father solicited the favour of a lettre de cachet by means of which he was confined in a convent at Armentières.