Such a widely circulated journal naturally had great influence. During the American War of Independence its ever-increasing success alarmed the English Cabinet, which, instead of suppressing it, foolishly endeavoured to circumvent the laws respecting the liberty of the Press by placing an embargo on the bales of the paper destined for export. But Swinton parried this blow by causing it to be printed simultaneously at Boulogne. “Whereupon,” says Brissot, “the English Government resigned itself to the inevitable and suffered the Courier de l’Europe to continue to injure England under the protection of English law itself.” Throughout the war which ended so humiliatingly for England, as Vergennes expressed it, “the gazette of Latour was worth a hundred spies” to France.
Under the editorship of Morande, who succeeded Serres de Latour, the journal, as may be imagined, more than maintained its reputation. “In it,” says Brissot, “he tore to pieces the most estimable people, spied on all the French who lived in or visited London, and manufactured, or caused to be manufactured, articles to ruin any one he feared.”
Such was the man, and such the weapon, that the Court of Versailles, which had frequently utilized both before, now employed to destroy Cagliostro.[41]
Morande, who had now become the chief of the brigade of police spies, which when he himself had been their quarry he had so loudly denounced in the English press, opened fire, in obedience to his orders, on September 1, 1786. For three months he bombarded Cagliostro unceasingly in a long series of articles that befouled, calumniated, and ridiculed him with a devilish cleverness. Like the Countess de Lamotte, he did not hesitate to deny his own statements when others could be made more serviceable. Thus, after affirming “Nature’s unfortunate child” to be the son of a coachman of the Neapolitan Duke of Castropignani, he declared him to be the valet of the alchemist Gracci, known as the Cosmopolite, from whom he had stolen all his secrets, which he had afterwards exploited in Spain, Italy, and Russia under various titles: sometimes a count, at others a marquis, here a Spanish colonel, there a Prussian—but always and everywhere an impostor.
In this way rambling from article to article, from calumny to calumny, without knowing where he was going, so to speak, Morande finally arrived at Giuseppe Balsamo—as described at the beginning of the book. The discovery of Balsamo was a veritable trouvaille. It enabled Morande to tack on to the variegated career of the Sicilian scoundrel all that he had hitherto affirmed of Cagliostro’s past life without appearing to contradict himself. Once on Balsamo’s track, he never lost scent of him. He ferreted out or invented all the stories concerning the Balsamos: their marriage, the manner in which they had lived, their forgeries, blackmail, poverty, licentiousness, imprisonment—everything, in fact, that could damage Cagliostro and his wife. He found people, moreover, to swear to the truth of all he said, or rather he asserted it, and on the strength of their accusations caused Cagliostro to be sued for debts incurred in the name of Balsamo years before. He collected all the hostile reports of the enemies the Grand Cophta had made in his travels through Europe and afterwards in the Necklace Affair, and re-edited them with the precision of an historian and the malice of a personal enemy. Then, after having done him all the injury he could and given the French Government full value for its money, Morande with brazen effrontery proposed to Cagliostro that he should purchase the silence of the Courier!
THEVENAU DE MORANDE
But Cagliostro was not the man—to his credit, be it said—to ignore the feigned indignation of the libellist who had been hired to ruin him. Aided by Thilorier,[42] his brilliant counsel in the Necklace Affair, who happened to be in England, the wonder-worker published a Letter to the English People, in which he flung in the face of the blackmailer all the atrocious acts of his own past. Morande, however, aware that any effort on his part to clear himself of these accusations would be useless, sought to distract attention from the subject by daring Cagliostro to disprove the charges made in the Courier. At the same time he thought to stab him to silence by covering with ridicule a statement which he asserted Cagliostro had made to the effect that “the lions and tigers in the forests of Medina were poisoned by the Arabians by devouring hogs fattened on arsenic for the purpose.”
The laughter which this reply aroused evidently stung Cagliostro to the quick, and to refute Morande’s implied accusation of charlatanism, he wrote the following letter to the Public Advertiser, in which, after some preliminary sarcasms, he said—
“Of all the fine stories that you have invented about me, the best is undoubtedly that of the pig fattened on arsenic which poisoned the lions, the tigers, and the leopards in the forest of Medina. I am now going, sir jester, to have a joke at your expense. In physics and chemistry, arguments avail little, persiflage nothing; it is experiment alone that counts. Permit me, then, to propose to you a little experiment which will divert the public either at your expense or mine. I invite you to lunch with me on November 9 (1786). You shall supply the wine and all the accessories, I on the other hand will provide but a single dish—a little pig fattened according to my plan. Two hours before the lunch you shall see it alive, and healthy, and I will not come near it till it is served on the table. You shall cut it in four parts, and, having chosen the portion that you prefer, you shall give me what you think proper. The next day one of four things will occur: either we shall both be dead, or we shall neither of us be dead; or I shall be dead and you will not; or you will be dead and I shall not. Of these four chances I give you three, and I will bet you 5,000 guineas that the day after the lunch you are dead and that I am alive and well.”