Whether or no Morande’s perception had been blunted by over-taxing his imagination in the attempt to discredit his enemy, he interpreted Cagliostro’s sarcasm literally. Afraid to accept the challenge, but tempted by the 5,000 guineas, he suggested “that the test should take place in public, and that some other carnivorous animal should be substituted for the pig fattened on arsenic.” But this suggestion, which revealed his cowardice by reducing the culinary duel to a farce, gave his adversary an opportunity he was quick to seize.
“You refuse to come yourself to the lunch to which I invite you,” wrote Cagliostro in a letter to the Public Advertiser which recalls one of Voltaire’s, “and suggest as a substitute some other carnivorous animal? But that was not my proposal. Such a guest would only very imperfectly represent you. Where would you find a carnivorous animal which amongst its own species is what you are amongst men? It is not your representative, but yourself, with whom I wish to treat. The custom of combat by champions has long gone out of fashion, and even if I allowed you to restore it, honour would forbid me to contend with the champion you offer. A champion should not have to be dragged into the arena, but enter it willingly; and however little you may know of animals, you must be aware that you cannot find one flesh-eating or grass-eating that would be your champion.”
To this letter the unscrupulous agent of the French Court dared not reply. The man he had been hired to defame with his venomous pen had the laugh on his side. The public, moreover, were beginning to detect the mercenary hireling in the detractor, and as the gallery had ceased to be amused Morande, to avoid losing what reputation he possessed, suddenly ceased his attacks, apologizing to his readers for “having entertained them so long with so futile a subject.”
Nevertheless, though the victory remained with Cagliostro, he had received a mortal wound. The poisoned pigs of the Arabians were not more destructive than the poisoned pen of Theveneau de Morande. The persistency of his attacks, the ingenuity of his detraction, were more effective than the most irrefutable proof. His articles, in spite of their too evident hostility, their contradictions, their statements either unverifiable or based on the testimony of persons whose reputations alone made it worthless, created a general feeling that the man whom they denounced was an impostor. The importance of the paper in which they appeared, quoted by other papers, all of Europe, served to confirm this impression. Thus the world, whose conclusions are formed by instinct rather than reason, forgetting that it had ridiculed as improbable Cagliostro’s own story of his life, accepted the amazing and still more improbable past that Morande “unmasked” without reservation. Nor did the Court of Versailles and its friends, nor all the forces of law and order which, threatened everywhere, made common cause with the threatened French monarchy, fail to circulate and confirm by every means in their power the statements of Morande. As if the stigma which the Countess de Lamotte and the Parliament, for two totally different reasons, had cast upon the reputation of Marie Antoinette was to be obliterated by blighting Cagliostro’s!
The deeper an impression, the more ineradicable it becomes. Within a quarter of a century the man whom Morande had called a cheat, an impostor, and a scoundrel had become on the page of history on which his memory is imprisoned the “Arch-quack of the eighteenth century,” “a liar of the first magnitude,” “an unparalleled impostor.”
But in the curious mass of coincidence and circumstantial evidence on which the popular conception of Cagliostro has been based, ingenious and plausible though it is, there is one little fact which history has overlooked and which Morande was careful to ignore. In turning Cagliostro into Giuseppe Balsamo, the fantastic idealist-enthusiast into the vagabond forger, “the charlatan,” as Queen’s friend Besenval describes him, “who never took a sou from a soul, but lived honourably and paid scrupulously what he owed,” into the vulgar souteneur, Morande, by no trick of the imagination, with all the cunning calumnies of the French Court, and the so-called “confession” wrung from its victim by the Inquisition, to aid him, could not succeed in making the two resemble one another. Yet it is on the word of this journalist-bravo, hired by the French Ministry to defame an innocent man whose unanimous acquittal of a crime in which he had been unjustly implicated was believed by Marie Antoinette to be tantamount to her own conviction, that Cagliostro has been branded as one of the most contemptible blackguards in history.
Surely it is time to challenge an opinion so fraudulently supported and so arbitrarily expressed? The age of calumny is past. The frenzied hatreds and passions that, like monstrous maggots, so to speak, infested the dying carcass of the old régime are extinct, or at least have lost their force. We can understand the emotions they once stirred so powerfully without feeling them. In taking the sting from the old hate Time has given new scales to justice. We no longer weigh reputations by the effects of detraction, but by its cause.
The evidence on which Morande’s diabolically ingenious theories are based has already been examined in the early chapters of this book. It requires no effort of the imagination to surmise what the effect would be on a jury to-day if their decision depended upon the evidence of a witness who, as Brissot says, “regarded calumny as a trade, and moral assassination as a sport.”
III
The campaign against Cagliostro was by no means confined to defamation. Morande assailed not only his character, but his person.