W. R. H. Trowbridge

“ The beauty of the Countess Cagliostro was also an important element in the success of her husband. She was like a sylph with her fluffy straw-coloured hair, which she wore unpowdered, her large, deep, soft blue eyes, her small and delicately chiselled nose, her full rose-red lips, and a dazzlingly white skin.
“She is an angel in human form,” said Maître Polverit, by whom she was defended when she was imprisoned in the Bastille on the charge of being implicated in the Necklace Affair, “who has been sent on earth to share and soften the days of the Man of Marvels. ”

“ He will make me the richest prince in Europe! These are no mere vagaries of the imagination, madame, but positive facts. Think of all his predictions that have been realized, of all the miraculous cures that he has effected! I repeat he is a most extraordinary, a most sublime man, whose knowledge is only equalled by his goodness. What alms he gives! What good he does! It exceeds all power of imagination. I can assure you he has never asked or received anything from me.”
But Cagliostro did not confine himself solely to seeking the philosopher’s stone for the Cardinal. ”

“ Least of all would the stupid mob that watched the victims doomed to the guillotine “spit into the basket,” as it termed in ferocious jest the fall of the heads beneath the axe, have made any distinction between the virtuous and innocent Louis XVI and Joseph II, or the Empress Catherine, had it been possible to arraign them likewise at the bar of the Revolutionary Tribunal. The gratitude of the people is even less to be depended on than that of princes. But God was not to be “freed” in a day. Seventy-five years elapsed between Freedom’s conception in the Regency and birth in the Revolution. ”

“ It took more than half a century to cleanse the honour of Marie Antoinette of all suspicion of connivance in the theft of the necklace.
The mistrust that mystery and magic always inspire made Cagliostro with his fantastic personality an easy target for calumny. After having been riddled with abuse till he was unrecognizable, prejudice, the foster-child of calumny, proceeded to lynch him, so to speak. For over one hundred years his character has dangled on the gibbet of infamy, upon which the sbirri of tradition have inscribed a curse on any one who shall attempt to cut him down. ”

“ But life has her great ironies as well as her little ones. Suddenly, to the rapt enthusiast on the Pisgah-peak of his ambition the shadow of the Revolution did indeed appear. Not the benign genius it was fondly imagined to be before 1789: herald of freedom and the golden age; but the monstrous demon of calumny, hatred and terror: the shadow of the Revolution as it was to be, claiming its victims in advance.
Before the Philalètes and the Egyptian Masons could effect their union, the Diamond Necklace Affair was to destroy all Cagliostro’s dreams and projects. ”

“ Scattered broadcast over Paris and all France it created an immense sensation. Directed against Breteuil, whose unpopularity, already great, it increased, it assailed more or less openly the monarchical principle itself. Of all the pamphlets which from the Necklace Affair to the fall of the Bastille attacked the royal authority none are so dignified or so eloquent. The longing for freedom, which was latent in the bosom of every man and which the philosophers and the secret societies had been doing their best to fan into a flame, was revealed in every line. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Thus to give the Parliament the power of determining the guilt or innocence of the Cardinal, which was in reality that of the Queen herself, was to take an acknowledged enemy for a judge.
[Pg 227]
When the news of the Cardinal’s arrest reached the Parliament, one of the most popular members—he afterwards perished on the guillotine like most of them—cried out, rubbing his hands, “Grand and joyful business! A Cardinal in a swindle! The Queen implicated in a forgery! Filth on the crook and on the sceptre! What a triumph for ideas of liberty! How important for the Parliament!” ”

“ Never has the belief in the supernatural been more flourishing and more invincible than at the present. Side by side with the positivism of modern science marches the mysticism of the occult, equally confident and undaunted, and equally victorious. Not a link in the chain that connects the phenomena of the mediums and adepts of to-day with those of the Chaldaeans has been broken. ”

“ If ever a man had cause to be embittered and to nurse a grievance it was Cagliostro. He had been cast suddenly headlong, through no fault of his own, from the pinnacle of good fortune into the Bastille; accused of another’s crime; arrested with the utmost brutality and treated with outrageous severity; kept in uncertainty of the fate of his wife, who for six months, unknown to him, was confined within fifteen feet of him; he had been an object of ridicule and mockery within, of calumny and detraction without his prison, of which the name alone was sufficient to reduce him to despair ”

“ If he ever asked himself why he should have been selected by the Almighty above the rest of mankind for so great an honour, the frequency of the divine appearances no doubt speedily satisfied his curiosity, for not a day passed during the rest of his life but God descended from Paradise—or if too busy, “sent an angel or saint in His place”—to converse with this remarkably privileged Swede and explain to him the mysteries of Heaven and Hell. ”

“ To the calumnies it gave birth may be traced the hatred which engendered the Reign of Terror.
[Pg 225]
“Calumny,” says M. Chaix d’Est-Ange in his brilliant monograph on the Necklace Affair, “is common to all ages, but it has not always the same force and success. In times when public opinion is indifferent or feeble it is despised and powerless. At other periods more favourable to it, borne on the wings of passion it soars aloft strong, confident, and triumphant. If ever it was a power it was in the eighteenth century.” ”

“ What followed on the arrival of the jailers is not known, but it is not likely that the prisoner was handled with gloves.
As a sequel to that frantic struggle for life and liberty, Cagliostro was secretly sent “in the middle of the night” to the Castle of San Leo, near Montefeltro. The situation of this stronghold is one of the most singular in Europe. The enormous rock, whose summit it crowns, rising on three sides precipitously from an almost desert plain, is like a monument commemorative of some primeval convulsion of nature. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As soon as the news of his arrest was known there was but a single opinion in the salons of the nobility: “What, arrest the Grand Almoner of France in full pontificals before the whole Court for a bit of chiffon! Send a Rohan and the chief of the clergy to the Bastille! C’est trop!”
The malcontents of the Court recognized in this shameful disgrace the hand of the unpopular minister Breteuil, who was known to be the bitter enemy of the Cardinal. ”

“ Madame Blavatsky and Mrs. Eddy are the latest descendants of Hermes Trismegistus, who whether regarded as man, god, or the personification of all the knowledge of his remote times, is the parent of all the wonder-workers, scientific as well as unscientific, of the world. The prodigies of these priestesses of theosophy and Christian science, which are the last and most popular manifestations of the marvellous, are no less significant, and much more wonderful because more inexplicable, than those of a Ramsay or a Curie. ”

“ There is something cabalistic in the very sound of the name that, considering the occult phenomena performed by the strange personality who assumed it, is curiously appropriate. As an incognito it is, perhaps, the most suitable ever invented. The name fits the man like a glove; and, recalling the mystery in which his career was wrapped, one involuntarily wonders if it has ever been cleared up. In a word, what was Cagliostro really? Charlatan, adventurer, swindler, whose impostures were finally exposed by the ever-memorable Necklace Affair in which he was implicated? ”

“ 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. ”

“ As the establishment of Egyptian Masonry was the object he had in view, he no doubt believed with his century that the end justifies the means. But to those who shape their conduct according to this passionate maxim it becomes a two-edged sword that seldom fails to wound him who handles it. The end that is justified by the means becomes of necessity of secondary importance, and eventually, perhaps, of no importance at all. This was the case with Cagliostro’s ideal. ”

“ Now Warsaw society, like that of Mittau, was on the most intimate terms with the great world of St. Petersburg. Had Cagliostro masqueraded in Russia as a bogus Prince de Santa Cruce or a swindling Prussian colonel, or had his wife excited the jealousy of the Empress Catherine, the fact would have been known in Warsaw—if not before he arrived there, certainly before he left. Of one thing we may be absolutely sure, the anonymous author of Cagliostro démasqué à Varsovie would not have failed to mention a scandal so much to the point. ”

“ Though taken aback by such an answer, the Philalètes did not abandon the hope of coming to some satisfactory arrangement. But Cagliostro proved too clever for them, and in the series of interviews and negotiations which followed they were completely overawed and over-reached. For a moment it seemed as if Freemasonry in general was to be restored to “its original Egyptian character,” and that Cagliostro would realize his sublime ideal, perform the greatest of all his prodigies, and “evoke” the Revolution, which the noblest minds in Europe had dreamt of for a hundred years. ”