Balsamo

“ Balsamo sighed, himself crushed by the weight of her immense despair.
"Alas, is it your fault, or that of the Creator. Why were you made the angel with the infallible gaze, by whose aid I should make the universe submit? Why is it that you are the one to read a soul through its bodily envelope as one may read a book through a glass! Because you are an angel of purity, Lorenza, and nothing throws a shadow upon your soul. In your radiant and immaculate bosom the divine spark may be enshrined, a place without sullying where it may fitly nestle. You are a seer because you are blameless, Lorenza ”

“ A few days more of this captivity against which I revolt, and I shall no longer feel obliged to you; a few more, and I shall perhaps believe you were in concert with those highwaymen."
"So you honor me with a captaincy of brigands," sneered Balsamo.
"I do not know about that, but I noticed secret signs and peculiar words."
"But," replied the other, losing color, "you will never tell them; never to a living soul? You will bury them in the remotest place in your memory so that they shall die there, smothered." ”

“ Balsamo came a step nearer and bowed to Marie Antoinette.
"So you make a business of foretelling?" said the latter, sipping the milk while regarding the new comer with more curiosity than she liked to betray.
"I make no business of it, but I do foretell, please your royal highness?" was the answer.
"Educated in an enlightened faith, we place faith solely in the mysteries of our religion." ”

“ Have I ever been ill save when you made me feel the petty miseries of your mean human life? I, ill, who you know am the physician to others.”
“At all events, master, here I am,” coldly observed Balsamo. “Let us not waste time.”
“You are a nice one to remind me of that. You force me to dole out what ought to be unmeasured to all human creatures. Yes, I am wasting time: my time, like others, is falling drop by drop into eternity when it ought to be itself eternity.”
“Come, master, let us know what is to be done?” asked the other, working the spring which closed the trap in the floor. ”

“ When he was thirteen years of age, Balsamo's parents determined he should be trained for the priesthood, but he ran away from his school. He was then confined in a Benedictine monastery. He showed a remarkable taste for natural history, and acquired considerable knowledge of the use of drugs ”

“ It was the last of three of a kind, which Balsamo had provided on request of the elder for his experiments.
"Bring that dog to this table," said he to Balsamo, who laid the creature on a marble slab.
Seeming to foresee its doom and having probably already been handled by the dissector, the animal shuddered, wriggled and yelped at contact of the cold stone.
"So you believe in life, since you do in death?" squeaked Althotas. "This dog looks live enough, eh?" ”

“ Tranquillity is denied thee, because of the concupiscence of thy ambition. A profligate and venal career has troubled thy soul with misgivings. Thou hast scorned even the five senses—those golden portals of humanity! Know, O dreamer, that in them alone consists the enjoyment of a finite existence: know that through the virtuous use of those five senses, earthly happiness is attainable! Dost thou still tremble in thy unbelief? Arise, Balsamo, and behold the teachings of eternity!"
As the last sentence resounded in the heart of Cagliostro, up into the air floated the Rosicrucian and the Voice. ”

“ Through Andrea de Taverney I can ascertain all—whether my incorruptible Fritz was bribed and—then, if love is a sham, if science is an error, and fidelity a snare—Balsamo will punish without pity or reservation—like the powerful man smites when he has put aside mercy and preserves but pride. ”

“ There could be no better illustration of the perplexities that confront the biographer of Cagliostro at every stage of his mysterious career than the uncertainty that prevails regarding the career of Giuseppe Balsamo himself. For rightly or wrongly, their identity has so long been taken for granted that the history of one has become indissolubly linked to that of the other. ”

“ With one incision Balsamo separated the vertebral column a couple of inches from the brain, and opened a yawning gash. The body remained unmoving.
"He is an inert animal, icy cold, forever without movement, eh? You say nothing prevails against death? No power can restore even the appearance of life, far less life itself, to this carcass?"
"Only the miracle of Heaven!"
"But Heaven does not do such things. Supreme wisdom kills because there is reason or benefit in the act. An assassin said so, and he was quite right. Nature has an interest in the death. ”

“ For some years he wandered about in different parts of Italy, living by his wits and by cheating. A goldsmith consulted him about a hidden treasure; he pretended to invoke the aid of spirits, frightened the goldsmith, got sixty ounces of gold from him to carry on his incantations, left him in the lurch, and fled to Messina. In that town he discovered an aged aunt who was sick; the aunt died, and left her money to the Church. Balsamo assumed her family name, added a title of nobility, and was known henceforward as the Count Alessandro Cagliostro. ”

“ Thus the imaginative Inquisition-biographer declares it was at Messina, whither he went on leaving Palermo, that Balsamo met the “noble Althotas,” whose power “to dematerialize himself” was, to judge from the last occasion on which he was reported to have been seen in the flesh at Malta, only another way of saying that he was clever in evading the police. ”

“ At last, Count Cagliostro, the chequered "Joseph Balsamo" (born 1743) , who combined alchemy, magic, astrology, sleight of hand, mesmerism, Free Masonry, and remarkable personal accomplishments, that altogether have never since been equalled, burst upon the world. ”

“ Take care, my lord, for the daughter of Maria Theresa is not to be sported with—a woman who holds in hand the destinies of thirty millions of souls. You know no more, or your imagination is exhausted."
Balsamo placed the saucer and the decanter on a bench in the darkest nook of the arbor, which thus resembled a pythoness' cave ”

“ Having gone to Palermo, I succeeded in discovering the old registers of the Parish of Mortarana; and in one of them, under the date of the 29th of July, 1788, I found the entry of the birth of Josephine Balsamo, daughter of Joseph Balsamo and Josephine de la P., subject of the King of France.
Was it Josephine Tascher de la Pagerie, the maiden name of the young wife who was separated from the Vicomte de Beauharnais, and of the future wife of General Bonaparte? I made investigations from this point of view. They required considerable patience ”

“ Sartines rose, trying in vain to dissimulate the agitation to which he was a prey.
“Well, accuse me if you like,” he said: “what does the testimony of a man like you amount to?”
“Take care, my lord,” Balsamo said: “men of no account were very often the very ones who bring others to account. ”

“ Because Lorenza is the superstitious Italian girl who believes that science is a crime and love a sin. Then she is afraid of the sage Balsamo and the loving Joseph. She has been told that to love would destroy her soul; and so she flees from the lover to the confines of the earth. ”

“ I can tell you, my dear guest, that Nicole Legay is not a prude like her mistress and compliments do not frighten her."
Watching the baron's daughter, Balsamo noticed the highest disdain on her beauteous face. He harmonized his features with hers and this pleased her, spite of herself, for she looked at him with less harshness, or, better, with less disquiet.
"This girl, only think," continued the poor noble, chucking the girl's chin with the back of his hand, "was at the nunnery with my daughter and picked up as much schooling. She does not leave her mistress a moment. ”

“ The economists, therefore, not being idiots, will not attack the King, but the man, the public officer, the agent who gambles for his sovereign.”
Sartines tried to shake his wig into the upright but it was no use.
“I am coming to the point, now,” said Balsamo. “In the same way as you know I am the Count of Fenix through your police, I know you are Lord Sartines through mine.” ”

“ CAGLIOSTRO The individual known to history as Comte Cagliostro, or more familiarly as Cagliostro, was of the family name of Balsamo and was received into the Church under the saintly name of Joseph. The familiarity of history is an appanage of greatness in some form. Greatness is in no sense a quality of worth or morality. It simply points to publicity, and if unsuccessful, to infamy. Joseph Balsamo was of poor parentage in the town of Palermo, Sicily, and was born in 1743. ”

“ Indeed, this Balsamo legend is so plausible an explanation of the mystery of Cagliostro’s origin that, for lack of any other, it has satisfied all who are entitled to be regarded as authorities. The evidence, however, on which they have based their belief is circumstantial rather than positive. ”

“ It was an instant before Lord Sartines was master of himself after so sharp an alarm. He almost looked into the muzzle of the firearm, and felt the ring of its cold iron on his forehead.
“My lord,” he said at last. “I have the advantage over you of knowing the kind of man I coped with and I did not take the cautionary measures I should with an ordinary malefactor.”
“You are irritated and you use harsh words,” replied Balsamo. “But you do not see how unjust you are to one who comes to do you a service. ”

“ As for Balsamo, it appears that during his first stay in London, he was convicted no less than ten times of swindling. The result was that he thought it better to be off to Paris, but the faculty of that city refused him permission to practise as a physician. Lorenza having left him, he found means to punish her by imprisoning her for several months at Sainte Pélagie. He then made a trip through the Netherlands and Germany, and suddenly reappeared at Palermo with the name of the Marquis de Pellegrini. ”

“ But as his talent in this respect appears to have been as limited as his knowledge of the occult, it is not surprising that the revenue he derived from the sketches he copied, or from old prints, freshened up and passed off as originals, was precarious.
Love, however, is the great consoler of poverty. About this time Balsamo conceived a violent passion for Lorenza Feliciani, the fourteen-year-old daughter of a “smelter of copper” who lived in an alley close to the Church of the Trinita de’ Pellegrini—one of the poorest quarters of Rome. ”

“ But as Balsamo after having “overrun the whole earth” with Althotas emerges once more into something like reality at Naples, in the company of the renegade priest who had assisted in the fleecing of Marano, it is not unreasonable to suppose that this city and not Messina was his immediate destination on leaving Palermo. ”

“ With a skilled hand he traced a circular incision separating all the flesh and neck muscles. Cleaving to the spine, he thrust his steel between two joints and gave with the maul a sharp, forcible rap. The head rolled on the table, and bounced to the ground. Marat was obliged to pick it up with his moistened hands. Balsamo turned his head not to fill the operator with too much delight. ”

“ To the reader who, knowing little or nothing of Cagliostro, takes up this book with an unbiassed mind, the above objections to the Balsamo legend may seem proof conclusive of its falsity. This would, however, be to go further than I, who attach much greater importance to these doubts than historians are inclined to do, care to admit. They merely show that it is neither right nor excusable to treat as a conviction what is purely a conjecture. ”

“ Madame Balsamo’s father came from Calabria. Her Christian name was Lorenza. The statement that the Countess Cagliostro was likewise called Lorenza and changed her name to Seraphina, by which she was known, is based entirely on supposition. That both were married very young and that neither knew how to write, scarcely calls for comment. Italian women usually married in early girlhood, and very few, if any, of the class to which Seraphina Cagliostro and Lorenza Balsamo belonged could write. ”

“ Lorenza’s honest copper-smelting father and brother are dragged from Rome to join in the swindling operations of herself and husband. The brother is whisked off with them to Malta and Spain, where he is abandoned as an incubus, apparently because he objected to exploit his good looks after the manner of his sister. Then, as it is necessary in some way to account for Cagliostro’s occult powers, Balsamo suddenly takes up the study of alchemy, and in the moments he snatches from the preparation of “beauty salves” and “longevity pills,” picks an occasional pocket. ”

“ As she had but indifferent success, Balsamo, having quarrelled with a painter and decorator by name of Pergolezzi, by whom he had for a few days been employed, assisted her in the infamous rôle of blackmailer.
Their most profitable victim appears to have been “a Quaker,” who, in spite of the rigorous standard of morality prescribed by the sect to which he belonged, occasionally deigned to make some secret concession to the weakness of human nature. ”

“ I want to install you in Rome, as I installed you in Naples. Madame de Girardin calls me il vetturino per amore.
Adieu for to-day. How are you? Do you amuse yourself sometimes? Does Georges take good care of both of you? If anything happens to you under his auspices I will crush his box of insects on the boat. I bless you every day of my life, and I thank God for your good affection. You are my happiness, as you are my fame and my future. ”

“ You are turning pale!" cried her mother.
"No!" exclaimed the young girl in a tone of resolution,—"no! it shall never be said that Ginevra Piombo acted a lie."
Hearing this singular exclamation, Piombo and his wife looked at their daughter in astonishment.
"I love a young man," she added, in a voice of emotion.
Then, not venturing to look at her parents, she lowered her large eyelids as if to veil the fire of her eyes.
"Is he a prince?" asked her father, ironically, in a tone of voice which made the mother quail.
"No, father," she said, gently, "he is a young man without fortune." ”