Count Cagliostro

“ That the thoughts of others besides himself should be concentrated on the “magic dream,” the relations of the Countess, as well as herself, were duly agitated by its expectation. With an air of great mystery, which Cagliostro could make so impressive, he delivered to Count von Medem a sealed envelope containing, he said, a question, which he hoped by the dream to have answered. ”

“ With still more enthusiasm than Madame Blavary, he held forth to his acquaintance, and in all public places, that the count was an extraordinary man, a true adept, whose fortune was immense, and who could transmute into pure and solid gold as much lead, iron, and copper as he pleased. The consequence was, that the house of Cagliostro was besieged by crowds of the idle, the credulous, and the avaricious, all eager to obtain a sight of the “philosopher,” or to share in the boundless wealth which he could call into existence. ”

“ Alas! “Count M.” had devoted his life to the subject, of which it did not take him long to discover Cagliostro knew next to nothing. Indignant that one who had not even learnt the alphabet of alchemy should undertake to instruct him of all people, he laid the trap described by Madame Böhmer. It was not, however, at the Royal Palace that the exposure took place that caused Cagliostro to leave Poland, but at a country seat near Warsaw. Moreover, if we are to believe “Count M.,” Cagliostro did not wait to be exposed, but suspecting what was a-foot, “decamped during the night.” ”

“ They travelled for three or four years in Russia, Poland, and Germany, transmuting metals, telling fortunes, raising spirits, and selling the elixir vitae wherever they went; but there is no record of their doings from whence to draw a more particular detail. It was not until they made their appearance in England in 1776, that the names of the Count and Countess di Cagliostro began to acquire a European reputation. ”

“ To turn back was equally perilous. In Italy, [Pg 288] where the Church, brutalized out of all semblance to Christianity by centuries of undisputed authority, regarded the least attempt to investigate the secrets of nature as a reflection on its own ignorance, a certain and terrible doom awaited any one who excited its suspicions. But to Cagliostro, with fate’s blood-hounds on his track, an Imperial dungeon seemed a more present danger than an Inquisition torture-chamber. It was no “Count Front of Brass,” as Carlyle jeeringly stigmatized him, that was brought to bay at Trent. ”

“ While Wilhelmine’s servant gave himself up to his hopes, slowly down the broad avenue, an elegant four-in-hand carriage rolled past him, and stopped at the house where lived Colonel Bischofswerder, long before he had reached the Brandenburg Gate. A gentleman sprang out, hastening past the footman into the house, where a servant evidently awaited his arrival, and preceded him with devout mien, throwing open the wide folding-doors and announcing, in a solemn voice—“His excellency, Count Cagliostro.” ”

“ They were willing to become parties to the secrecy which the awful nature of the deed would make indispensable. They had entire faith in his supernatural skill. And the period of two years which they had mentioned was so short that he would be enabled to modify the strength of the draught and thus greatly diminish the possibility of a fatal result. Never again would such an opportunity occur: should he allow it to pass?
Count Cagliostro arranged to make the experiment on the next night, which was the second anniversary of Angelo and Francesca's marriage. ”

“ French Revolution—wherever he meets him—he brands him as a “King of Liars,” a “Prince of Scoundrels,” an “Arch-Quack,” “Count Front of Brass-Pinch-beckostrum,” “Bubby-jock,” “a babbling, bubbling Turkey-cock,” et cetera. But such violence defeats its intention. When on every page the historian’s conscience is smitten with doubts that prejudice cannot succeed in stilling, the critical and inquisitive reader comes to the conclusion he knows less about the real Cagliostro at the end than he did at the beginning. He has merely seen Carlyle in one of his fine literary rages ”

“ Superior to Cagliostro, even in accomplishments, and second to him in notoriety only, was that human nondescript, the so-called Count de St. Germain, whom Fredrick the Great called, “a man no one has ever been able to make out.” ”

“ Madame di Cagliostro accepted the present, and was from that hour exposed to the most incessant persecution from all the confederates, Blavary, Vitellini, and the pretended Lord and Lady Scot. They flattered themselves they had regained their lost footing in the house, and came day after day to know lucky numbers in the lottery; sometimes forcing themselves up the stairs, and into the Count's laboratory, in spite of the efforts of the servants to prevent them. Cagliostro, exasperated at their pertinacity, threatened to call in the assistance of the magistrates ”

“ The Bastille was too massive a cage for so delicate a bird. Implicated without the shadow of a reason in the Necklace Affair the Countess Cagliostro began to imagine herself ill. She pined for her fine house, her admirers, her diamonds, her black mare Djérid, and the companionship of the man to whom she owed all that spelt happiness in her inoffensive, doll-like existence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On the 6th October, 1795, the Moniteur states “it is reported in Rome that the famous Cagliostro is dead.” But when he died, or how, is absolutely unknown. “That his end was tragic,” says d’Alméras, “one can well suppose, and his jailers, to make sure that he should not escape, may have put him out of his misery.” The Moniteur speaks of the probability of such an end as being a topic of conversation in Rome. In any case, it seems impossible to believe that he could long have survived so terrible a doom, which, whatever his offence, was utterly disgraceful to the government that pronounced it. ”

“ He regained his liberty in a few weeks; and the arbitrators between him and Miss Fry made their award against him. He was ordered to pay the two hundred pounds she had sworn against him, and to restore the necklace and gold box which had been presented to the countess. Cagliostro was so disgusted, that he determined to quit England. His pretensions, besides, had been unmercifully exposed by a Frenchman, named Morande, the editor of the Courrier de l'Europe, published in London. To add to his distress, he was recognised in Westminster Hall as Joseph Balsamo, the swindler of Palermo. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Cagliostro and the countess afterwards travelled in Italy, where they were arrested by the Papal government in 1789, and condemned to death. The charges against him were, that he was a freemason, a heretic, and a sorcerer. This unjustifiable sentence was afterwards commuted into one of perpetual imprisonment in the Castle of St. Angelo. His wife was allowed to escape severer punishment by immuring herself in a nunnery. Cagliostro did not long survive. The loss of liberty preyed upon his mind—accumulated misfortunes had injured his health and broken his spirit, and he died early in 1790. ”

“ Judging from the itinerary of his wanderings in northern Italy and the Tyrol, Cagliostro seems to have intended to go to Germany, hoping, no doubt, to find an asylum, like Saint-Germain, Weishaupt, Knigge and many other, at the Court of some Protestant prince, most of whom were Rosicrucians, alchemists, Freemasons, and revolutionary enthusiasts. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Even his valet was supposed to have discovered the secret of immortality. This fellow, a veritable Scapin, assisted him admirably in mystifying the credulous.
“Your master,” said a sceptic one day, seizing him by the collar, “is a rogue who is taking us all in. Tell me, is it true that he was present at the marriage of Cana?”
“You forget, sir,” was the reply, “I have only been in his service a century.”
Many of the most amazing stories circulated about Cagliostro were merely a repetition of those related twenty years before of Saint-Germain. ”

“ If, indeed, the parents of the Countess Seraphina, or Lorenza Balsamo, as you will, were still living or even resident in Rome, they were apparently unwilling or afraid to recognize the relationship, for nothing further is heard of them. It is much more likely that Cagliostro chose Rome on account of its size, as being the one place in Italy which offered him the most likely chance of escaping observation. In so large a city his poverty was itself a safe-guard. ”

“ It is that unfortunate woman, whom neither her virtues, her innocence, nor her quality of stranger could save from the hardships of a captivity as cruel as it is unmerited.”
From this stage of his Odyssey, beyond citing as references certain persons by whom he was known in the various countries through which he passed, Cagliostro was very reticent as to his doings. From [Pg 242] Rome he arrived at Strasburg at a bound, whence he proceeded to his imprisonment in the Bastille with almost equal speed. ”

“ It is possible, however, to draw another and more [Pg 73] sensible inference from this legal escroquerie of which Cagliostro was the dupe, than one based on mere prejudice. As his fame, needless to say, lies not in proved charges of embezzlement, but in the secrets of the crucible and the mysteries of Egyptian Masonry, it is clearly by his adventures in the laboratory and the lodge rather than by those which led him to the King’s Bench and the Bastille that he is to be judged. ”

“ By others, again, it was said that “the Jesuits supplied him with funds, or that having persuaded some Asiatic prince to send his son to travel in Europe, he had murdered the youth and taken possession of his treasures.” Cagliostro himself was always very mysterious on this subject.
“But your manner of living,” he was questioned at his trial in the Necklace Affair, “is expensive; you give away much, and accept of nothing in return; you pay everybody; how do you contrive to get money?” ”

“ As for his wife, it is preposterous to expect any one to believe that the pretty demirep Lorenza would have looked as girlish and fresh as the Countess Seraphina after fifteen years of the sort of life she led with Giuseppe. As vice and hardship have never yet been regarded as aids to beauty, those who persist in pinning their faith to the Balsamo legend will perhaps assent to the suggestion that Cagliostro’s remedies possessed virtues hitherto denied them. ”

“ From all of which it may be gathered that whether Cagliostro is depicted as an Apostle of Light by his friends the occultists, or a rank impostor by his enemies, of whom Carlyle is the most implacable and d’Alméras the most charitably inclined, the real man has been as effectually hidden from view by prejudice as by the mystery in which he wrapped himself. ”

“ Cagliostro at once requested all who were in the sick-room to leave it. What he did when he found himself alone with the prince was never known, but, after an hour, he called the Cardinal and said to him—
“If my prescription is followed, in two days Monseigneur will leave his bed and walk about the room. Within a week he will be able to take a drive, and within three to go to Court.”
When one has consulted an oracle, one can do no better than obey it. The family accordingly confided the prince completely to the care of the unknown doctor, who on the same day paid his patient a second visit. ”