à l’histoire du Comte de Cagliostro_, the distinguished thaumaturgist
announced that at a private supper, given to six guests, he would
evoke the spirits of any dead persons whom they named to him, and
that the phantoms, apparently substantial, should seat themselves at
the banquet. The repast took place with the knowledge and, it may be
supposed, with the connivance of Lorenza. At midnight the guests were
assembled; a round table, laid for twelve, was spread, with unheard-of
luxury, in a dining-room, where all was in harmony with the approaching
Kabbalistic operation. The six guests, with Cagliostro, took their
seats, and thus the ominous number thirteen were designed to be present
at table.
The supper was served, the servants were dismissed with threats of
immediate death if they dared to open the doors before they were
summoned. Each guest demanded the deceased person whom he desired
to see. Cagliostro took the names, placed them in the pocket of his
gold-embroidered vest, and announced that with no further preparation
than a simple invocation on his part the evoked spirits would appear
in flesh and blood, for, according to the Egyptian dogma, there were
in reality no dead. These guests of the other world, asked for and
expected with trembling anxiety, were the Duc de Choiseul, Voltaire,
d’Alembert, Diderot, the Abbé de Voisenon, and Montesquieu. Their names
were pronounced slowly in a loud voice, and with all the concentrated
determination of the adept’s will; and after a moment of intolerable
doubt, the evoked guests appeared very unobtrusively, and took their
seats with the quiet courtesy which had characterised them in life.
The first question put to them when the awe of their presence had
somewhat worn off was as to their situation in the world beyond.
“There is no world beyond,” replied d’Alembert. “Death is simply
the cessation of the evils which have tortured us. No pleasure is
experienced, but, on the other hand, there is no suffering. I have
not met with Mademoiselle Lespinasse, but I have not seen Lorignet.
There is marked sincerity, moreover. Some deceased persons who have
recently joined us inform me that I am almost forgotten. I am, however,
consoled. Men are unworthy of the trouble we take about them. I never
loved them, now I despise them.”
“What has become of your learning?” said M. de ---- to Diderot.
“I was not learned, as people commonly supposed. My ready wit adapted
all that I read, and in writing I borrowed on every side. Thence comes
the desultory character of my books, which will be unheard of in half
a century. The Encyclopædia, with the merit of which I am honoured,
does not belong to me. The duty of an editor is simply to set in order
the choice of subjects. The man who showed most talent in the whole
of the work was the compiler of its index, yet no one has dreamed of
recognising his merits.”
“I praised the enterprise,” said Voltaire, “for it seemed well fitted
to further my philosophical opinions. Talking of philosophy, I am none
too certain that I was in the right. I have learned strange things
since my death, and have conversed with half a dozen Popes. Clement
XIV. and Benedict, above all, are men of infinite intelligence and good
sense.”
“What most vexes me,” said the Duc de Choiseul, “is the absence of sex
where we dwell. Whatever may be said of this fleshly envelope, ’twas
by no means so bad an invention.”
“What is truly a pleasure to me,” said the Abbé Voisenon, “is that
amongst us one is perfectly cured of the folly of intelligence. You
cannot conceive how I have been bantered about my ridiculous little
romances. I had almost confessed that I appreciated these puerilities
at their true value, but whether the modesty of an academician is
disbelieved in, or whether such frivolity is out of character with my
age and profession, I expiate almost daily the mistakes of my mortal
existence.”
* * * * *
Amid these marvels, Cagliostro proceeded with the dearest of all his
projects, namely, the spread of his Egypto-masonic rite,[AN] into which
ladies were subsequently admitted, a course of magic being opened for
the purpose by Madame Cagliostro. The postulants admitted to this
course were thirty-six in number, and all males were excluded. Thus
Lorenza figured as the Grand Mistress of Egyptian Masonry, as her
husband was himself the grand and sublime Copt. The fair neophytes
were required to contribute each of them the sum of one hundred louis
to abstain from all carnal connection with mankind, and to submit to
everything which might be imposed on them. A vast mansion was hired
in the Rue Verte, Faubourg Saint Honoré, at that period a lonely part
of the city. The building was surrounded with gardens and magnificent
trees. The séance for initiation took place shortly before midnight on
the 7th of August 1785.
On entering the first apartment, says Figuier, the ladies were obliged
to disrobe and assume a white garment, with a girdle of various
colours. They were divided into six groups, distinguished by the tint
of their cinctures. A large veil was also provided, and they were
caused to enter a temple lighted from the roof, and furnished with
thirty-six arm-chairs covered with black satin. Lorenza, clothed
in white, was seated on a species of throne, supported by two tall
figures, so habited that their sex could not be determined. The light
was lowered by degrees till surrounding objects could scarcely be
distinguished, when the Grand Mistress commanded the ladies to uncover
their left legs as far as the thigh, and raising the right arm to rest
it on a neighbouring pillar. Two young women then entered sword in
hand, and with silk ropes bound all the ladies together by the arms and
legs. Then after a period of impressive silence, Lorenza pronounced
an oration, which is given at length, but on doubtful authority, by
several biographers, and which preached fervidly the emancipation of
womankind from the shameful bonds imposed on them by the lords of
creation.
These bonds were symbolised by the silken ropes from which the fair
initiates were released at the end of the harangue, when they were
conducted into separate apartments, each opening on the Garden, where
they made the most unheard-of experiences. Some were pursued by men
who unmercifully persecuted them with barbarous solicitations; others
encountered less dreadful admirers, who sighed in the most languishing
postures at their feet. More than one discovered the counterpart of
her own lover, but the oath they had all taken necessitated the most
inexorable inhumanity, and all faithfully fulfilled what was required
of them. The new spirit infused into regenerated woman triumphed along
the whole line of the six and thirty initiates, who with intact and
immaculate symbols re-entered triumphant and palpitating the twilight
of the vaulted temple to receive the congratulations of the sovereign
priestess.
When they had breathed a little after their trials, the vaulted roof
opened suddenly, and, on a vast sphere of gold, there descended a man,
naked as the unfallen Adam, holding a serpent in his hand, and having a
burning star upon his head.
The Grand Mistress announced that this was the genius of Truth, the
immortal, the divine Cagliostro, issued without procreation from the
bosom of our father Abraham, and the depositary of all that hath been,
is, or shall be known on the universal earth. He was there to initiate
them into the secrets of which they had been fraudulently deprived.
The Grand Copt thereupon commanded them to dispense with the profanity
of clothing, for if they would receive truth they must be as naked
as itself. The sovereign priestess setting the example unbound her
girdle and permitted her drapery to fall to the ground, and the fair
initiates following her example exposed themselves in all the nudity of
their charms to the magnetic glances of the celestial genius, who then
commenced his revelations.
He informed his daughters that the much abused magical art was the
secret of doing good to humanity. It was initiation into the mysteries
of Nature, and the power to make use of her occult forces. The
visions which they had beheld in the Garden where so many had seen
and recognised those who were dearest to their hearts, proved the
reality of hermetic operations. They had shewn themselves worthy to
know the truth; he undertook to instruct them by gradations therein. It
was enough at the outset to inform them that the sublime end of that
Egyptian Freemasonry which he had brought from the very heart of the
Orient was the happiness of mankind. This happiness was illimitable in
its nature, including material enjoyments as much as spiritual peace,
and the pleasures of the understanding.
The Marquis de Luchet, to whom we are indebted for this account,
concludes the nebulous harangue of Cagliostro by the adept bidding
his hearers abjure a deceiving sex, and to let the kiss of friendship
symbolise what was passing in their hearts. The sovereign priestess
instructed them in the nature of this friendly embrace.
Thereupon the Genius of Truth seated himself again upon the sphere
of gold, and was borne away through the roof. At the same time the
floor opened, the light blazed up, and a table splendidly adorned and
luxuriously spread rose up from the ground. The ladies were joined by
their lovers _in propria persona_; the supper was followed by dancing
and various diversions till three o’clock in the morning.
About this time the Count Cagliostro was unwillingly compelled to
concede to the continual solicitations of the poor and to resume
his medical _rôle_. In a short time he was raised to the height of
celebrity by a miraculous cure of the Prince de Soubise, the brother
of the Cardinal de Rohan, who was suffering from a virulent attack of
scarlet fever. From this moment the portrait of the adept was to be
seen everywhere in Paris.
In the meantime, the cloud in his domestic felicity, to which a
brief reference has been made already, began to spread. A certain
adventuress, by name Madame de la Motte, surprised Lorenza one day in
a _tête-à-tête_ with the Chevalier d’Oisemont. The count at the time
was far away from Paris, and the adventuress promised to keep the
secret on condition that Lorenza should in turn do all in her power to
establish her as an intimate friend in the house, having free entrance
therein, and should persuade Cagliostro to place his knowledge and
skill at her disposal, if ever she required it. The result of this
arrangement was the complicity of Cagliostro in the extraordinary and
scandalous affair of the Diamond Necklace. When the plot was exposed,
Cagliostro was arrested with the other alleged conspirators, including
the principal victim, the Cardinal de Rohan. He was exonerated, not
indeed without honour, from the charge of which he was undoubtedly
guilty, but his wife had fled to Rome at his arrest, and had rejoined
her family. He himself began to tremble at his own notoriety, and grew
anxious to leave France. He postponed till a more favourable period
his grand project concerning the metropolitan lodge of the Egyptian
rite.[AO] A personage, calling himself Thomas Ximenes, and claiming
descent from the cardinal of that name, sought to reanimate his former
masonic enthusiasm; but the vision of the Bastile seemed to be ever
before his eyes, and neither this person, nor the great dignitaries of
the Parisian lodges, could prevail with him. In spite of his acquittal
he nourished vengeance against the Court of France, and more than once
he confided to his private friends that he should make his voice heard
when he had passed the frontier. He prepared to depart, and one day
his disconsolate adepts learned that he was on the road to England.
Once in London he recovered his energy. He was received with great
honour; many of his disciples from Lyons and Paris followed him. The
English masons invited him to the metropolitan lodge, and gave him
the first place, that of grand orient. He was entreated to convene a
masonic lodge of the Egyptian rite, and consented with some sadness,
for the memory of the brilliant Paris lodge which he had been on the
point of founding was incessantly before him. He could not console
himself for the fall of that beautiful and long-cherished plan, which
had cost him so much study, pains, and preaching.
It was from this discreet distance that Cagliostro addressed his famous
Letter to the People of France, which was translated into a number
of languages, and circulated widely through Europe. It predicted the
French Revolution, the demolishment of the Bastile, and the rise of
a great prince who would abolish the infamous _lettres de cachet_,
convoke the States-General, and re-establish the true religion.
The publication was intemperate in its language and revolutionary
in its sentiments, and close upon its heels followed his well-known
quarrel with the _Courrier de l’Europe_, which resulted in the exposure
of the real life of Cagliostro from beginning to end.
Dreading the rage of his innumerable dupes, and extreme measures on
the part of his creditors, he hastened to quit London, disembarked in
Holland, crossed Germany, took refuge in Basle, where the patriarchal
hospitality of the Swiss cantons to some extent reassured the unmasked
adept. From the moment, however, of this exposure, the descent of
Cagliostro was simply headlong in its rapidity. Nevertheless, he was
followed by some of his initiates, who pressed him to return to
France, assuring him of the powerful protection of exalted masonic
dignitaries. In his hesitation he wrote to the Baron de Breteuil, the
king’s minister of the house, but, as it chanced, a personal enemy of
the Cardinal de Rohan. Considering Cagliostro as a _protégé_ of the
prince, he replied that if he had sufficient effrontery to set foot
within the limits of the kingdom, he should be arrested and transferred
to a prison in Paris, there to await prosecution as a common swindler,
who should answer to the royal justice for his criminal life.
From this moment Cagliostro saw that he was a perpetual exile from
France, and feeling in no sense assured of his safety even in
Switzerland, he left Basle for Aix, in Savoy. He was ordered to
quit that town in eight and forty hours. At Roveredo, a dependency
of Austria, the same treatment awaited him. He migrated to Trent,
and announced himself as a practitioner of lawful medicine, but the
prince-bishop who was sovereign of the country discerned the cloven
hoof of the sorcerer beneath the doctor’s sober dress, and showed
him in no long space of time his hostility to magical practices. The
wandering hierophant of Egyptian masonry, somewhat sorely pressed, took
post to Rome, and reached the Eternal City after many vicissitudes.
Here, according to Saint-Félix and Figuier, he was rejoined by his
wife; according to the Italian biographer, Lorenza had accompanied him
in his wanderings, and persuaded him to seek refuge in Rome, being sick
unto death of her miserable course of life. The former statement is,
on the whole, the most probable, as it is difficult to suppose that
she left Italy to rejoin Cagliostro at Passy, and she appears to have
returned to him with marked repugnance. She endeavoured to lead him
back to religion, which had never been eradicated from her heart. He
lived for some time with extraordinary circumspection, and consented
at last to see a Benedictine monk, to whom he made his confession. The
Holy Inquisition, which doubtless had scrutinised all his movements, is
said to have been deceived for a time, and he was favourably received
by several cardinals. He lived for a year in perfect liberty, occupied
with the private study of medicine. During this time he endeavoured to
obtain loans from the initiates of his Egyptian rite who were scattered
over France and Germany, but they did not arrive, and the sublime Copt,
the illuminated proprietor of the stone philosophical and the medicine
yclept metallic, came once more, to the eternal disgrace of Osiris,
Isis, and Anubis, on the very verge of want.
His extremity prompted him to renew his relations with the masonic
societies within the area of the Papal States. A penalty of death
hung over the initiates of the superior grades, and their lodges were
in consequence surrounded with great mystery, and were convened in
subterranean places. He was persuaded to found a lodge of Egyptian
Freemasonry in Rome itself, from which moment Lorenza reasonably
regarded him as lost. One of his own adepts betrayed him; he was
arrested on the 27th of September 1789, by order of the Holy Office,
and imprisoned in the Castle of St Angelo. An inventory of his papers
was taken, and all his effects were sealed up. The process against him
was drawn up with the nicest inquisitorial care during the long period
of eighteen months. When the trial came on he was defended by the Count
Gætano Bernardini, advocate of the accused before the sacred and august
tribunal, and to this pleader in ordinary the impartial and benign
office, of its free grace and pleasure, did add generously, as counsel,
one Monsignor Louis Constantini, “whose knowledge and probity,” saith
an unbought and unbuyable witness (inquisitorially inspired), “were
generally recognised.” They did not conceal from him the gravity of his
position, advised him to refrain from basing his defence on a series of
denials, promising to save him from the capital forfeit, and so he was
persuaded to confess everything, was again reconciled to the church;
and being almost odoriferous with genuine sanctity, on the 21st of
March 1791 he was carried before the general assembly of the purgers of
souls by fire, before the Pope on the 7th of the following April, when
the advocates pleaded with so much eloquence that they retired in the
agonies of incipient strangulation, Cagliostro repeated his avowal, and
as a natural consequence of the unbought eloquence and the purchased
confession, the penalty of death was pronounced.
When, however, the shattered energies of the advocates were a little
recruited, a recommendation of mercy was addressed to the Pope, the
sentence was commuted to perpetual imprisonment, and the condemned man
was consigned to the Castle of St Angelo. After an imprisonment of two
years, he died, God knows how, still in the prime of life, at the age
of fifty.
Lorenza, whose admissions had contributed largely towards the
condemnation of her husband, was doomed to perpetual seclusion in a
penitentiary. The papers of Cagliostro were burned by the Holy Office,
and the phantom of that institution keeps to the present day the secret
of the exact date of its victim’s death. It carefully circulated the
report that on one occasion he attempted to strangle a priest whom he
had sent for on the pretence of confessing, hoping to escape in his
clothes; and then it made public the statement that he had subsequently
strangled himself. When the battalions of the French Revolution entered
Rome, the commanding officers, hammering at the doors of Saint-Angelo,
determined to release the entombed adept, but they were informed that
Cagliostro was dead, “at which intelligence,” says Figuier, “they
perceived plainly that the former _Parlement de France_ was not to
be compared with the Roman Inquisition, and without regretting the
demolished Bastile, they could not but acknowledge that it disgorged
its prey more easily than the Castle of Saint Angelo.”
* * * * *
The personal attractions of Cagliostro appear to have been exaggerated
by some of his biographers. “His splendid stature and high bearing,
increased by a dress of the most bizarre magnificence, the extensive
suite which invariably accompanied him in his wanderings, turned all
eyes upon him, and disposed the minds of the vulgar towards an almost
idolatrous admiration.”
With this opinion of Figuier may be compared the counter-statement
of the Italian biographer:--“He was of a brown complexion, a bloated
countenance, and a severe aspect; he was destitute of any of those
graces so common in the world of gallantry, without knowledge and
without abilities.” But the Italian biographer was a false witness,
for Cagliostro was beyond all question and controversy a man of
consummate ability, tact, and talent. The truth would appear to lie
between these opposite extremes. “The Count de Cagliostro,” says
the English life, published in 1787, “is below the middle stature,
inclined to corpulency; his face is a round oval, his complexion and
eyes dark, the latter uncommonly penetrating. In his address we are
not sensible of that indescribable grace which engages the affections
before we consult the understanding. On the contrary, there is in
his manner a self-importance which at first sight rather disgusts
than allures, and obliges us to withhold our regards, till, on a more
intimate acquaintance, we yield it the tribute to our reason. Though
naturally studious and contemplative, his conversation is sprightly,
abounding with judicious remarks and pleasant anecdotes, yet with an
understanding in the highest degree perspicuous and enlarged, he is
ever rendered the dupe of the sycophant and the flatterer.”
The persuasive and occasionally overpowering eloquence of Cagliostro
is also dwelt upon by the majority of his biographers, but, according
to the testimony of his wife, as extracted under the terror of the
Inquisition and adduced in the Italian life:--“His discourse, instead
of being eloquent, was composed in a style of the most wearisome
perplexity, and abounded with the most incoherent ideas. Previous to
his ascending the rostrum he was always careful to prepare himself for
his labours by means of some bottles of wine, and he was so ignorant as
to the subject on which he was about to hold forth, that he generally
applied to his wife for the text on which he was to preach to his
disciples. If to these circumstances are added a Sicilian dialect,
mingled with a jargon of French and Italian, we cannot hesitate a
single moment as to the degree of credibility which we are to give
to the assertions that have been made concerning the wonder-working
effects of his eloquence.”
But the Inquisition was in possession of documents which bore
irrefutable testimony to the extraordinary hold which Cagliostro
exercised over the minds of his numerous followers, and it is
preposterous to suppose it could have been possessed by a man who was
ignorant, unpresentable, and ill-spoken. Moreover, the testimony of
Lorenza, given under circumstances of, at any rate, the strongest moral
intimidation is completely worthless on all points whatsoever, and the
biassed views of our inquisitorial apologists are of no appreciable
value.
I have given an almost disproportionate space to the history of Joseph
Balsamo, because it is thoroughly representative of the charlatanic
side of alchemy, which during two centuries of curiosity and credulity
had developed to a deplorable extent. There is no reason to suppose,
despite the veil of mystery which surrounded Altotas, that he was an
adept in anything but the sophistication of metals, and his skill
in alchemical trickery descended to his pupil. That Balsamo was a
powerful mesmerist, that he could induce clairvoyance with facility in
suitable subjects, that he had dabbled in Arabic occultism, that he
had the faculty of healing magnetically, are points which the evidence
enables us to admit, and these genuine phenomena supported his titanic
impostures, being themselves supplemented wherever they were weak or
defective by direct and prepared fraud. Thus his miraculous prophecies,
delineations of absent persons, revelations of private matters, &c.,
may to some extent be accounted for by the insatiable curiosity and
diligence which he made use of to procure knowledge of the secrets of
any families with which he came into communication. Lorenzo declared
upon oath during her examination that many of the pupils had been
prepared beforehand by her husband, but that some had been brought to
him unawares, and that in regard to them she could only suppose he had
been assisted by the marvels of magical art.