THE CONQUEST OF THE CARDINAL
I
Of the difficulties that perpetually beset the biographer of
Cagliostro, those caused by his frequent disappearances from sight
are the most perplexing. It is possible to combat prejudice--to
materialize, so to speak, rumour, to manipulate conflicting evidence,
and even to throw light on that which is mysterious in his character.
But when it is a question of filling up the gaps, of bridging the
chasms in his career, one can only proceed by assumption.
Such a chasm, and one of the deepest, occurs between June 26, 1780,
when Cagliostro suddenly fled from Warsaw, and September 19, when
he arrived in Strasburg. Even rumour lost track of him during this
interval. The Inquisition-biographer pretends to discover him for a
moment at Frankfort-on-the-Main as a secret agent of the Illuminés,
and, as an assumption, the statement is at once plausible and probable.
Cagliostro, as stated in a previous chapter, has always been supposed,
on grounds that all but amount to proof, to have been at some period in
his mysterious career connected with one of the revolutionary secret
societies of Germany. This society has always been _assumed_ to be the
Illuminés.[18] If this assumption be true--and without it his mode of
life in Strasburg is utterly inexplicable--his initiation could only
have taken place at this period and, probably, at Frankfort, where
Knigge, one of the leaders of the Illuminés, had his head-quarters.
As Knigge was a member of the Order of Strict Observance, in the lodges
of which throughout Germany Cagliostro’s reputation as a wonder-worker
stood high, he had undoubtedly heard of him, if he was not personally
acquainted with him. Knigge, moreover, was just the man to appreciate
the possibilities of such a reputation in obtaining recruits for
Illuminism. Nothing is more reasonable, then, than to assume that
certain members of the Illuminés made overtures at Frankfort to
Cagliostro, who, one can imagine, would have readily accepted them
as the means of recovering the influence and prestige he had lost in
Poland.
His initiation, according to the Inquisition-biographer, took place in
a grotto a short distance from the city. In the centre, on a table, was
an iron chest, from which Knigge or his deputy took a manuscript. On
the first page Cagliostro perceived the words “_We, the Grand Masters
of the Templars_.” Then followed the formula of an oath written in
blood, to which eleven signatures were appended, and which signified
that Illuminism was a conspiracy against thrones. The first blow was
to be struck in France, and, after the fall of the monarchy, Rome
was to be attacked. Cagliostro, moreover, learnt that the society
had ramifications everywhere, and possessed immense sums in banks
in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, London, Genoa, and Venice. This money was
furnished by an annual subscription of twenty-five livres paid by each
member.
On taking the oath, which included a vow of secrecy, Cagliostro is
presumed to have received a large sum, destined to defray the expenses
of propaganda, and to have proceeded immediately, in accordance with
instructions, to Strasburg, where he arrived on September 19, 1780.
II
From the nature of his entry into the capital of Alsace, it is certain
that great pains had been taken in advance to excite public interest in
him. The fabulous Palladium could not have been welcomed with greater
demonstrations of joy. From early morning crowds of people waited on
the Pont de Kœhl and on both banks of the Rhine for the arrival of a
mysterious personage who was reported to go from city to city healing
the sick, working miracles, and distributing alms. In the crowd
speculations were rife as to his mysterious origin, his mysterious
travels in strange and remote countries, and of the mysterious source
of his immense wealth. Some regarded him as one inspired, a saint or
a prophet possessed of the gift of miracles. To others, the cures
attributed to him were the natural result of his great learning
and occult powers. Yet another group saw in him an evil genius, a
devil sent into the world on some diabolic mission. Among these,
however--and they were not the least numerous--there were some more
favourable to Cagliostro, and who, considering that after all he only
did good, inferred logically that, if supernatural, he must be a good,
rather than an evil, genius.
Suddenly, speculation was silenced by the approach of the being who
had excited it. The rumbling of wheels, the clatter of hoofs, the
cracking of whips was heard, and out of a cloud of dust appeared a
carriage drawn by six horses, and accompanied by lacqueys and outriders
in magnificent liveries. Within rode the Grand Cophta, the High
Priest of Mystery, with his “hair in a net,” and wearing a blue coat
covered with gold braid and precious stones. Bizarre though he was
with his circus-rider’s splendour, the manner in which he acknowledged
the vivats of the crowd[19] through which he passed was not without
dignity. His wife, who sat beside him, sparkling with youth, beauty,
and diamonds, shared the curiosity he excited. It was a veritable
triumphal progress.
The advantage to which such an ovation could be turned was not to be
neglected. Fond of luxury and aristocratic society though he was,
Cagliostro was not the man to despise popularity in any form that it
presented itself. Having lost the influence of the great, by means of
whom he had counted to establish Egyptian Masonry, he was anxious to
secure that of the masses. So great was the importance he attached to
the interest he had aroused, he even took up his abode among them,
“living first over a retail tobacconist’s named Quère, whose shop was
in one of the most squalid quarters of the town, and later lodging with
the caretaker of the canon of St. Pierre-le-Vieux.”
According to all reports, from the very day of his arrival in Strasburg
he seemed to busy himself solely in doing good, regardless of cost or
personal inconvenience. No one, providing he was poor and unfortunate,
appealed to him in vain. Hearing that an Italian was in prison for
a debt of two hundred livres, Cagliostro obtained his release by
paying the money for him, and clothed him into the bargain. Baron von
Gleichen, who knew him well, states that he saw him, on being summoned
to the bed-side of a sick person, “run through a downpour in a very
fine coat without stopping to take an umbrella.”
Every day he sought out the poor and infirm, whose distress he
endeavoured to relieve not only with money and medicine, but “with
manifestations of sympathy that went to the hearts of the sufferers,
and doubled the value of the action.” Though his enemies did not
hesitate to charge him with the most mercenary motives in administering
his charities, they were obliged to admit the fact of them. Meiners,
who thoroughly disliked him and considered him both a quack and a
charlatan, was honest enough to acknowledge that he gave his services
gratis, and even refused to make a profit on the sale of his remedies.
“For some time,” says this hostile witness, “it was believed that he
shared with his apothecary the profits on the remedies he prescribed
to his patients. But as soon as Cagliostro learnt that such suspicions
were entertained, he not only changed his apothecary, but obliged the
one he chose in his place, as I have been informed by several people,
to sell his remedies at so low a price that the fellow made scarcely
anything by the sale of them.
“He would take, moreover, neither payment nor present for his labour.
If a present was offered him of a sort impossible to refuse without
offence, he immediately made a counter present of equal or even of
higher value. Indeed, he not only took nothing from his patients, but
if they were very poor he supported them for months; at times even
lodging them in his own house and feeding them from his own table.”
III
At first, only the poor received attention from Cagliostro. If a rich
invalid desired his attendance he referred him to the regular doctors.
Though such an attitude was well calculated to attract attention, it
was not, as his enemies have declared, altogether prompted by selfish
considerations. In the disdain he affected for the rich there was
much real resentment. Through the rich and powerful, he had gained
nothing but mortification and disgrace. The circumstances under which
he was forced to flee from Warsaw must have wounded to the quick a
nature in which inordinate vanity and generosity were so curiously
blended. Of a certainty it was not alone the hope of turning Illuminism
to the advantage of Egyptian Masonry that prompted him to join the
Illuminés in his hour of humiliation. In Illuminism, whose aim,
revolutionary though it was, like that of Egyptian Masonry, was also
inspired with the love of humanity, Cagliostro had seen both a means
of rehabilitation and revenge. Of studied vengeance, however, he was
incapable; the disdain with which he treated the rich was the extent of
his revenge. Indeed, susceptible as he was to flattery, it was not long
before his resentment was altogether appeased. But though, in spite
of his bitter experience, he was even once more tempted to court the
favour of the great, he did so in quite a different manner. Henceforth,
in pandering to their love of sensation, he took care to give them what
_he_ saw fit, and not, as before, what _they_ demanded.
Particularly was this the case in the exhibitions he gave of his occult
powers. If, as on previous occasions, he had recourse to artifice to
obtain the effect he desired, it was not detected. It is evident that
his unfortunate experiences in Warsaw had taught him the wisdom of
confining himself solely to phenomena within his scope. No longer does
one hear of séances arranged beforehand with the medium; of failures,
exposures, and humiliations.
If from some of his prodigies the alchemists of the period saw in him
a successor of the clever ventriloquist and prestidigitator Lascaris,
from many others the mediums of the present day in Europe and America
might have recognized in him their predecessor and even their master in
table-turning, spirit-rapping, clairvoyance, and evocations. In a word,
he was no longer an apprentice in magic, but an expert.
As the manifestations of the occult of which Cagliostro, so to speak,
made a speciality were of a clairvoyant character, some idea of the
manner in which he had developed his powers may be gathered from the
following account by a contemporary of a séance he held in Strasburg
with the customary _colombe_ and carafe.
“Cagliostro,” says this witness, “having announced that he was ready
to answer any question put to him, a lady wished to know the age of
her husband. To this the _colombe_ made no reply, which elicited great
applause when the lady confessed she had no husband. Another lady
demanded an answer to a question written in a sealed letter she held in
her hand. The medium at once read in the carafe these words: ‘You shall
not obtain it.’ The letter was opened, the purport of the question
being whether the commission in the army which the lady solicited for
her son would be accorded her. As the reply was at least indicative of
the question, it was received with applause.
“A judge, however, who suspected that Cagliostro’s answers were the
result of some trick, secretly sent his son to his house to find out
what his wife was doing at the time. When he had departed the father
put this question to the Grand Cophta. The medium read nothing in the
carafe, but a voice announced that the lady was playing cards with two
of her neighbours. This mysterious voice, which was produced by no
visible organ, terrified the company; and when the son of the judge
returned and confirmed the response of the oracle, several ladies were
so frightened that they withdrew.”
At Strasburg he also told fortunes, and read the future as well as
the past with an accuracy that astonished even the sceptical Madame
d’Oberkirch. One of the most extraordinary instances he gave of his
psychic power was in predicting the death of the Empress Maria Theresa.
“He even foretold the hour at which she would expire,” relates Madame
d’Oberkirch. “M. de Rohan told it to me in the evening, and it was five
days after that the news arrived.”
IV
It was, however, as a healer of the sick that Cagliostro was chiefly
known in Strasburg. Sudden cures of illnesses, thought to be mortal
or incurable, carried his name from mouth to mouth. The number of his
patients increased daily. On certain days it was estimated that upwards
of five hundred persons besieged the house in which he lodged, pressing
one another to get in. From the collection of sticks and crutches left
as a mark of gratitude by those who, thanks to his skill, no longer had
need of them, it seemed as if all the cripples in Strasburg had flocked
to consult him.
The Farmer-General Laborde declares that Cagliostro attended over
fifteen thousand[20] sick people during the three years he stayed in
Strasburg, of whom only three died.
One of his most remarkable cures was that of the secretary of the
Marquis de Lasalle, the Commandant of Strasburg. “He was dying,”
says Gleichen, “of gangrene of the leg, and had been given up by the
doctors, but Cagliostro saved him.”
On another occasion he procured a belated paternity for Sarazin,
the banker of Bâle, who afterwards became one of his most devoted
adherents. No illness appeared to baffle him. The graver the malady
the more resourceful he became. A woman about to be confined, having
been given up by the midwives, who doubted even their ability to save
her child, sent for him in her extremity. He answered the summons
immediately, as was his custom, and after a slight examination
guaranteed her a successful _accouchement_. What is more to the point,
he kept his word.
This case is worthy of note as being the only one on record concerning
which Cagliostro gave an explanation of his success.
“He afterwards confessed to me,” says Gleichen, “that his promise was
rash. But convinced that the child was in perfect health by the pulse
of the umbilical cord, and perceiving that the mother only lacked the
strength requisite to bring her babe into the world, he had relied
on the virtue of a singularly soothing remedy with which he was
acquainted. The result, he considered, had been due to luck rather than
skill.”
The most famous of all his cures was that of the Prince de Soubise, a
cousin of Cardinal de Rohan. In this case, however, it was the rank of
the patient, even more than the illness of which he was cured, that set
the seal to Cagliostro’s reputation. The prince, it seems, had been ill
for some weeks, and the doctors, after differing widely as to the cause
of his malady, had finally pronounced his condition to be desperate.
Thereupon the Cardinal, who had boundless confidence in Cagliostro’s
medical skill, immediately carried him off in his carriage to Paris
to attend his cousin, simply stating, on arriving at the Hôtel de
Soubise, that he had brought “a doctor,” without mentioning his name,
lest the family, influenced by the regular physicians, who regarded
him as a quack, should refuse his services. It was, perhaps, a useless
precaution, for, as the patient had just been given up by the doctors,
the family were willing enough to suffer even a quack to do what he
could.
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. On this occasion he took with him a small vial containing a
liquid, ten drops of which he administered to the sick man.
On leaving, he said to the Cardinal: “To-morrow I will give the prince
five drops, the day after two, and you will see that he will sit up the
same evening.”
The result more than fulfilled the prediction. The second day after
this visit the Prince de Soubise was in a condition to receive some
friends. In the evening he got up and walked about the room. He was in
good spirits, and even had sufficient appetite to ask for the wing of
a chicken. But, in spite of his insistence, it was necessary to refuse
him what he so much desired, since an absolute abstention from solid
food was one of the prescriptions of the “doctor.”
On the fourth day the patient was convalescent, but it was not till
the evening of the fifth that he was permitted to have his wing of
a chicken. “No one,” says Figuier, “in the Hôtel de Soubise had the
least idea that Cagliostro was the doctor who attended the prince. His
identity was only disclosed _after_ the cure, when his name, already
famous, ceased to be regarded any longer as that of a charlatan.”
V
The secret of these astonishing cures, by far the most wonderful of
Cagliostro’s prodigies, has given rise to a great deal of futile
discussion. For he never cured in public, like Mesmer; nor would he
consent to give any explanation of his method to the doctors and
learned academicians, who treated him with contempt born of envy--as
the pioneers of science, with rare exceptions, have always been treated.
From the fact that he became celebrated at about the same time as
Mesmer, many have regarded them as rivals, and declared that the
prestige of both is to be traced to the same source. According to this
point of view, Cagliostro, being more encyclopedic than Mesmer, though
less scientific in manipulating the agent common to both, had in some
way generalized magnetism, so to speak. His cures, however, were far
more astonishing than Mesmer’s, for they were performed without passes
or the use of magnets and magnetic wands. Neither did he heal merely by
_touching_, like Gassner, nor by prayers, exorcisms, and the religious
machinery by which faith is made active; though very probably the
greater part of his success was due, like Mrs. Eddy’s, to the confident
tone in which he assured his patients of the certainty of their
recovery.
Cagliostro’s contemporaries, on the other hand, to whom the mechanism
of Christian Science and the attributes of hypnotism--since so well
tested by Dr. Charcot--were unknown, sought a material explanation
of his cures in the quack medicines he concocted. The old popular
belief in medicinal stones and magical herbs was still prevalent.
One writer of the period pretended to know that Cagliostro’s “Elixir
Vitæ” was composed of “magical herbs and gold in solution.” Another
declared it to be the same as the elixir of Arnauld de Villeneuve, a
famous alchemist of the Middle Ages, whose prescription consisted of
“a mixture of pearls, sapphires, hyacinths, emeralds, rubies, topazes
and diamonds, to which was added the scraping of the bones of a stag’s
heart.”
Equally fantastic were the properties attributed to these panaceas by
those who owed their restoration to health to Cagliostro. The following
story, repeated everywhere--and believed, too, by many--gave the
notoriety of a popular modern advertisement to the “Wine of Egypt.”
A great lady, who was also, unfortunately for her, an old one, and was
unable to resign herself to the fact, was reported to have consulted
Cagliostro, who gave her a vial of the precious liquid with the
strictest injunction to take two drops when the moon entered its last
quarter. Whilst waiting for this period to arrive the lady who desired
to be rejuvenated shut up the vial in her wardrobe, and the better to
insure its preservation informed her maid that it was a remedy for the
colic. Fatal precaution! By some mischance on the following night, the
maid was seized with the very malady of which her mistress had spoken.
Remembering the remedy so fortuitously at hand she got up, opened the
wardrobe, and emptied the vial at a draught.
The next morning she went as usual to wait on her mistress, who looked
at her in surprise and asked her what she wanted. Thinking the old lady
had had a stroke in the night, she said--
“Ah, madame, don’t you know me? I am your maid.”
“My maid is a woman of fifty,” was the reply, “and you----”
But she did not finish the sentence. The woman had caught a glimpse
of her face in a mirror. The Wine of Egypt had rejuvenated her thirty
years!
In an age unfamiliar with the cunning devices of the art of advertising
and the universality of the pretensions of quack remedies, such
encomiums lavished on “an extract of Saturn,” a “Wine of Egypt,”
or an “Elixir Vitæ,” were calculated to damage the reputation of
their inventor in the opinion of serious people even more than the
bitter denunciations to which they were exposed. One of the charges
of imposture on which the case against Cagliostro rests is that of
manufacturing his remedies with the object of defrauding the public
by attributing to them fabulous properties which he knew they did not
possess. If this be admitted, then a similar accusation must be made
against every maker of patent medicines to-day, which, in view of the
law of libel and the fact that many persons have been restored to
health by the concoctions of quacks whom the skilled physician has
been powerless to heal, would be incredibly foolish.
To regard these remedies of Cagliostro with their ridiculous names and
quixotic pretensions with the old prejudice is preposterous. Judged
by the number and variety of his cures--and it is the only reasonable
standard to judge them by--they were, to say the least, remarkable.
In the present day, it is no longer the custom to deride the knowledge
of the old alchemists. The world has come to acknowledge that, in spite
of the fantastic jargon in which they expressed themselves, they fully
understood the uses of the plants and minerals of which they composed
their drugs. Stripped of the atmosphere of magic and mystery in which
they delighted to wrap their knowledge--and which, ridiculous as it
may seem to-day, had just as much effect on the imagination in their
benighted age as the more scientific mode of “suggestion” employed
by the doctors of our own enlightened era--the remedies of a Borri
or a Paracelsus are still deserving of respect, and still employed.
Cagliostro is known to have made a serious study of alchemy, and it is
very probable that his magic balsams and powders were prepared after
receipts he discovered in old books of alchemy. Perhaps too, like all
quacks--it is impossible to accord a more dignified title to one who
had not the diploma of a properly qualified practitioner--he made the
most of old wives’ remedies picked up haphazard in the course of his
travels.
Without doubt the unparalleled credulity and superstition of the age
contributed greatly to his success. Miracles can only succeed in an
atmosphere favourable to the miraculous. In Europe, as the reader has
seen--particularly in France--the soil had been well prepared for seed
of the sort that Cagliostro sowed.
VI
The cure of the Prince de Soubise gave Cagliostro an immense prestige.
“It would be impossible,” says the Baroness d’Oberkirch, “to give an
idea of the passion, the madness with which people pursued him. It
would appear incredible to any one who had not seen it.” On returning
to Strasburg, “he was followed by a dozen ladies of rank and two
actresses” who desired to have the benefit of his treatment. People
came from far and wide to consult him; and many out of sheer curiosity.
To these, whom he regarded as spies sent by his enemies, he was either
inaccessible or positively rude.
Lavater, who came from Zurich, was treated with very scant courtesy.
“If,” said Cagliostro, “your science [that of reading character by the
features, by which he had acquired a European reputation] is greater
than mine, you have no need of my acquaintance; and if mine is the
greater, I have no need of yours.”
Lavater, however, was not to be repulsed by the inference to be drawn
from such a remark. The following day he wrote Cagliostro a long letter
in which, among other things, he asked him “how he had acquired his
knowledge, and in what it consisted.” In reply Cagliostro limited
himself to these words: _In verbis, in herbis, in lapidibus_, by which,
as M. d’Alméras observes, he probably indicated correctly the nature
and extent of his medical and occult lore. But Lavater, as credulous
as he was inquisitive, impressed by the mystery in which Cagliostro
enveloped his least action, read into his words quite another meaning.
Believing firmly in the Devil--about whom he had written a book--the
Swiss pastor returned home convinced that the Grand Cophta of Egyptian
Masonry was “a supernatural being with a diabolic mission.”
[Illustration: LAVATER
(_After the engraving by William Blake_)]
In nobody were the curiosity and admiration that he inspired greater
than in the notorious Cardinal de Rohan. His Eminence was one of the
darlings of Fortune, whose choicest favours had been showered on him
with a lavish hand. Of the most illustrious birth, exceptionally
handsome, enormously rich, and undeniably fascinating, no younger son
ever started life under more brilliant auspices. The Church seemed to
exist solely for the purpose of providing him with honours. Bishop of
Strasburg, Grand Almoner of France, Cardinal, Prince of the Empire,
Landgrave of Alsace--his titles were as numerous as the beads of a
rosary. Nor were they merely high-sounding and empty dignities. From
the Abbey of St. Waast, the richest in France, of which he was the
Abbot, he drew 300,000 livres a year, and from all these various
sources combined his revenue was estimated at 1,200,000 livres.
Nature had endowed him no less bounteously than Fortune. To the
honours which he owed to the accident of birth, his intellect had won
him another still more coveted. At twenty-seven he had been elected
to the Académie Française, where, as he was particularly brilliant
in conversation, it is not surprising that the Immortals should have
“declared themselves charmed with his company.”
He possessed all the conspicuous qualities and defects which in
the eighteenth century were characteristic of the aristocrat. High
ecclesiastic that he was, he had nothing of the ascetic about him.
Like so many of the great dignitaries of the Church under the _ancien
régime_, he was worldly to the last degree. As he was not a hypocrite,
he did not hesitate to live as he pleased. Appointed Ambassador to
Vienna, he had scandalized the strait-laced Maria Theresa by his
reckless extravagance and dissipation. The Emperor, to her disgust,
“loved conversing with him to enjoy his flippant gossip and wicked
stories.” “Our women,” she wrote to her Ambassador at Versailles,
“young and old, beautiful and ugly, are bewitched by him. He is their
idol.”
His character was a mosaic of vice and virtue. With him manners took
the place of morals. “He possessed,” says Madame d’Oberkirch, “the
gallantry and politeness of a grand seigneur such as I have rarely met
in any one.” Madame de Genlis considered that, “if he was nothing that
he ought to be, he was as amiable as it was possible to be.” In him
vice lost all its grossness and levity acquired dignity. Anxious to
please, he was also susceptible to flattery. “By my lording him,” says
Manuel, who disliked him, “one can get from him whatever one desires.”
At the same time he was obliged to confess that the Cardinal “had a
really good heart.”
It was to his excessive good-nature that he owed most of his
misfortunes. The entire absence of intolerance in his character caused
him to be regarded as an atheist, but his unbelief, like his vices, was
greatly exaggerated. Men in his position never escape detraction, but
in the case of the Cardinal he deliberately invited it. Gracious to
all, he was generous to a fault. He dispensed favour and charity alike
without discernment, giving to the poor as readily and as bountifully
as to his mistresses. Of these he had had many; the memoirs of the
period contain strange, and often untranslatable, stories of his
private life. For some years he was followed wherever he went by the
beautiful Marquise de Marigny dressed as a page.
Besides his weakness for a pretty face, this splendid tare had a
fondness amounting to passion for pomp and alchemy. “On state occasions
at Versailles,” says Madame d’Oberkirch, “he wore an alb of lace _en
point à l’aiguille_ of such beauty that the assistants were almost
afraid to touch it.” It was embroidered with his arms and device--the
famous device of the Rohans, _Roy ne puis, prince ne daigne, Rohan je
suis_. It was said to be worth a million livres.
In gratifying his taste for luxury, the cost was the last thing he
considered. On going to Vienna as Ambassador he took with him two gala
coaches worth 40,000 livres each; fifty horses, two equerries, two
piqueurs, seven pages drawn from the nobility of Brittany and Alsace
with their governors and tutors, two gentlemen-in-waiting, six footmen,
whose scarlet and gold liveries cost him 4000 livres apiece, etc.
In France his style of living was still more extravagant. He spent
vast sums on pictures, sculptures, and artistic treasures generally.
Collecting illuminated missals was his speciality. At his episcopal
palace at Saverne, near Strasburg, which he rebuilt after it was
destroyed by fire in 1779 at a cost of between two and three million
livres, he had a magnificent library. As printed books, according to
Madame d’Oberkirch, were beneath his notice, his library was noted for
its beautiful bindings, and above all for the missals ornamented with
miniatures worth their weight in gold.
His principal pastime, however, was alchemy. At Saverne, besides his
library, he had one of the finest laboratories in Europe. He was almost
mad on the subject of the philosopher’s stone. The mention of the
occult sciences at once arrested his attention; then, and only then,
did the brilliant, frivolous Cardinal become serious.
Naturally, such a man could not fail to be impressed by the mysterious
physician whose cures were the talk of Strasburg.
Shortly after Cagliostro’s arrival, Baron de Millinens, the Cardinal’s
master of the hounds, called to inform him that his Eminence desired
to make his acquaintance. But Cagliostro knowing, as he stated at his
trial in the Necklace Affair, that the prince “only desired to see him
from curiosity, refused to gratify him.” The answer he returned is
famous, and thoroughly characteristic of him.
“If the Cardinal is ill,” he is reported to have said, “let him come to
me and I will cure him; but if he is well, he has no need of me nor I
of him.”
This message, far from affronting the Cardinal, only increased his
curiosity. After having attempted in vain to gain admittance to the
sanctuary of the new Esculapius, his Eminence had, or feigned, an
attack of asthma, “of which,” says Cagliostro, “he sent to inform me,
whereupon I went at once to attend him.”
The visit, though short, was long enough to inspire the Cardinal with a
desire for a closer acquaintance. But Cagliostro’s disdainful reserve
was not easily broken down. The advances of the Cardinal, however, were
none the less flattering. At last, captivated by the persistency of
the fascinating prelate, he declared in his grandiose way, to Rohan’s
immense joy, that “the prince’s soul was worthy of his, and that he
would confide to him all his secrets.”
The relation thus formed, whatever the motives that prompted it, soon
ripened into intimacy. Needless to say, they had long, frequent, and
secret confabulations in the Cardinal’s well-equipped laboratory.
Cagliostro, with his wife, eventually even went to live at Saverne at
the Cardinal’s request. He was bidden to consider the palace as his
own, and the servants were ordered to announce him when he entered a
room as “His Excellency M. le Comte de Cagliostro.”
The Baroness d’Oberkirch, on visiting Saverne while he was there, “was
stunned by the pomp with which he was treated.” She was one of the few
great ladies of Strasburg who refused to believe in him. To her he was
merely an adventurer. On the occasions of her visit to Saverne the
Cardinal, who had great respect for her, endeavoured to bring her round
to his opinion. “As I resisted,” she said, “he became impatient.”
“Really, madame,” said he, “you are hard to convince. Do you see this?”
He showed me a large diamond that he wore on his little finger, and on
which the Rohan arms were engraved. This ring was worth at least twenty
thousand francs.
“It is a beautiful gem, monseigneur,” I said, “I have been admiring
it.”
“Well,” he exclaimed, “it is Cagliostro who made it: he made it out of
nothing. I was present during the whole operation with my eyes fixed
on the crucible. Is not that science, Baroness? People should not say
that he is duping me, or taking advantage of me. I have had this ring
valued by a jeweller and an engraver, and they have estimated it at
twenty-five thousand livres. You must admit that he would be a strange
kind of cheat who would make such presents.”
I acknowledge I was stunned. M. de Rohan perceived it, and continued--
“This is not all--he can make gold! He has made in this very palace, in
my presence, five or six thousand livres. 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. For the benefit of his splendid
host he displayed the whole series of his magical phenomena.
One day, according to Roberson--who professed to have obtained his
information from “an eye-witness very worthy of credence”--he promised
to evoke for the Cardinal the shade of a woman he had loved. He had
made the attempt two or three times before without success. Death
seemed to hesitate to come to the rendez-vous. The moon, perhaps, had
not been propitious, or some great crime committed at the moment of
evocation may have had an unfavourable effect. But on this occasion all
the conditions on which success depended were united.
“The performance,” says Roberson, “took place in a small darkened room
in the presence of four or five spectators who were seated far enough
apart to prevent them from secretly communicating with one another.
Wand in hand, Cagliostro stood in the middle of the room. The silence
which he had commanded was so profound that even the hearts of those
present seemed to stop beating. All at once the wand, as if drawn by
a magnet, pointed to a spot on the wall where a vague, indefinite
form was visible for a moment. The Cardinal uttered a cry. He had
recognized--or believed he had, which amounted to the same thing--the
woman he had loved.”
* * * * *
So great was the confidence that Rohan placed in Cagliostro that he
treated him as an oracle. He constantly consulted him, and suffered
himself to be guided entirely by his advice. As the consequences of
this infatuation were in the end disastrous, it is customary to regard
the Cardinal as the dupe of Cagliostro. Many, blinded by prejudice,
have supposed that Cagliostro, having previously informed himself of
the tastes, character, and vast wealth of the prince, came to Strasburg
for the express purpose of victimizing him. It is even asserted that
the Countess had her share in the subjugation of the Cardinal, and
that while Cagliostro attacked his understanding, she laid siege to
his heart.
The disdainful, almost hostile, attitude that Cagliostro adopted
towards his patron at the beginning of their acquaintance was so well
calculated to inflame Rohan’s curiosity that it is a matter of course
to attribute it to design. The Abbé Georgel, who as a Jesuit thoroughly
disliked the Grand Cophta of Egyptian Masonry, asserts that “he sought,
without having the air of seeking it, the most intimate confidence of
his Eminence and the greatest ascendency over his will.”
But this very plausible statement is not only unsupported by any fact,
but is actually contrary to fact. The Cardinal was _not_ Cagliostro’s
banker, as has so often been stated. At his trial in the Necklace
Affair Rohan denied this most emphatically. Moreover, it would have
been utterly impossible for him, had he wished, to have supplied
Cagliostro with the sums he spent so lavishly. In spite of his vast
income, he had for years been head over ears in debt. If there were any
benefits conferred, it was the Cardinal who received them.
“Cagliostro,” says Madame d’Oberkirch, “treated him, as well as the
rest of his aristocratic admirers, as if they were under infinite
obligation to him and he under none to them.”
This statement is the secret of the real nature of Cagliostro’s
so-called conquest. It was not cupidity, but colossal vanity, that
lured him into the glittering friendship that ruined him. The Cardinal,
with his great name and position, his influence, and his undeniable
charm, dazzled Cagliostro quite as much as he, with his miracles, his
magic, and his mystery, appealed to the imagination of the Cardinal.
Each had for the other the fascination of a flame for a moth. Each
fluttered round the other like a moth; and each met with the proverbial
moth’s fate. But the Cagliostro-flame only scorched the wings of his
Eminence. It was in the flame of the Cardinal that Cagliostro perished.