CAGLIOSTRO RETURNS TO LONDON
I
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; then--crowning injustice--after
being acquitted on every count in a manner that could leave no doubt
of his innocence, he had been arbitrarily banished within twenty-four
hours of the recovery of his liberty.
Under such circumstances resentment is perfectly natural and
justifiable. To “take it lying down,” as the saying is, at all times a
doubtful virtue, becomes frequently a downright folly.
Had Cagliostro been silent in the present instance with the protecting
arm of the sea between him and a corrupt and blundering despotism
he would have been utterly undeserving of pity. In “getting even,”
however, to his credit be it said, he did not adopt the methods of
the _Rohanists_, as all the enemies of the Government were called, and
launch, like Calonne, Madame de Lamotte and so many others, libel after
libel at the honour of the defenceless and unpopular Queen--the low and
contemptible revenge of low and contemptible natures. On the contrary,
he held the Baron de Breteuil, as the head of the Government, directly
responsible for his sufferings and attacked him once and once only, in
his famous _Letter to the French People_.[36]
This letter, written the day after his arrival in England, to a
friend in Paris, was immediately published in pamphlet form, and even
translated into several languages. 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. It was not
unreasonably regarded as the confession of faith of an Illuminé. The
Inquisition-biographer declares that it was conceived in a spirit so
calculated to excite a revolt that “it was with difficulty a printer
could be found in England to print it.” Cagliostro himself admits that
it was written with “a freedom rather republican.”[37]
This letter gave great offence to the French Government and
particularly to the Baron de Breteuil who dominated it, and whose
conduct in the Necklace Affair sufficiently proves his unfitness for
the post he filled. Under ordinary circumstances he would no doubt
have ignored the attack upon himself. His pride, the pride of an
aristocrat--he was the personification of reaction--would have scorned
to notice the insult of one so far beneath him as Cagliostro. But the
prestige of the Government and the majesty of the throne damaged by
the unspeakable calumnies of the Necklace Affair had to be considered.
Might not the sensation caused by the inflammatory _Letter to the
French People_ encourage the author to follow it up by other and
still more seditious pamphlets? There was but one way to prevent this
contingency--_to kidnap him_. For not only would it be impossible to
persuade the English Government to give him up, but futile to attempt
to purchase silence from one who had a grievance and made it his boast
that he never took payment for the favours he conferred.
Before the days of extradition, kidnapping was a practice more or less
common to all governments. Eighteenth century history, particularly
that of France, is full of such instances.[38] Breteuil was, therefore,
merely following precedent when he ordered Barthélemy, the French
Ambassador in London, to inform Cagliostro that “His Most Christian
Majesty gave him permission to return to his dominions.”
This permission, was, accordingly, duly conveyed to Cagliostro, with
the request that he would call at a certain hour on the following
day at the Embassy when the ambassador would give him any further
information on the subject he desired. It is exceedingly unlikely that
Barthélemy intended to forcibly detain him when he called, but rather
to gull him by false pretences--a not difficult proceeding in the case
of one so notoriously vain as Cagliostro--into returning to France. Be
this as it may, on calling on the ambassador at the appointed hour he
prudently invited Lord George Gordon and one Bergeret de Frouville, an
admirer who had followed him from France, to accompany him. This they
not only did, but insisted in being present throughout the interview.
Nettled by this veiled suggestion of treachery, Barthélemy received his
visitor in a manner which served to confirm this impression. Producing
a letter from the Baron de Breteuil he informed Cagliostro that he was
authorized to give him permission to return to France. But Cagliostro,
having taken no steps to obtain this permission was naturally
suspicious of the source from which it emanated.
“How is it possible,” he asked, “that a simple letter of the Baron de
Breteuil should be able to revoke the _lettre de cachet_ signed by the
King himself, by which I was exiled? I tell you, sir, I can recognize
neither M. de Breteuil nor his orders.”
He then begged Barthélemy to let him have the letter or a copy of it.
The ambassador, however, for some inexplicable reason saw fit to refuse
the request, whereupon the interview ended.
There was certainly nothing unreasonable in the request.
“Without having some proof of my permission to return to France,”
says Cagliostro in the letter he subsequently wrote to the _Public
Advertiser_, “how could I have answered the Governor of Boulogne or
Calais when I was asked by what authority I returned? I should at once
have been made a prisoner.”
The next day Lord George Gordon publicly constituted himself the
champion of Cagliostro in a letter to the _Public Advertiser_, in
which he made an outrageous and utterly unjustifiable attack on Marie
Antoinette. No better illustration could be given of the spirit in
which the established authorities sought to crush the revolutionary
tendency of the times, which had begun to manifest itself, than the
price that Lord George was made to pay for his libel. Exasperated by
the insults and calumnies that were now continually directed against
his unpopular consort, Louis XVI ordered his ambassador in London to
bring an action against Gordon.
Under ordinary circumstances Gordon, relying on the resentment that
England cherished against France for the part she had taken in the
American War of Independence, would have had nothing to fear. But he
was a rabid demagogue with a bad record. A few years before he had
accepted the presidency of the Protestant Association formed to secure
the repeal of the act by which the Catholic disabilities imposed in
the time of William and Mary had been removed. It was this association
which had fomented the famous Gordon riots, as they were called, when
London had been on the point of being pillaged. Gordon, it is true,
had disclaimed all responsibility for the conduct of the mob, which,
however, acknowledged him as its leader, and though tried for high
treason had been acquitted. But this experience had not sobered his
fanaticism. He was the soul of sedition in his own country, and one of
the most notorious and violent revolutionists in Europe at this period.
The British Government was only too glad of the opportunity afforded it
by the French to reduce him to silence.
Gordon, accordingly, fled to Holland, but learning that the Dutch
Government was preparing to send him back, he returned secretly to
England. Soon afterwards he was betrayed by a Jew, whose religion he
had adopted and with whom he had taken shelter. The action of the
French Government having in the meantime been decided against him, he
was sentenced to five years imprisonment and to pay a heavy fine. This
was the end of Lord George Gordon. For at the expiration of his term of
confinement, being unable to pay the fine, he remained a prisoner,
and eventually died in Newgate.
[Illustration: LORD GEORGE GORDON (_From an old print_)]
Compromised by the dangerous manner in which Gordon had taken up his
cause, Cagliostro hastened to disclaim all connection with him. In his
letter to the _Public Advertiser_, in which he described his interview
with Barthélemy, he referred to the ambassador, the Baron de Breteuil,
and the King of France in terms of the greatest respect. Breteuil,
however, did not forget him. A month later Barthélemy called in person
upon him with a warrant signed by the King’s own hand, permitting him
to return to France.
Cagliostro received it with profuse thanks, but he did not dare to
avail himself of the privilege it accorded him.
“It is but natural,” he said, “for a man who has been nine months in
the Bastille without cause, and on his discharge receives for damages
an order of exile, to startle at shadows and to perceive a snare in
everything that surrounds him.”
So suspicious did he become that when a friend, who was showing him the
sights of London, suggested “an excursion down the Thames as far as
Greenwich,” he at once scented danger.
“I did not know who to trust,” he says, “and I remembered the history
of a certain Marquis de Pelleport and a certain Dame Drogard.”[39]
Needless to say, he was careful not to write any more letters or
pamphlets “with a freedom rather republican.” Nevertheless he was a
marked man, and Fate was getting ready her net to catch him.
II
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. Instead of floating on the crest of the wave he was
caught in the under-current. With few exceptions the acquaintances he
made were more calculated to lower him still further in the esteem of
respectable society, than to clear him of the suspicion that attached
to him. The mere association of his name with Lord George Gordon’s
would alone have excited mistrust. But the injury he received from the
questionable manner in which Gordon sought to befriend him was trifling
compared with the interest that the Editor of the _Courier de l’Europe_
took in him.
Theveneau de Morande, to give this individual a name, was one of the
greatest blackguards of his time--the last quarter of the eighteenth
century produced many who equalled him in infamy but none who surpassed
him. The son of a lawyer at Arnay-le-Duc in Burgundy, where he was
born in 1741, Theveneau de Morande “was,” as M. Paul Robiquet truly
says in his brilliant study of him, “from the day of his birth to the
day of his death utterly without scruple.”[40] When a boy he was
arrested for theft in a house of ill-fame. Compelled to enlist or be
sent to prison he chose the former alternative, but did not serve long.
In response to his entreaties his father obtained his discharge on
condition that he would reform. Instead, however, of returning home as
he promised, Morande went to Paris, where his dissolute life led him to
the prison of For-l’Evêque. Hereupon his father solicited the favour of
a _lettre de cachet_ by means of which he was confined in a convent at
Armentières.
On being released two years later at the age of four-and-twenty, having
been imprudent enough to lampoon one of the principal members of the
Government, Morande fled the country. After tramping about Belgium
he arrived in London in a condition of absolute want. But he was not
long without means of subsistence. The ease with which he extorted
money by threatening to inform the police of the equivocal lives of
such acquaintances as chance threw in his way suggested the system of
blackmail which he afterwards developed into a fine art.
Gifted with a talent for writing he ventured to attack notabilities.
From fear of his mordant, cynical pen many were induced to purchase
his silence. In _Le Gazetier Cuirassé, ou Anecdotes scandaleuses sur
la cour de France_, all who had refused to purchase exemption had been
represented by him in the worst possible light. For this work, which
Brissot describes as “one of those infamous productions the very name
of which one blushes to mention,” he is said to have received 1,000
guineas.
Emboldened by the fright he inspired he redoubled his attacks, but
they did not always meet with the same success. He thought to extort
a ransom from Voltaire, but the aged philosopher of Ferney had lived
through too much to be frightened for so little. He published Morande’s
letter, accompanied with commentaries of the sort he knew so well
how to make effective. The Comte de Lauraguais replied even more
effectively than Voltaire. Not only did he obstinately refuse to pay
the tribute demanded of him, but, being in London at the time, gave the
blackmailer a horsewhipping, and compelled him to publish an abject
apology in the press into the bargain.
Morande, however, was not discouraged, and prepared to reap the most
fruitful of all his harvests. For the object he had in view Madame du
Barry was a gold mine. The famous favourite of Louis XV was notoriously
sensitive on the subject of her reputation, and dreaded nothing so much
as a libel. Morande, accordingly, wrote to inform her that he had in
preparation a work in four volumes, to be entitled the _Mémoires d’une
femme publique_, in which she would figure as the heroine, unless she
preferred to pay a handsome sum for its suppression. To assist her to
come to the latter decision a scenario of the work was sent her. “_Le
Gazetier Cuirassé_,” says Bachaumont, who saw it, “was rose-water in
comparison with this new _chef-d’œuvre_.”
Alarmed and enraged, the poor creature communicated her fears and anger
to the King, who applied to George III for Morande’s extradition. The
attitude of the British Government was characteristic of the political
morality of the age. The laws and customs of England rendering the
extradition of a foreign refugee out of the question, the French
Court was informed that failing an action for libel--which under
the circumstances was clearly impossible--the only alternative was
to kidnap the libellist. The British Government even offered its
assistance, providing that Morande’s “removal was done with the
greatest secrecy and in such a manner as not to wound the national
susceptibilities.”
The French Government accordingly sent a brigade of police to London,
but Morande was on the alert. Warned from Paris of his danger, he
exposed the contemplated attack upon him in the Press, giving himself
out as “a political exile and an avenger of public morality”--poses,
needless to say, which are always applauded in England. Public sympathy
was thus excited in his favour to such a pitch that the French police
were obliged to return to France empty-handed, after having narrowly
escaped being thrown into the Thames by an infuriated crowd.
Morande, enchanted at having got the better of the French Government,
redoubled his threats. He wrote again to Madame du Barry to inform
her that 6,000 copies of his scandalous work were already printed and
ready for circulation. Louis XV, who had no more fear of a libel than
Voltaire, would have let him do his worst, but to please his mistress
he decided to come to terms. As this had now become a delicate matter,
Beaumarchais was entrusted with the negotiation on account of his
superior cunning. The celebrated author who had everything to gain by
earning the gratitude of Madame du Barry went to London under the name
of Ronac, and in a very short time succeeded in gaining the confidence
of the libellist, whose silence was purchased for the sum of 32,000
livres in cash and a pension of 4,000 livres, to be paid to Morande’s
wife in the event of her surviving him.
It was about this time that Morande, without altogether abandoning his
career of blackmail, adopted the more profitable one of spy. Instead of
attacking authority, he now offered to serve it. Having been taught his
value by experience, the French Government gladly accepted the offer.
He began by “watching” the French colony in London, which was composed
chiefly of escaped criminals and political refugees, and ended as
Editor of the _Courier de l’Europe_.
This paper had been started by a refugee, Serres de Latour, with the
object of instructing the French public in the internal affairs of
England, particularly as regards her foreign policy. The money to
finance the scheme had been supplied by a Scotchman by name of Swinton,
who was granted every facility by the Comte de Vergennes, the French
Minister for Foreign Affairs, that would assist the enterprise.
Thus protected, the _Courier de l’Europe_ was a success from the start.
In a short time it had 5,000 subscribers--an enormous number for those
days--and a revenue of 25,000 livres. Brissot, the leader of the
Girondins in the Revolution, who was connected with it for a time as a
young man, estimated its readers at over a million. “There was not,” he
says, “a corner of Europe in which it was not read.”
Such a widely circulated journal naturally had great influence. During
the American War of Independence its ever-increasing success alarmed
the English Cabinet, which, instead of suppressing it, foolishly
endeavoured to circumvent the laws respecting the liberty of the
Press by placing an embargo on the bales of the paper destined for
export. But Swinton parried this blow by causing it to be printed
simultaneously at Boulogne. “Whereupon,” says Brissot, “the English
Government resigned itself to the inevitable and suffered the _Courier
de l’Europe_ to continue to injure England under the protection of
English law itself.” Throughout the war which ended so humiliatingly
for England, as Vergennes expressed it, “the gazette of Latour was
worth a hundred spies” to France.
Under the editorship of Morande, who succeeded Serres de Latour, the
journal, as may be imagined, more than maintained its reputation. “In
it,” says Brissot, “he tore to pieces the most estimable people, spied
on all the French who lived in or visited London, and manufactured, or
caused to be manufactured, articles to ruin any one he feared.”
Such was the man, and such the weapon, that the Court of Versailles,
which had frequently utilized both before, now employed to destroy
Cagliostro.[41]
Morande, who had now become the chief of the brigade of police spies,
which when he himself had been their quarry he had so loudly denounced
in the English press, opened fire, in obedience to his orders, on
September 1, 1786. For three months he bombarded Cagliostro unceasingly
in a long series of articles that befouled, calumniated, and ridiculed
him with a devilish cleverness. Like the Countess de Lamotte, he did
not hesitate to deny his own statements when others could be made
more serviceable. Thus, after affirming “Nature’s unfortunate child”
to be the son of a coachman of the Neapolitan Duke of Castropignani,
he declared him to be the valet of the alchemist Gracci, known as the
Cosmopolite, from whom he had stolen all his secrets, which he had
afterwards exploited in Spain, Italy, and Russia under various titles:
sometimes a count, at others a marquis, here a Spanish colonel, there a
Prussian--but always and everywhere an impostor.
In this way rambling from article to article, from calumny to calumny,
without knowing where he was going, so to speak, Morande finally
arrived at Giuseppe Balsamo--as described at the beginning of the
book. The discovery of Balsamo was a veritable _trouvaille_. It
enabled Morande to tack on to the variegated career of the Sicilian
scoundrel all that he had hitherto affirmed of Cagliostro’s past life
without appearing to contradict himself. Once on Balsamo’s track, he
never lost scent of him. He ferreted out or invented all the stories
concerning the Balsamos: their marriage, the manner in which they
had lived, their forgeries, blackmail, poverty, licentiousness,
imprisonment--everything, in fact, that could damage Cagliostro and
_his_ wife. He found people, moreover, to swear to the truth of all
he said, or rather he asserted it, and on the strength of their
accusations caused Cagliostro to be sued for debts incurred in the
name of Balsamo years before. He collected all the hostile reports of
the enemies the Grand Cophta had made in his travels through Europe
and afterwards in the Necklace Affair, and re-edited them with the
precision of an historian and the malice of a personal enemy. Then,
after having done him all the injury he could and given the French
Government full value for its money, Morande with brazen effrontery
proposed to Cagliostro that he should purchase the silence of the
_Courier_!
[Illustration: THEVENAU DE MORANDE]
But Cagliostro was not the man--to his credit, be it said--to ignore
the feigned indignation of the libellist who had been hired to ruin
him. Aided by Thilorier,[42] his brilliant counsel in the Necklace
Affair, who happened to be in England, the wonder-worker published a
_Letter to the English People_, in which he flung in the face of the
blackmailer all the atrocious acts of his own past. Morande, however,
aware that any effort on his part to clear himself of these accusations
would be useless, sought to distract attention from the subject by
daring Cagliostro to disprove the charges made in the _Courier_. At the
same time he thought to stab him to silence by covering with ridicule a
statement which he asserted Cagliostro had made to the effect that “the
lions and tigers in the forests of Medina were poisoned by the Arabians
by devouring hogs fattened on arsenic for the purpose.”
The laughter which this reply aroused evidently stung Cagliostro to the
quick, and to refute Morande’s implied accusation of charlatanism, he
wrote the following letter to the _Public Advertiser_, in which, after
some preliminary sarcasms, he said--
“Of all the fine stories that you have invented about me, the best is
undoubtedly that of the pig fattened on arsenic which poisoned the
lions, the tigers, and the leopards in the forest of Medina. I am
now going, sir jester, to have a joke at your expense. In physics and
chemistry, arguments avail little, persiflage nothing; it is experiment
alone that counts. Permit me, then, to propose to you a little
experiment which will divert the public either at your expense or mine.
I invite you to lunch with me on November 9 (1786). You shall supply
the wine and all the accessories, I on the other hand will provide but
a single dish--a little pig fattened according to my plan. Two hours
before the lunch you shall see it alive, and healthy, and I will not
come near it till it is served on the table. You shall cut it in four
parts, and, having chosen the portion that you prefer, you shall give
me what you think proper. The next day one of four things will occur:
either we shall both be dead, or we shall neither of us be dead; or I
shall be dead and you will not; or you will be dead and I shall not. Of
these four chances I give you three, and I will bet you 5,000 guineas
that the day after the lunch you are dead and that I am alive and well.”
Whether or no Morande’s perception had been blunted by over-taxing
his imagination in the attempt to discredit his enemy, he interpreted
Cagliostro’s sarcasm literally. Afraid to accept the challenge, but
tempted by the 5,000 guineas, he suggested “that the test should take
place in public, and that some other carnivorous animal should be
substituted for the pig fattened on arsenic.” But this suggestion,
which revealed his cowardice by reducing the culinary duel to a farce,
gave his adversary an opportunity he was quick to seize.
“You refuse to come yourself to the lunch to which I invite you,”
wrote Cagliostro in a letter to the _Public Advertiser_ which recalls
one of Voltaire’s, “and suggest as a substitute some other carnivorous
animal? But that was not my proposal. Such a guest would only very
imperfectly represent you. Where would you find a carnivorous animal
which amongst its own species is what you are amongst men? It is not
your representative, but yourself, with whom I wish to treat. The
custom of combat by champions has long gone out of fashion, and even
if I allowed you to restore it, honour would forbid me to contend with
the champion you offer. A champion should not have to be dragged into
the arena, but enter it willingly; and however little you may know of
animals, you must be aware that you cannot find one flesh-eating or
grass-eating that would be your champion.”
To this letter the unscrupulous agent of the French Court dared not
reply. The man he had been hired to defame with his venomous pen had
the laugh on his side. The public, moreover, were beginning to detect
the mercenary hireling in the detractor, and as the gallery had ceased
to be amused Morande, to avoid losing what reputation he possessed,
suddenly ceased his attacks, apologizing to his readers for “having
entertained them so long with so futile a subject.”
Nevertheless, though the victory remained with Cagliostro, he had
received a mortal wound. The poisoned pigs of the Arabians were not
more destructive than the poisoned pen of Theveneau de Morande. The
persistency of his attacks, the ingenuity of his detraction, were more
effective than the most irrefutable proof. His articles, in spite of
their too evident hostility, their contradictions, their statements
either unverifiable or based on the testimony of persons whose
reputations alone made it worthless, created a general feeling that the
man whom they denounced was an impostor. The importance of the paper in
which they appeared, quoted by other papers, all of Europe, served to
confirm this impression. Thus the world, whose conclusions are formed
by instinct rather than reason, forgetting that it had ridiculed as
improbable Cagliostro’s own story of his life, accepted the amazing and
still more improbable past that Morande “unmasked” without reservation.
Nor did the Court of Versailles and its friends, nor all the forces
of law and order which, threatened everywhere, made common cause with
the threatened French monarchy, fail to circulate and confirm by every
means in their power the statements of Morande. 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.”
But in the curious mass of coincidence and circumstantial evidence on
which the popular conception of Cagliostro has been based, ingenious
and plausible though it is, there is one little _fact_ which history
has overlooked and which Morande was careful to ignore. In turning
Cagliostro into Giuseppe Balsamo, the fantastic idealist-enthusiast
into the vagabond forger, “the charlatan,” as Queen’s friend Besenval
describes him, “who never took a sou from a soul, but lived honourably
and paid scrupulously what he owed,” into the vulgar _souteneur_,
Morande, by no trick of the imagination, with all the cunning
calumnies of the French Court, and the so-called “confession” wrung
from its victim by the Inquisition, to aid him, could not succeed in
making the two _resemble_ one another. Yet it is on the word of this
journalist-bravo, hired by the French Ministry to defame an innocent
man whose unanimous acquittal of a crime in which he had been unjustly
implicated was believed by Marie Antoinette to be tantamount to her
own conviction, that Cagliostro has been branded as one of the most
contemptible blackguards in history.
Surely it is time to challenge an opinion so fraudulently supported
and so arbitrarily expressed? The age of calumny is past. The frenzied
hatreds and passions that, like monstrous maggots, so to speak,
infested the dying carcass of the old _régime_ are extinct, or at
least have lost their force. We can understand the emotions they once
stirred so powerfully without feeling them. In taking the sting from
the old hate Time has given new scales to justice. We no longer weigh
reputations by the _effects_ of detraction, but by its _cause_.
The evidence on which Morande’s diabolically ingenious theories are
based has already been examined in the early chapters of this book. It
requires no effort of the imagination to surmise what the effect would
be on a jury to-day if their decision depended upon the evidence of a
witness who, as Brissot says, “regarded calumny as a trade, and moral
assassination as a sport.”
III
The campaign against Cagliostro was by no means confined to defamation.
Morande assailed not only his character, but his person.
On the first shot fired by the _Courier de l’Europe_, as if it were the
signal for a preconcerted attack, a swarm of blackmailers, decoys, and
spurious creditors descended upon the unfortunate Grand Cophta. Warned
by the noise that the daring, but unsuccessful, attempts of the secret
agents of the French police to kidnap the Count de Lamotte had created,
Morande adopted methods less likely to scandalize the British public in
his efforts to trepan Cagliostro. While apparently confining himself
to the congenial task of “unmasking” his victim daily in the columns
of his widely-read journal, he was a party to, if he did not actually
organize, the series of persecutions that embittered the existence of
the now broken and discredited wonder-worker.
If, as he declared, in his efforts to convince the public that
Cagliostro was Giuseppe Balsamo, the perjured Aylett and the
restaurant-keeper Pergolezzi were prepared to corroborate his
statement, then given his notorious character, unconcealed motive,
and the money with which he was supplied by the French Government,
the presumption that these questionable witnesses were bought is at
least well founded. In the _Letter to the English People_ in which
Cagliostro, with the aid of Thilorier, sought to defend himself from
the charges of the _Courier de l’Europe_, he states, as “a fact well
known in London,” that Morande went about purse in hand, purchasing the
information, witnesses, and accomplices he required.
He offered one hundred guineas to O’Reilly, to whose good offices
Cagliostro owed his release from the King’s Bench jail in 1777, to
swear that he had left England without paying his debts. But though
O’Reilly refused to be bought, Swinton, Morande’s intimate friend and
the proprietor of the _Courier de l’Europe_, proceeding on different
lines, succeeded in making mischief between O’Reilly and Cagliostro,
by which the latter was deprived of a valuable friend when he had most
need of him.
According to Brissot, who knew him thoroughly, and whose testimony is
above dispute, Swinton was every bit as unprincipled as his editor.
A Scotchman by birth, he had lived the greater part of his life,
married, and made his fortune in France. On settling in London he had
drifted naturally into the French colony, in which, by reason of his
sympathies, connections and interests he had acquired great influence,
which he turned to account on every possible occasion. One of his many
profitable enterprises was a “home” for young Frenchmen employed in
London. “He also ran a druggist’s shop,” says Brissot, “in the name
of one of his clerks, and a restaurant in the name of another.”[43]
And when Cagliostro arrived in London with a letter of introduction to
him, Swinton, who was as full of schemes as he was devoid of principle,
thought to run him, too, for his own profit. The wonder-worker with
his elixirs, his balsams, and his magical phenomena was, if properly
handled, a mine of gold.
Taking advantage of Cagliostro’s ignorance of the language and customs
of the country in which he had sought refuge, Swinton, who was
assiduous in his attentions, rented him a house in Sloane Street, for
which he desired a tenant, induced him to pay the cost of repairing
it, and provided him with the furniture he needed at double its value.
To prevent any one else from interfering with the agreeable task of
plucking so fat a bird, and at the same time the better to conceal his
duplicity, Swinton endeavoured to preclude all approach to his prey. It
was to this end that he made trouble between Cagliostro and O’Reilly.
Having succeeded thus far in his design he redoubled his attentions,
and urged Cagliostro to give a public exhibition of his healing powers,
as he had done at Strasburg. But warned by previous experience of the
danger of exciting afresh the hostility of the doctors, Cagliostro
firmly refused. Swinton then proposed to become his apothecary, and to
push the sale of the Grand Cophta’s various medicaments, of which his
druggist’s shop should have the monopoly, in the _Courier de l’Europe_.
To this, however, Cagliostro also objected, preferring, apparently, not
to disclose the secret of their preparation--if not to share with the
apothecary, as Morande afterwards declared, the exorbitant profit to be
derived from their sale. Perceiving that he was not to be persuaded by
fair means, Swinton injudiciously tried to put on the screw. But his
threats, far from accomplishing their purpose, only served to betray
his designs, and so disgusted Cagliostro that he ceased to have any
further communication with him. Swinton, however, was not to be got rid
of in any such fashion. Living next door to his enemy, his house became
the rendezvous of the various bailiffs and decoys hired by Morande to
seize or waylay his unfortunate adversary.
Among numerous schemes of Swinton and Morande to capture Cagliostro
were two attempts to obtain his arrest by inducing persons to take out
writs against him for imaginary debts--a proceeding which the custom of
merely swearing to a debt to procure a writ rendered easy. In this way
Priddle, who had behaved so scurvily in Cagliostro’s arbitration suit
with Miss Fry in 1777, was induced to take out a writ for sixty pounds,
due, as he pretended, for legal business transacted nine years before.
Warned, however, that the bailiffs were hiding in Swinton’s house to
serve the writ the moment he should appear, Cagliostro was able to
defeat their intention by procuring bail before they could accomplish
their purpose. In the end it was Priddle who went to Newgate. But
instead of the former demand for sixty pounds, Cagliostro, by means
of one of the various legal subterfuges in the practice of which the
eighteenth century lawyer excelled, was obliged to pay one hundred and
eighty pounds and costs.
Immediately after this dearly-bought victory, the baited victim of
ministerial tyranny and corruption was similarly attacked from another
quarter in a manner which proves how great was the exasperation of
his enemies. Sacchi, the blackmailer, who had published a libellous
pamphlet against Cagliostro--quoted by Madame de Lamotte at her trial,
when it was generally regarded as worthless, and its suppression
ordered by the Parliament of Paris--appeared in London and obtained a
writ for one hundred and fifty pounds, which, he claimed, Cagliostro
owed him for the week passed in his service in Strasburg in 1781. The
impudence of this claim on examination was, of course, sufficient
to disprove it; but Morande, who had brought Sacchi to England
and assisted him to procure the writ, all but succeeded in having
Cagliostro ignominiously dragged to Newgate on the strength of it.
The proximity, however, of Swinton’s house--in which the bailiffs had
secreted themselves pending an opportunity of seizing their prey, as on
the former occasion--helped to betray their presence, and once again
Cagliostro managed to forestall them by giving the necessary bail in
due time.
Such an existence was enough to give the most fearless nature cause for
alarm, and the Bastille had effectually damped the courage of the Grand
Cophta. “Startling at shadows” the pertinacity of his enemies left him
not a moment’s peace. The fate of Lord George Gordon was ever in his
thoughts. If the French Government was powerful enough to effect the
imprisonment of an Englishman who had offended it in his own country,
what chance had he of escaping?
[Illustration: A MASONIC ANECDOTE
(_After the caricature by Gillray_)]
His Masonic experiences in England, moreover, were not of a nature
to encourage the hopes he had entertained of making converts to the
sect he had founded. At first it seemed as if Egyptian Masonry might
prosper on English soil. Assisted by a number of adepts from Paris and
Lyons, whose zeal had induced them to follow their master to London,
Cagliostro had sought to found a lodge for the observance of the
Egyptian Rite. To this end he had held séances which many people of
distinction attended. These were so successful that to encourage some
of the more promising of his clientele he “transmitted to them, as a
mark of exceptional favour, the power to obtain manifestations in his
absence.” Unfortunately, instead of the angels they expected to evoke,
devils appeared.[44] The effect produced upon these inexperienced
occultists was deplorable; combined with the attacks of the _Courier de
l’Europe_ it effectually killed Egyptian Masonry in England.
The Freemasons, who had welcomed him to their lodges with open arms, as
the victim of a degenerate and despicable despotism, influenced by the
scathing attacks of Morande, who was himself a Mason, now gave him the
cold shoulder. At a convivial gathering at the Lodge of Antiquity which
he attended about this time, instead of the sympathy he expected he was
so ridiculed by one “Brother Mash, an optician,” who gave a burlesque
imitation of the Grand Cophta of Egyptian Masonry as a quack-doctor
vending a spurious balsam to cure every malady, that the victim of his
ridicule was compelled to withdraw.
The mortification which this incident occasioned Cagliostro was
further intensified by the wide notoriety that it was given by Gillray
in a caricature entitled “A Masonic Anecdote,” to which the following
lines were attached in English and French:--
“EXTRACT OF THE ARABIAN COUNT’S MEMOIRS
“Born, God knows where, supported, God knows how,
From whom descended--difficult to know;
Lord Crop adopts him as a bosom friend,
And madly dares his character defend.
This self-dubb’d Count some few years since became
A Brother Mason in a borrow’d name;
For names like Semple numerous he bears,
And Proteus-like in fifty forms appears.
‘Behold in me (he says) Dame Nature’s child
Of Soul benevolent and Manners mild,
In me the guiltless Acharat behold,
Who knows the mystery of making Gold;
A feeling heart I boast, a conscience pure,
I boast a Balsam every ill to cure,
My Pills and Powders all disease remove,
Renew your vigour and your health improve.’
This cunning part the arch-impostor acts
And thus the weak and credulous attracts.
But now his history is render’d clear
The arrant hypocrite and knave appear;
First as Balsamo he to paint essay’d,
But only daubing he renounc’d the trade;
Then as a Mountebank abroad he stroll’d;
And many a name on Death’s black list enroll’d.
Three times he visited the British shore,
And ev’ry time a different name he bore;
The brave Alsatians he with ease cajol’d
By boasting of Egyptian forms of old.
The self-same trick he practis’d at Bourdeaux,
At Strasburg, Lyons and at Paris too.
But fate for Brother Mash reserv’d the task
To strip the vile impostor of his mask.
May all true Masons his plain tale attend!
And Satire’s laugh to fraud shall put an end.”
To recover the prestige he had lost in the Masonic world Cagliostro
seems for a moment to have sought affiliation with the Swedenborgians,
whose extravagant form of spiritualism was not unlike that of the
Egyptian Rite. It was undoubtedly with this object in view that he
inserted a notice in the _Morning Herald_ in which he invited “all true
Masons in the name of Jehovah to assemble at O’Reilly’s Hotel to form
a plan for the reconstruction of the New Temple of Jerusalem.” The
Swedenborgians, however, failed to respond to the invitation.
Smitten thus hip and thigh, England became impossible to Cagliostro;
and having made the necessary preparations he set out with great
secrecy and alone for Switzerland some time in May 1787. But Morande
even now did not cease persecuting him. Not content with boasting that
“he had succeeded in hunting his dear Don Joseph out of England,”
he circulated the report that “the charlatan had gone off with the
diamonds of his wife, who in revenge now admitted that her husband was
indeed Giuseppe Balsamo and that all the _Courier de l’Europe_ had
written about him was true.”
This report is another instance of the vindictive rumours on which so
much of the prejudice against Cagliostro is based. It was devoid of the
least particle of truth, and was deliberately fabricated and circulated
solely for the purpose of injuring the man it slandered.
As a matter of fact, in travelling without his wife for the first
and only time in his career, Cagliostro did so from necessity. Beset
with spies who, as he was informed, suspecting his intention of
leaving England had planned to capture him _en route_,[45] he had need
of observing the greatest caution in his movements. The Countess
Cagliostro, far from being left in “great distress,” as Morande
asserted, had ample means at her disposal as well as valuable friends
in the Royal Academician de Loutherbourg and his wife, with whom she
lived till her own departure for Switzerland.
Philip James de Loutherbourg was a painter of considerable note in his
day. An Alsatian by birth, he had studied art under Vanloo in Paris,
but meeting with little success in France, migrated to England, where
fortune proved more propitious. His battle-pieces and landscapes in
the Salvator Rosa style were very popular with the great public of
his day. Engaged by Garrick to paint scenery for Drury Lane Theatre,
the innovations that he introduced completely revolutionized the
mounting of the stage. He was also the originator of the panorama. His
“Eidophusicon,” as he called it, in which, by the aid of mechanical
contrivances, painted scenes acquired the appearance of reality, when
exhibited in London excited the unbounded admiration of Gainsborough.
Of a decidedly visionary temperament, de Loutherbourg “went in” for
alchemy, till his wife, who was equally visionary and more spiritually
inclined, smashed his crucible in a fit of religious exaltation.
Converted in this violent fashion to a less material though no less
absurd form of supernaturalism, the popular Royal Academician, whose
pictures at least had nothing mystical about them, became assiduous
in attending Baptist chapels, revivalist meetings, and Swedenborgian
services. After associating with the enthusiast Brothers, who called
himself “the nephew of the Almighty” and was more fitted for a lunatic
asylum than the prison to which his antics led him, de Loutherbourg
turned faith-healer. At the same time his wife also acquired the power
to heal.
[Illustration: PHILIP JAMES DE LOUTHERBOURG]
Beside the cures the de Loutherbourgs are reported to have performed
those of Cagliostro pale into insignificance. Even Mrs. Eddy, of
Christian science fame, with her “absent treatment,” has only imitated
them. Unlike her, the de Loutherbourgs healed free of charge.
Sometimes the sufferer they treated would be in another room or even
in another house. On one occasion, if “A Lover of the Lamb of God” is
to be believed, they cured “a boy suffering from scrofula who had been
discharged from St. Bart’s as incurable in five days without seeing
him.”
Naturally their fame soon spread, and as they professed to be able
to cure all diseases, people suffering from all sorts of infirmities
flocked to consult them. Horace Walpole declares that de Loutherbourg
had as many as three thousand patients. Certain days in each week were
appointed for their treatment, which were regularly advertised. On one
occasion all the three thousand, apparently owing to some error in the
announcement, are said to have surrounded the house at once, so that it
was with the greatest difficulty one could either enter or leave it.
“A Lover of the Lamb of God” was so impressed by the miracles the de
Loutherbourgs performed as to call upon the Archbishop of Canterbury
“to compile a form of prayer to be used in all churches and chapels
that nothing may impede their inestimable gift having free course.”
Their practice, however, was brought to an abrupt close by some
indignant patients whom they had failed to cure, and who, accompanied
by a mob, attacked the house and very nearly lynched the faith-healers.
De Loutherbourg’s mystical tendencies, however, do not appear to
have injured him in the least in the opinion of the general public.
On resuming his career as painter he found the same encouragement as
before, and was highly respected by all who knew him. As contrasted
with the enmity of so notorious a blackguard as Morande, the
friendship of so estimable a man as de Loutherbourg speaks volumes for
Cagliostro’s own probity.
The charity of the de Loutherbourgs, on which Morande, Swinton
and Company declared that the Countess Cagliostro lived after her
husband’s escape from their clutches, consisted entirely in defeating
their attempts to take advantage of her defenceless state. Receiving
information that a writ was to be issued by which Cagliostro’s
furniture was to be seized, de Loutherbourg advised the Countess to
sell it and take up her abode in his house until her husband sent for
her, when to ensure her travelling without molestation he and Mrs. de
Loutherbourg accompanied her to Switzerland.
The first thing that she did on arriving at Bienne was to go before
a magistrate and make an affidavit to the effect that her reported
corroboration of the charges made against her husband in the _Courier
de l’Europe_ was a lie. The fact that the Countess Cagliostro did this
with the knowledge of the de Loutherbourgs is sufficient to prove the
truth of her words.