IV.

IV.Cagliostro’s greatest triumph was achieved in Paris. A gay and frivolous aristocracy, mad after new sensations, welcomed the magician with open arms. The way had been paved for him by St. Germain and Mesmer. He made his appearance in the French capital, January 30, 1785. Fantastic stories were circulated about him. The Cardinal de Rohan selected and furnished a house for him, and visited him three or four times a week, arriving at dinner time and remaining until an advanced{58}hour in the night. It was said that the great Cardinal assisted the sorcerer in his labors, and many persons spoke of the mysterious laboratory where gold bubbled and diamonds sparkled in crucibles brought to a white heat. But nobody except Cagliostro, and perhaps the Cardinal, ever entered that mysterious laboratory. All that was known for a certainty was that the apartments were furnished with Oriental splendor, and that Count Cagliostro in a dazzling costume received his guests with kingly dignity, and gave them his hand to kiss. Upon a black marble slab in the antechamber carved in golden letters was the universal prayer of Alexander Pope. “Father of all! in every age,” etc., the parody of which ten years later Paris sang as a hymn to the Supreme Being.Says Funck-Brentano:13“At Paris Cagliostro showed himself what he had been at Strasburg, dignified and reserved. He refused with haughtiness the invitations to dinner sent to him by the Count of Artois, brother of the king, and the Duke of Chartres, prince of the blood. He proclaimed himself chief of the Rosicrucians, who regarded themselves as chosen beings placed above the rest of mankind, and he gave to his adepts the rarest pleasure. . . . To all who pressed him with questions as to who he was, he replied in a grave voice, knitting his eyebrows and pointing his forefinger towards the sky, ‘I am he who is’; and as it was difficult to make out that he was ‘he who is not,’ the only thing was to bow with an air of profound deference.“He possessed the science of the ancient priests of Egypt. His conversation turned generally on three points: (1) Universal Medicine, of which the secrets were known to him. (2) Egyptian Freemasonry, which he wished to restore, and of which he had just established a parent lodge at Lyons, for Scotch masonry, then predominant in France, was in his eyes only an inferior, degenerate form. (3) The Philosopher’s Stone, which was to ensure the transmutation of all the imperfect metals into fine gold.”{59}13The Diamond Necklace. Being the true Story of Marie Antoinette and the Cardinal de Rohan. From the new documents recently discovered in Paris.By Frantz Funck-Brentano. Translated from the French by H. S. Edwards. Philadelphia, 1901. 8vo.“He thus gave to humanity, by his universal medicine, bodily health; by Egyptian masonry, spiritual health; and by the philosopher’s stone, infinite wealth.” These were his principal secrets, but he had a host of others, that of predicting the winning numbers in lotteries; prophesying as to the future; softening marble and restoring it to its pristine hardness; of giving to cotton the lustre and softness of silk, which has been re-invented in our day by a chemical process.Many writers on magic have fancied that the art of making gold was the secret that lay hid under the forms of Egyptian theology. Says the Benedictine monk, Pernetz: “The hermetic science was the source of all the riches of the Egyptian kings, and the object of these mysteries so hidden under the veil of their pretended religion.” In a subterranean chamber beneath the Great Pyramid of Gizeh, Hermes Trismegistus is supposed, according to mediæval alchemists, to have placed his Table of Emerald, upon which he engraved the secret of transmuting metals into gold.Among the many stories told of Cagliostro, that of the supper in the hotel of the Rue Saint Claude, where the ghosts made merry, is the most extraordinary. Six guests and the host took their places at a round table upon which there were thirteen covers. Each guest pronounced the name of the dead man whose spirit he desired to appear at the banquet table. Cagliostro, concentrating his mysterious forces, gave the invitation in a solemn and commanding tone. One after another the six guests appeared. They were the Duc de Choiseul, Voltaire, d’Alembert, Diderot, the Abbé de Voisenon, and Montesquieu.The story of this spirit séance created a sensation in Paris. It reached the court, and one evening, when the conversation turned upon the banquet of the ghosts, Louis XVI frowned, shrugged his shoulders, and resumed his game of cards. The queen became indignant, and forbade the mention of the name of the charlatan in her presence. Nevertheless, some of the light-headed ladies of the court burned for an introduction to the superb sorcerer. They begged Lorenza Feliciani to get him to give them a course of lectures or lessons in magic to which no gentlemen were to be admitted. Lorenza replied that he would consent, provided there were thirty-six pupils. The list was made{60}up in a day, and a week afterward the fair dames got their first lesson. But they gossiped about it. This caused another scandal, and consequently the first lesson was the last.Cagliostro’s Egyptian Rite of Masonry was well received in Paris, especially the lodge for ladies, which was presided over by the beautiful Lorenza, his wife. It was appropriately calledIsis. Among the members of this female lodge were the Countesses de Brienne, Dessalles, de Polignac, de Brassac, de Choiseul, d’Espinchal, the Marchioness d’Avrincourt, and Mmes. de Loménie, de Genlis, de Bercy, de Trevières, de Baussan, de Monteil, d’Ailly, etc.Cagliostro lived like a lord, thanks to the revenues obtained from the initiates into his masonic rite, and the money which he unquestionably received from his dupe, the Cardinal de Rohan, who was magic mad.“His wife,” says a gossipy writer, “was rarely seen, but by all accounts she was a woman of bewildering beauty, realizing the Greek lines in all their antique purity and enhanced by an Italian expression. The most enthusiastic of her so-called admirers were precisely those who had never seen her face. There were many duels to decide the question as to the color of her eyes, some contending that they were black, and others that they were blue. Duels were also fought over the dimple which some admirers insisted was on the right cheek, while others said that the honor belonged to the left cheek. She appeared to be no more than twenty years old, but she spoke sometimes of her eldest son, who was for some years a captain in the Dutch army.”The magician’s sojourn in Paris caused the greatest excitement. His portrait and that of his wife were to be seen everywhere, on fans, on rings, on snuff-boxes, and on medallions. His bust was cut in marble by the famous sculptor, Houdon, cast in bronze, and placed in the mansions of the nobility. He was called by his admirers “the divine Cagliostro.” To one of the old portraits was appended the following verse:“De l’Ami des Humains reconnaissez les traits:Tous ses jours sont marqués par de nouveaux bienfaits,Il prolonge la Vie, il secourt l’indigence;Le plaisir d’être utile est seul sa recompense.”{61}BUSTOFCAGLIOSTRO.After Houdon.(In the possession of M. Storelli.)CAGLIOSTRO.FromVie de Joseph Balsamo, etc.Paris, 1791.Hats and neckties were named after him. In Paris as in Strasburg, he gave away large sums of money to the poor and cured them of their ailments free of charge. His mansion was always crowded with noble guests. The idle aristocracy could find nothing better to do than attend the spirit séances of the charlatan. The shades of Voltaire, Rousseau, and other dead celebrities were summoned from the “vasty deep,” impersonated doubtless by clever confederates in the pay of Cagliostro, often aided by mechanical and optical accessories. The art of phantasmagoria, in which the concave mirror plays a part, was well known to the enchanter. The Count de Beugnot gives in detail, in his interesting autobiography, an account of Cagliostro’s performances at the residences of Madame de la Motte and the Cardinal de Rohan. The niece of Count de la Motte, a Mlle. de{62}la Tour, a charming girl of fifteen, frequently acted as clairvoyant in the mystical séances. She is reported to have possessed all the requisites of a seeress: angelic purity, delicate nerves, and blue eyes, also to have been born under the constellation Capricorn. “Her mother nearly died of joy.”Says Count Beugnot: “When she learned that her child fulfilled all these conditions of Egyptian thaumaturgy, she thought the treasures of Memphis and of that large city in the interior of Africa were about to fall upon her family, which was badly in need of them.” In the report of the necklace trial (Arch. Nat. X2, B‐1417), the young girl confesses to have aided the charlatan in his magical operations at the house of the Cardinal, by pretending to see visions of Marie Antoinette and others in a globe of water, which was surrounded by lighted tapers and figures of Isis and Apis. He had decked her out in a freemason’s apron embroidered with cabalistic characters. She aided him because “she did not want to be bothered,” and answered his leading questions, etc. But there was perhaps another reason for her acquiescence in the fraud. Cagliostro had declared to her, in the presence of the prelate, her aunt and mother, when she first attempted to play the part of pythoness and failed, that her inability to see anything in the globe was evidence that she was not innocent. Stung by his inuendos, she immediately yielded and saw all she was desired to see, thereby becoming his confederate to deceive De Rohan.An interesting pen portrait of Cagliostro is contained in Beugnot’s memoirs. The Count met the enchanter for the first time at the house of Madame de la Motte:“Cagliostro was of medium height, rather stout, with an olive complexion, a very short neck, round face, two large eyes on a level with the cheeks, and a broad, turned-up nose. . . . His hair was dressed in a way new to France, being divided into several small tresses that united behind the head, and were twisted up into what was then called a club.“He wore on that day an iron gray coat of French make, with gold lace, a scarlet waistcoat trimmed with broad Spanish lace, red breeches, his sword looped to the skirt of his coat, and a laced hat with a white feather, the latter a decoration still{63}required of mountebanks, tooth-drawers and other medical practitioners, who proclaim and retail their drugs in the open air. Cagliostro set off this costume by lace ruffles, several valuable rings, and shoe-buckles which were, it is true, of antique design, but bright enough to be taken for real diamonds. . . . The face, attire, and the whole man made an impression on me that I could not prevent. I listened to the talk. He spoke some sort of medley, half French and half Italian, and made many quotations which might be Arabic, but which he did not trouble himself to translate. I could not remember any more of [his conversation] than that the hero had spoken of heaven, of the stars, of the Great Secret, of Memphis, of the high-priest, of transcendental chemistry, of giants and monstrous beasts, of a city ten times as large as Paris, in the middle of Africa, where he had correspondents.”14Cagliostro often boasted of his great age.One day in Strasburg, he stopped before a huge crucifix of carved wood, and contemplated it with melancholy countenance.“The likeness is excellent,” he remarked to one of his votaries, “but I cannot understand how the artist, who certainly never saw Christ, could have secured such a perfect portrait.”“You knew Christ, then?” inquired the neophyte, breathlessly.“We were on the most intimate terms.”“My dear Count!—”“I mean what I say. How often we strolled together on the sandy shore of the Lake of Tiberias. How infinitely sweet his voice. But, alas, he would not heed my advice. He loved to walk on the seashore, where he picked up a band oflazzaroni—of fishermen and beggars. This and his preaching brought him to a bitter end.”Turning to his servant, Cagliostro added: “Do you remember that evening at Jerusalem when they crucified Christ?”“No, Monsieur le Comte,” replied the well-tutored lackey, bowing low, “you forget that I have only been in your employ for the last fifteen hundred years.”Baron Munchausen is not to be compared to Cagliostro.{64}14Beugnot, Comte de.Mémoires.Paris, 1866.

Cagliostro’s greatest triumph was achieved in Paris. A gay and frivolous aristocracy, mad after new sensations, welcomed the magician with open arms. The way had been paved for him by St. Germain and Mesmer. He made his appearance in the French capital, January 30, 1785. Fantastic stories were circulated about him. The Cardinal de Rohan selected and furnished a house for him, and visited him three or four times a week, arriving at dinner time and remaining until an advanced{58}hour in the night. It was said that the great Cardinal assisted the sorcerer in his labors, and many persons spoke of the mysterious laboratory where gold bubbled and diamonds sparkled in crucibles brought to a white heat. But nobody except Cagliostro, and perhaps the Cardinal, ever entered that mysterious laboratory. All that was known for a certainty was that the apartments were furnished with Oriental splendor, and that Count Cagliostro in a dazzling costume received his guests with kingly dignity, and gave them his hand to kiss. Upon a black marble slab in the antechamber carved in golden letters was the universal prayer of Alexander Pope. “Father of all! in every age,” etc., the parody of which ten years later Paris sang as a hymn to the Supreme Being.

Says Funck-Brentano:13“At Paris Cagliostro showed himself what he had been at Strasburg, dignified and reserved. He refused with haughtiness the invitations to dinner sent to him by the Count of Artois, brother of the king, and the Duke of Chartres, prince of the blood. He proclaimed himself chief of the Rosicrucians, who regarded themselves as chosen beings placed above the rest of mankind, and he gave to his adepts the rarest pleasure. . . . To all who pressed him with questions as to who he was, he replied in a grave voice, knitting his eyebrows and pointing his forefinger towards the sky, ‘I am he who is’; and as it was difficult to make out that he was ‘he who is not,’ the only thing was to bow with an air of profound deference.

“He possessed the science of the ancient priests of Egypt. His conversation turned generally on three points: (1) Universal Medicine, of which the secrets were known to him. (2) Egyptian Freemasonry, which he wished to restore, and of which he had just established a parent lodge at Lyons, for Scotch masonry, then predominant in France, was in his eyes only an inferior, degenerate form. (3) The Philosopher’s Stone, which was to ensure the transmutation of all the imperfect metals into fine gold.”{59}

13The Diamond Necklace. Being the true Story of Marie Antoinette and the Cardinal de Rohan. From the new documents recently discovered in Paris.By Frantz Funck-Brentano. Translated from the French by H. S. Edwards. Philadelphia, 1901. 8vo.

“He thus gave to humanity, by his universal medicine, bodily health; by Egyptian masonry, spiritual health; and by the philosopher’s stone, infinite wealth.” These were his principal secrets, but he had a host of others, that of predicting the winning numbers in lotteries; prophesying as to the future; softening marble and restoring it to its pristine hardness; of giving to cotton the lustre and softness of silk, which has been re-invented in our day by a chemical process.

Many writers on magic have fancied that the art of making gold was the secret that lay hid under the forms of Egyptian theology. Says the Benedictine monk, Pernetz: “The hermetic science was the source of all the riches of the Egyptian kings, and the object of these mysteries so hidden under the veil of their pretended religion.” In a subterranean chamber beneath the Great Pyramid of Gizeh, Hermes Trismegistus is supposed, according to mediæval alchemists, to have placed his Table of Emerald, upon which he engraved the secret of transmuting metals into gold.

Among the many stories told of Cagliostro, that of the supper in the hotel of the Rue Saint Claude, where the ghosts made merry, is the most extraordinary. Six guests and the host took their places at a round table upon which there were thirteen covers. Each guest pronounced the name of the dead man whose spirit he desired to appear at the banquet table. Cagliostro, concentrating his mysterious forces, gave the invitation in a solemn and commanding tone. One after another the six guests appeared. They were the Duc de Choiseul, Voltaire, d’Alembert, Diderot, the Abbé de Voisenon, and Montesquieu.

The story of this spirit séance created a sensation in Paris. It reached the court, and one evening, when the conversation turned upon the banquet of the ghosts, Louis XVI frowned, shrugged his shoulders, and resumed his game of cards. The queen became indignant, and forbade the mention of the name of the charlatan in her presence. Nevertheless, some of the light-headed ladies of the court burned for an introduction to the superb sorcerer. They begged Lorenza Feliciani to get him to give them a course of lectures or lessons in magic to which no gentlemen were to be admitted. Lorenza replied that he would consent, provided there were thirty-six pupils. The list was made{60}up in a day, and a week afterward the fair dames got their first lesson. But they gossiped about it. This caused another scandal, and consequently the first lesson was the last.

Cagliostro’s Egyptian Rite of Masonry was well received in Paris, especially the lodge for ladies, which was presided over by the beautiful Lorenza, his wife. It was appropriately calledIsis. Among the members of this female lodge were the Countesses de Brienne, Dessalles, de Polignac, de Brassac, de Choiseul, d’Espinchal, the Marchioness d’Avrincourt, and Mmes. de Loménie, de Genlis, de Bercy, de Trevières, de Baussan, de Monteil, d’Ailly, etc.

Cagliostro lived like a lord, thanks to the revenues obtained from the initiates into his masonic rite, and the money which he unquestionably received from his dupe, the Cardinal de Rohan, who was magic mad.

“His wife,” says a gossipy writer, “was rarely seen, but by all accounts she was a woman of bewildering beauty, realizing the Greek lines in all their antique purity and enhanced by an Italian expression. The most enthusiastic of her so-called admirers were precisely those who had never seen her face. There were many duels to decide the question as to the color of her eyes, some contending that they were black, and others that they were blue. Duels were also fought over the dimple which some admirers insisted was on the right cheek, while others said that the honor belonged to the left cheek. She appeared to be no more than twenty years old, but she spoke sometimes of her eldest son, who was for some years a captain in the Dutch army.”

The magician’s sojourn in Paris caused the greatest excitement. His portrait and that of his wife were to be seen everywhere, on fans, on rings, on snuff-boxes, and on medallions. His bust was cut in marble by the famous sculptor, Houdon, cast in bronze, and placed in the mansions of the nobility. He was called by his admirers “the divine Cagliostro.” To one of the old portraits was appended the following verse:

“De l’Ami des Humains reconnaissez les traits:Tous ses jours sont marqués par de nouveaux bienfaits,Il prolonge la Vie, il secourt l’indigence;Le plaisir d’être utile est seul sa recompense.”

“De l’Ami des Humains reconnaissez les traits:

Tous ses jours sont marqués par de nouveaux bienfaits,

Il prolonge la Vie, il secourt l’indigence;

Le plaisir d’être utile est seul sa recompense.”

{61}

BUSTOFCAGLIOSTRO.After Houdon.(In the possession of M. Storelli.)CAGLIOSTRO.FromVie de Joseph Balsamo, etc.Paris, 1791.

After Houdon.

(In the possession of M. Storelli.)

FromVie de Joseph Balsamo, etc.Paris, 1791.

Hats and neckties were named after him. In Paris as in Strasburg, he gave away large sums of money to the poor and cured them of their ailments free of charge. His mansion was always crowded with noble guests. The idle aristocracy could find nothing better to do than attend the spirit séances of the charlatan. The shades of Voltaire, Rousseau, and other dead celebrities were summoned from the “vasty deep,” impersonated doubtless by clever confederates in the pay of Cagliostro, often aided by mechanical and optical accessories. The art of phantasmagoria, in which the concave mirror plays a part, was well known to the enchanter. The Count de Beugnot gives in detail, in his interesting autobiography, an account of Cagliostro’s performances at the residences of Madame de la Motte and the Cardinal de Rohan. The niece of Count de la Motte, a Mlle. de{62}la Tour, a charming girl of fifteen, frequently acted as clairvoyant in the mystical séances. She is reported to have possessed all the requisites of a seeress: angelic purity, delicate nerves, and blue eyes, also to have been born under the constellation Capricorn. “Her mother nearly died of joy.”

Says Count Beugnot: “When she learned that her child fulfilled all these conditions of Egyptian thaumaturgy, she thought the treasures of Memphis and of that large city in the interior of Africa were about to fall upon her family, which was badly in need of them.” In the report of the necklace trial (Arch. Nat. X2, B‐1417), the young girl confesses to have aided the charlatan in his magical operations at the house of the Cardinal, by pretending to see visions of Marie Antoinette and others in a globe of water, which was surrounded by lighted tapers and figures of Isis and Apis. He had decked her out in a freemason’s apron embroidered with cabalistic characters. She aided him because “she did not want to be bothered,” and answered his leading questions, etc. But there was perhaps another reason for her acquiescence in the fraud. Cagliostro had declared to her, in the presence of the prelate, her aunt and mother, when she first attempted to play the part of pythoness and failed, that her inability to see anything in the globe was evidence that she was not innocent. Stung by his inuendos, she immediately yielded and saw all she was desired to see, thereby becoming his confederate to deceive De Rohan.

An interesting pen portrait of Cagliostro is contained in Beugnot’s memoirs. The Count met the enchanter for the first time at the house of Madame de la Motte:

“Cagliostro was of medium height, rather stout, with an olive complexion, a very short neck, round face, two large eyes on a level with the cheeks, and a broad, turned-up nose. . . . His hair was dressed in a way new to France, being divided into several small tresses that united behind the head, and were twisted up into what was then called a club.

“He wore on that day an iron gray coat of French make, with gold lace, a scarlet waistcoat trimmed with broad Spanish lace, red breeches, his sword looped to the skirt of his coat, and a laced hat with a white feather, the latter a decoration still{63}required of mountebanks, tooth-drawers and other medical practitioners, who proclaim and retail their drugs in the open air. Cagliostro set off this costume by lace ruffles, several valuable rings, and shoe-buckles which were, it is true, of antique design, but bright enough to be taken for real diamonds. . . . The face, attire, and the whole man made an impression on me that I could not prevent. I listened to the talk. He spoke some sort of medley, half French and half Italian, and made many quotations which might be Arabic, but which he did not trouble himself to translate. I could not remember any more of [his conversation] than that the hero had spoken of heaven, of the stars, of the Great Secret, of Memphis, of the high-priest, of transcendental chemistry, of giants and monstrous beasts, of a city ten times as large as Paris, in the middle of Africa, where he had correspondents.”14

Cagliostro often boasted of his great age.

One day in Strasburg, he stopped before a huge crucifix of carved wood, and contemplated it with melancholy countenance.

“The likeness is excellent,” he remarked to one of his votaries, “but I cannot understand how the artist, who certainly never saw Christ, could have secured such a perfect portrait.”

“You knew Christ, then?” inquired the neophyte, breathlessly.

“We were on the most intimate terms.”

“My dear Count!—”

“I mean what I say. How often we strolled together on the sandy shore of the Lake of Tiberias. How infinitely sweet his voice. But, alas, he would not heed my advice. He loved to walk on the seashore, where he picked up a band oflazzaroni—of fishermen and beggars. This and his preaching brought him to a bitter end.”

Turning to his servant, Cagliostro added: “Do you remember that evening at Jerusalem when they crucified Christ?”

“No, Monsieur le Comte,” replied the well-tutored lackey, bowing low, “you forget that I have only been in your employ for the last fifteen hundred years.”

Baron Munchausen is not to be compared to Cagliostro.{64}

14Beugnot, Comte de.Mémoires.Paris, 1866.

Back to Index Next