The Queen's Necklace

Chapter Four. The Magician

FIRST OF ALL, we should apologise for Cagliostro’s presence in the case, like that of Pontius Pilate in the Creed. His innocence was established beyond doubt in the course of the trial. Nonetheless close attention must be paid to this mysterious personage. His contemporaries always believed that he was implicated in the necklace affair, and that is how he is remembered. Mention Cagliostro and people immediately think of the necklace; mention the necklace, and they think of Cagliostro. The truth of such legends often runs deeper than the facts of history. He is one of the main characters in the story not so much in terms of those facts but by reason of its nature. By understanding that, and what it represents, we can truly understand the significance of the whole story and its place in world history.

The source materials relating to his life are many and unreliable. They are many because he exercised the imaginations of his contemporaries and they in consequence wrote a great deal about him; and unreliable because the eighteenth century — which has been called the century of women — adored and cultivated malicious gossip to an extent one now finds astonishing. For all that the period witnessed the development of a generally more critical attitude among people, it also welcomed and enjoyed scandal and rumour unquestioningly, so long as it was sufficiently spiteful and amusing.

Thus the material presents us with two directly contrasting images of the man. The overwhelming majority of extant writings vie with one another in their efforts to blacken him, gleefully portraying a wily trickster — a charlatan, quack and bogus prophet. But in his own writings, and in comments made by his followers, he appears as a genuine seer and worker of miracles.

The file is by no means closed. The nineteenth century was generally hostile towards his adherents. In 1904 Henri d’Almeras’s Cagliostro amassed a pile of painstaking evidence to show him as one of the greatest frauds of all time, and yet a swindler who, for all his little peccadilloes, remains entirely sympathetic. D’Almeras characterises him, most aptly, as the Figaro of alchemists.

A more recent work is Dr Marc Haven’s Cagliostro, le maître inconnu, which assembles even more evidence to argue the reverse, rehabilitating the man and claiming him to be, as his followers had always maintained, the great master of arcane lore. But Haven is himself an occultist, and his intention is quite clearly to use Cagliostro to defend the honour of occult learning in general. And in any case it remains true that those contemporaries who wrote about Cagliostro were often even greater scoundrels than he was.

So it is understandable that two flatly contradictory versions of his early life have come down to us — his own, and the one put together by his many enemies. Perhaps we should begin by paying this unusual character the courtesy of hearing his own account first. The story can be found in the memoir written in 1786 by his defending counsel M Thilorier, just after the necklace trial.

His origins and name, he informs us, he never knew, but he believed he had been born on the island of Malta. He spent his childhood years in Medina, where he was known as Acharat, under the protection of the great mufti Salahym. He had four people to attend to his needs: one white footman, two black footmen and his wise teacher Altotas. While he was still very young Altotas remarked on his exceptional capacity for learning. As a child he was taught the secrets of botany and medicine, acquired several oriental languages and fathomed the mysteries of the Egyptian pyramids. Meanwhile Altotas informed him that his parents had been Christians of noble birth.

At the age of twelve he and his teacher left Medina and went to Mecca. There, they were clad in rich attire and presented to the Sharif. “When I caught sight of the Prince,” he tells us, “I was filled with inexpressible perturbation, and my eyes filled with the sweetest of tears, and I noticed that he too could barely restrain his own.” He remained in Mecca for three years, spending every day with the Sharif, who at last bestowed on him a look of the most profound tenderness and emotion. It was what was called at the time ‘blood speaking to blood’. It made Cagliostro feel he should regard the noble Sharif as his father, even though that contradicted what Altotas had told him.

Not long afterwards came the painful moment of separation. Acharat and his supposed father fell into each other’s arms. “God be with you, unhappy child of nature!” pronounced the Sharif, as tears poured from his eyes.

The young man and his teacher now went to Egypt, where the priests took them into places not permitted to the ordinary traveller; then they sailed on to the island of Rhodes, and finally Malta. Here the most surprising transformation awaited him. The wise Altotas removed his Muslim garb and revealed himself to be not only a Christian but one of the knights. From this point onwards Acharat called himself Count Cagliostro, and was received as a guest at the palace of Pinto d’Alfonseca, Grand Master of the Order.

Then, sadly, Altotas died. With his dying breath he whispered these words: “My son, always remember to fear the Lord and love your fellow man. Soon enough, you will know that all I have taught you is true.”

Despite repeated requests from the Grand Master, Cagliostro did not join the Order but continued on his way, to devote his life to medical studies. He toured the islands of the Archipelago before reaching Rome in 1770, where he married a high-born young lady, Serafina Feliciani.

All this is Cagliostro’s own account. The alternative version is contained, in its fullest form, in the Compendio della vita e delle gesta di Giuseppe Balsamo, which appeared in 1791. It was written by a cleric, in the form of notes recorded by the Inquisition. Its author clearly seeks to condemn Freemasonry in the person of Cagliostro, so it too is not completely reliable, but at all events it sounds rather more probable that his own version.

According to it, the man’s real name was Giuseppe Balsamo. He was born into a lower middle-class family in Palermo on 8th June 1743. His mother had an uncle called Cagliostro, the name he later adopted.

The author of the Compendio, like some of his contemporaries, asserts that Cagliostro was of Jewish origin, at least on his father’s side. The many extant portraits do nothing to dispel the idea; but of course, we might on the same principle declare that the face has a distinctly Italian look. Goethe, who took an intense interest in the whole necklace affair and wrote a play about it because he felt that it summed up the spirit of the age, actually called on Cagliostro’s relations while in Palermo and was given a warm welcome. Goethe does not mention their being Jewish, but it is true that he spoke only to the mother, sister and sister’s children, and no one from the supposedly Jewish side.

There seems to be no doubt that Cagliostro was born and brought up in Palermo. Sicily was of course a wonderful environment for an aspiring trickster. It was home to Europe’s most credulous, superstitious and miracle-loving people — a people, moreover, not overly devoted to work. At a very early age Cagliostro developed his inclination to live not by his own efforts but on the credulity of his fellow men — on what was in fact a by-product of their religious faith.

According to the scribe, he began his career at an early age. He ran away from the monastery at Caltagirone where he had been entered, and where he had acquired some of the basics of medicine. There followed a long series of escapades: he swindled, beat up the local policeman and robbed his own family. Among the more successful of these youthful adventures was the episode of the buried treasure. He persuaded a jeweller called either Murano or Marano that he knew of a cave in which there was hidden booty. But, as usual, it was guarded by devils. These would have first to be appeased by the recitation of arcane scripts, and by leaving two hundred ounces of gold at the cave’s entrance.

One night the two men made their way to the site. The jeweller set the gold down, and Cagliostro began to declaim in Italian and Latin, but mainly in Arabic. But some error must have crept into the text, because it had precisely the opposite effect from the one intended. Four black devils rushed out of the cave and beat Marano thoroughly, until he ran off home, howling all the way. Marano tried to sue, but Cagliostro had found it prudent to make a rapid departure from the city of his birth.

Now, apparently, he really did travel through the Levant, and indeed in the company of someone called Altotas. He even went to Malta, where Pinto d’Alfonseca, the Grand Master of the knightly Order, did actually take him in, so that Cagliostro could assist him with his alchemical experiments. Either he inserted these real names and facts into his otherwise fanciful autobiography, or some of them were added by the scribe.

From Malta he went to Rome, and there he did in fact marry. The lady concerned was Lorenza (not Serafina) Feliciani, who was not exactly of noble birth but the daughter of a simple foundry worker. Where the many sources do agree is that she was extremely beautiful, with her girlish charm and blue-eyed allure. Casanova wrote about her in his memoirs in tones of the greatest rapture — which may not mean much in itself, since he used the same language about all the ladies (the secret of all Don Juans being to find all women pleasing) — but in this case there are other, less flamboyant, expert witnesses. However Cagliostro is not ranked among the experts. Men did fall in love with her at a distance, but in the eighteenth century love was not a particularly romantic business, but somewhat detached. The sort of people who rhapsodised about her had never seen her. Two of them actually fought a duel over whether the dimple was on the left or the right side of the face.

When, later on, the lovely Lorenza was incarcerated in the Bastille during the necklace trial, her lawyer, Maître Polverit, described her to the court as an “angel in human form, sent down to earth to share and sweeten the days of her wonder-working husband; a woman so lovely that her beauty had no equal; and yet, for all that, she is a model of gentleness and obedience, submitting to her fate because she could not conceive of any other way to bear it. Her radiant nature, and her perfection above all other mere mortals, hold out a symbol which we can worship but not understand. And this angel, so incapable of sinning, is now held under lock and key. It is a cruel absurdity, and one that must be put right forthwith. What can a being of this nature have to do with the business of a law court?” And the Paris Parlement took one look at her and set her free.

Lorenza accompanied her husband on his escapades and in his rather unusual daily life, loyally and sometimes not so loyally, like the sort of favourite charm you might keep in your pocket to ward off bad luck. She was always the angel-doll, untouched by life because she simply didn’t understand what it was all about. Perhaps that explains her huge success in French society, where the women understood it only too well.

Malicious minds knew of course that as soon as things started to go badly for Cagliostro he would put her on the market. According to some, he had the generosity of her ‘patrons’ to thank for his subsequent, undoubtedly huge, fortune. In her numerous statements to the court Lorenza regularly mentions some gentleman or other approaching her with less than honourable intentions, while she, generally, defends her innocence and honour. Generally, we insist, because there was an occasion when she moved in with a lawyer called Duplessis, who maintained the two of them for a while until he became bored with the whole business and had Cagliostro locked up as a fraudster. She then gave evidence against her own husband, denouncing him as work-shy and a coquin, and was detained at his request in the St Pelágia prison. But she later withdrew her allegation, and he withdrew his, she got out of prison, and they loved one another just as much as before.

One story says that she turned one of her suitors away on the grounds that she couldn’t possibly betray her husband because he could make himself invisible and be present in more than one place at a time.

He certainly pops up in a great many places, whether passing himself off as a soldier in the Prussian army or as earning his living as a draughtsman and stage designer. He travelled to Madrid, made a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, then returned to Palermo, where the jeweller Marano took him to court, but a powerful local prince (Lorenza’s admirer) beat up the prosecution lawyer and put an end to the case. Finally, in 1777, he turns up in London once again — and here the true story begins. If we can believe his detractors, he had up to this point been a mere petty swindler — an underworld figure, an insignificant member of the social underclass. But his wanderings had shaped his character. He had matured, gained much useful experience, and come to the point where, as Almeras puts it, he still lived by throwing dust in people’s eyes, but its quality was now very much finer.

The great change began on 12th April 1777, when Cagliostro and his wife were admitted to the Hope Lodge of Freemasons in London, whose members were mostly French and Italian craftsmen and manufacturers. It became the Archimedes point from which Cagliostro would move the world.

When, dear reader, you hear what follows about the Order of Freemasons, think of it as quite unconnected with whatever else you know (or believe you know) about the organisation. Do not think of it now in terms of its links with the liberal-democratic powers, and whether those powers were the cause of past, present and future wars. In the eighteenth century the movement stood for something very different from what it later became. To support this argument we need only mention that most authorities are convinced that French Freemasonry had a strongly Catholic character from the outset. This meant that, by its rules, no atheist could be admitted to its ranks; and indeed, for all their supposed tolerance, no French lodge in the period admitted a single Jew. A later charge against the organisation is that it prepared the way for the Revolution. Quite how far that is true is difficult to determine, but what is beyond question is that the Revolution put a temporary stop to the working of the lodges.

Freemasons are pleased to trace the history of the ‘Royal Art’ back to the earliest biblical times. James Anderson, the first historian of the movement, claimed in a work published in 1723 that, “During their wanderings in the wilderness, Moses, in his capacity of Grand Master, would often assemble the Israelites in a regular lodge which they all attended.” King Solomon was also a Grand Master, since he built the temple, and so too, for reasons which are rather less clear, was Nebuchadnezzar.

Other writers trace the origins of the movement back to the Knights Templar, and others again to the mysterious and, properly speaking, non-existent Rosicrucian fraternity of the seventeenth century. Less fanciful observers settle for English precursors of the lodges in the medieval stonemason corporations, or guilds. That suggestion has the ring of probability, but even it cannot be proved. The theory is that at some point in the seventeenth century the stonemasons, by now rather isolated and very much in decline, admitted (in full accordance with their basic constitution) members of the gentry and upper middle class who wished to exchange views and opinions of the world in a secure atmosphere under the protection of the guild. These would be people who were disenchanted with religious wars, thus entrenching the principles of tolerance and open-ended inquiry into ideas that were ahead of their time. The records of some of these lodges go back a very long way. Those of Edinburgh Mary’s Number One, for example, claim to date from 1599.

The movement finally emerges from this twilight of myth and conjecture in 1717, when, on St John’s day (St John being their patron saint), the first English Grand Lodge was founded, absorbing most of the other English lodges that were still active. Its French counterparts had come into being a few years earlier.

It is difficult to be very sure what these first lodges actually did, and on what sort of ideological basis they existed. What is sure is that dinners had a prominent place on their agendas, often with the Grand Master as presiding host. By this time he probably considered the lodge as his own property, effectively a component of his business or factory, and no doubt this further softened the general ethos towards one of ‘enlightened’ Epicureanism.

The history of the French lodges in the eighteenth century is rather more troubled. In 1737 the authorities began persecuting them, and in the following year Clement XII issued a Papal Bull excommunicating their members. But neither the religious or secular authorities took this very seriously.

In 1737 a Scottish nobleman called Ramsay reformed the French lodges and founded the so-called Scottish Order, creating a great many more ranks than the original three, the better to reward members’ loyalty. In this celebrated refoundation the ethical principles of Freemasonry are more clearly manifest. Ramsay wrote to his brethren about four ideals: first, philanthropy, the love of one’s fellow man, regardless of nationality or religious denomination, thus giving an element of universal brotherhood to the organisation; second, moral purity (a homosexual, for example, could not be admitted until he changed his ways and affirmed that he would pay appropriate respect to the ‘fair sex’); third, absolute secrecy; and finally, love of the fine arts. Among these he included academic scholarship, and held out certain universal disciplines as the most ideal: his hope was that the Order would undertake something like the project which, a few years later, became the Grande encyclopédie.

In 1738 the French Freemasons elected a member of the royal family, Louis de Bourbon-Condé, Duc de Clermont, as their Grand Master. Clermont fulfilled his duties with the usual Bourbon insouciance, deputing a dancing master, Lacorne, in his place. Lacorne’s rather dubious character alienated the more serious elements in the membership, and this led to rifts and divisions that lasted for decades. To counterbalance this they instituted the Grand Orient. Its Grand Master, the Duc de Chartres, finally reunited the warring lodges after Clermont’s death in 1771. This Duc de Chartres was none other than Philippe-Égalité, the future revolutionary Duc d’Orléans, who, though a Grand Master and supporter of the Revolution, did not himself escape the guillotine, but whose descendants became the ruling (junior Bourbon) House of Orléans.

What were the Freemasons doing when not at war with one another, and what did their work consist of? They organised meetings, initiated new members, progressed up the ranks via elaborate ceremonies, dined, performed charitable deeds, and practised philanthropy. It was an intensely theatrical age — as early as 1754 the appearance of the actor Manelli in a new opera buffa had led to such heated conflict between the devotees of French and Italian music that the Parisian Jansenists and ultramontanes set aside their mutual hostility that had been threatening a religious civil war. In such a climate, when everything was played out in the full glare of publicity, and the arrival of a new theatre company could put a temporary stop to revolutionary activity, the Freemasons no doubt took a charitable view of all varieties of theatrical genre.

In 1782 a market vegetable stall-holder called Mme Menthe was disinherited by her wealthy sister. Despite this she then gave a home to this wicked sibling’s illegitimate son, even though she already had ten children of her own. Shortly afterwards she gave birth to her nineteenth child (eight having died young), and to mark the occasion the Sincerity Lodge arranged a grand surprise for her. “The meeting,” wrote a contemporary, “took place with more than one hundred and forty illustrious members, of both sexes, present. After the usual ceremonies, the curtain rose and there on the stage, seated on a throne, was the worthy Mme Menthe, surrounded by her ten children, and, at her feet, the child she had so magnanimously taken in. The entire family (so deserving of compassion!) had been fitted out with new clothes at the Lodge’s expense. The presiding Marquis, in a speech that was as harrowing as it was eloquent, explained the meaning of the striking tableau before our eyes. At the most moving point in his address, the Comtesse X placed a citizen’s crown on the lady’s head, the Marquise Y held out a purse to her containing a considerable sum of money, and the Comtesse Z profferred a trousseau for the infant so newly brought into the world. The child that Mme Menthe had taken in was then adopted by the Lodge, who undertook to raise it and take every care of it.”

The brothers Goncourt mention a letter written to the Princesse de Lamballe by Marie-Antoinette, in which she states: “I read with great interest what was happening in the Freemasonry lodges you took charge of at the start of the year. I see that all they do apart from their charitable works is sing pretty songs. But by working for the release of prisoners and finding homes for young women your lodges are following in our own footsteps — which will certainly not stop us doing the same for the girls in our care or finding homes for the children on our list.”

But the real attraction of Freemasonry in this period lay in its secrecy. Members were bound to that absolutely. Most of the time those secrets, involving special symbols, practices and so forth, would have had no significance whatsoever: mystique was practised for its own sake. Of course, people have always loved secrets — they still do. But in eighteenth-century France, when life was lived in permanent public view, when non-stop gossip ensured that everyone knew everyone else’s business and the whole country was one great, malicious family, privacy held an especially powerful attraction. The favoured Court style, rococo, with its exquisite, tiny interiors, was an art of intimacy; and the rest of the nation also lived in confined spaces. The idea of a shut door was unknown. In such an age, the concept of a closed and secret meeting fulfilled an important spiritual need.

Everyone — especially the very young and the adolescent — adores a secret. Youth is a time of secret writing, secret languages, secret symbols daubed on walls. Some secrets are to be shared only between boys, never with women, not even mothers (especially, Freudians would say, not with mothers). Within young male groups, by some atavistic process, some ancient primitive impulse rises out of the deep layer that Jung calls the collective unconscious, a race-memory of the male-bonding and male-only societies of primitive peoples. In ancient times, and even today in rural parts of Africa and New Guinea, pubescent youths are initiated into manhood in harsh tests involving cruel rites. Thereafter they become independent of their families and live with other youths in all-male compounds, where women are admitted only on very special occasions. The juveniles form a separate little social group in defiant opposition to the adults, and leave these closed communities only to establish families of their own. It is from these all-male societies that the great negro outlaw gangs are formed, such as the Leopard People of Liberia, who hold entire countries in terror.

The higher civilisations were founded on the family unit, thus abolishing these exclusive pre-adult and adult male-only societies. But they could not root out the innate tendency which still sometimes surfaces, the eternal impulse of the man to turn his back on women and the family, return to his boyhood-self and join some all-male group in a great, daring, heroic and pointless adventure. The same primal impulse gave rise to the knightly orders, whose initiation ceremonies are a vestige of the old puberty rites. And initiation was the central feature of the Freemasons’ ceremonies too, because the movement was, at base, another such all-male society, much tamed, of course, and gentrified. This, after the element of secrecy, must have been its second most important attraction.

The secretiveness of the Freemasons tempted certain individuals to set up imitation lodges for the sort of people who wanted to be part of a secret society but were deterred by their own frivolous natures from the more serious, or morally daunting, purposes of the real ones. Thus we find the Mopsli Order (in Austria) whose initiation rites required the new member to kiss a dog of that breed, not on the mouth but at the opposite end. However, when the intrepid candidate bent over to approach his task, a pleasant surprise awaited him: the dog was made of silk and velvet. In the Tappo Order in Italy (the name means ‘cork’ or ‘plug’) would-be knights and ladies were required to kiss the Grand Master in a similar place, only to discover that it wasn’t actually the Grand Master, etc etc. Members of the French Ordre de la Félicité would set out on a journey to the Blessed Isles carrying Freemason-style emblems. For these fellowships, as with the Fendeurs Charbonniers and the Nymphes de la Rose, the purposes were purely erotic, involving secret orgies … if indeed these societies did exist, and were not simply an invention of the gossiping tendency of the age.

Goethe, as we have already mentioned, was so fascinated by the case of the Queen’s necklace that he wrote a play about it, Der Gross-Kophta. In it he writes: “Der Menschen lieben die Dämmerung mehr als den hellen Tag, und eben in der Dämmerung erscheinen die Gespenster”—Men prefer twilight to the full glare of day, and it is in the twilight that the ghosts show themselves. In the mysterious darkness that the lodges exploited to satisfy people’s eternal longing for secrets, the ghosts were not slow to appear. Eighteenth-century Freemasonry became the home of occultism. For more mystical souls, the secrets that existed merely for their own sake, the noble aspirations and symbols, were not enough. They held meetings separately from the lodges to seek out the real mysteries, those of nature itself, and the supernatural. In other words, to pursue alchemy and spiritualism.

Thus eighteenth-century Freemasonry became associated with Satanism, black magic and even the conjuration of devils. The Grand Master, Philippe-Égalité himself, personally believed in the black arts and, if we can trust the retrospective memoirs of the Marquise de Créquy, even invoked Satan, who appeared in the form of a naked man, very pale, with black eyes and a scar across his left temple (apparently the result of a lightning strike), pronounced the ominous words: “Victoire et malheur! Victoire et malheur!”—Victory and disaster! — and vanished into thin air.

The various strands of eighteenth-century occultism all converge in the person of the great seer Emanuel Swedenborg. It was he who gave form and direction to the mystical aspirations of the time, and his considerable influence is with us still. There are sects in America today whose beliefs derive from his teachings.

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a natural scientist and engineer in his younger days, who went on to become an important person in his native Sweden, was ennobled, and was elected to membership of most of the learned societies in Europe. In 1745, he was dining in a private room in his favourite restaurant in London. When he finished, a kind of fog filled the room and hideous creatures appeared, writhing on the floor. The fog dispersed, and in a corner of the room he saw a man bathed in light. The man commanded him, in ringing tones: “Do not eat so much!” and vanished. Swedenborg went home, but the man reappeared the next day, dressed in purple, and informed him that he was God.

From that point onwards, Swedenborg was a prophet. He gave up all his official positions in order to live for and by his revelations. In his books he writes (at incredible length) about his supernatural experiences as dictated to him by spirits.

What most surprises the modern reader about his visions is the easy, natural, phlegmatic way he moves among scenes of the other world. As he records the location of the heavenly cities, the variety of their citizens and their manner of living, and explains their various theological preoccupations and other related questions, we almost feel as if we are reading a Baedeker. According to his writings, he had travelled much where few mortals had gone before, and on these journeys had made the acquaintance of a great many angels and devils, together with spirits belonging to an intermediate group who “live between heaven and hell”. These and many other things he discussed with Martin Luther. Luther, having arrived in the other world, moved first into much the same sort of house as he had occupied back home in Eisleben, and here he would sit on a throne and declaim his sermons. But in 1757, when his period of transformation in the spirit world had been completed, the house was taken from him, and shortly afterwards, under the influence of Swedenborg and others, he renounced those of his ideas that differed from those of the author. Swedenborg also met the philosopher Melanchton, who spent long periods at his heavenly desk writing, just as he had on earth, that good works did not matter, only faith. But when the new heaven was built, in 1757, he too corrected his original ideas. He now resides in the south-eastern region of heaven, and when he goes for a stroll his footsteps produce the clang of someone treading in iron shoes across a stone pavement.

Swedenborg also discovered that in the other world the Dutch generally did rather well. They ran flourishing businesses that were highly profitable because they were working for the sake of it and not for money. They could be easily identified by the affluence displayed by the way they lived. The Jews, on the other hand, did the dirty jobs, huddled amid stench and squalor; otherwise their main occupation was buying and selling precious stones, and a few of them became extremely rich. From time to time robed angels dressed as Christian converts would seek them out to try and win their souls, but with little success. The English, given their love of independence, of the instinctual life, and of freedom of thought, did relatively well up there. The Germans did much worse, since they “live in separate little states under local despots and, unlike the English and Dutch, enjoy no freedom of speech, spoken or written — and where those freedoms are shackled, so too is thought”.

Incidentally, the other world has none of the eternal, impassable borders of Dante’s vision. According to Swedenborg, it is simply a state of mind: people are sent to hell or raised up to heaven not by God but by their own mentality, and when they change their spiritual condition they are moved from one place to another accordingly. So how could it be that the denizens of hell, on discovering that their beliefs have been misguided, and that they have been sent there because of their spiritual state, do not instantly change their ways and thus claim their ticket to eternal salvation? The answer, according to Swedenborg, is that hell is not especially unpleasant. Everyone there is comfortable in his or her own way: the inhabitants rather like the revolting smell and feel thoroughly at home. They do occasionally visit heaven, but find it all rather alarming and disconcertingly unfamiliar, and cannot wait to get back to the comforts of the Other Place.

In all this deep philosophising it is the matter-of-factness and surprisingly narrow range of his theological interests that make Swedenborg the belated child of earlier centuries. He has been the subject of some remarkable comparisons, for example with the sort of man whose desires fail to keep pace with the growth in his understanding, like the lecher who hides a whore in his cellar, goes upstairs and has a perfectly sensible conversation with his wife and guests on the subject of virginity, then returns downstairs to give free rein to his passions. But despite these comparisons, Swedenborg’s style is in the end somewhat arid and coldly rationalistic. In a strange way what he says rings true, but he lacks a soaring imagination. It could be that he was a great visionary, but a poor poet. He was certainly not Dante. Perhaps he did genuinely see the other world with the eye of the soul, but his vision is much less compelling than that of the great Florentine, who found himself lost ‘at the mid-point of our life’s journey’ in imagination only.

And perhaps that is the secret of his power. Swedenborg is the petty-bourgeois of the supernatural. He stands in the same relation to Dante as the ‘blood brotherhood’ of the Freemasons does to the Leopard People of West Africa. It would have been no use talking to him about such grandiose matters as the Rose of Heaven or the Worm at the Heart of the World. For him the whole business is really quite simple if approached in a common-sense way. Such is his manner whenever he talks about souls. His souls — this point he cannot stress sufficiently — are no different from the living. They possess everything that humans do; they eat and drink, and live married lives. It is just that they do all this on a spiritual plane, though their spirit status should not be overemphasised. Souls are still human. The secret of Swedenborg’s power is that he reduces the spirit world to an everyday level, thus popularising it. Not everyone can pick his or her way through the grim tercets of Dante’s vision: not everyone can breathe the alarming air of the world of magic. But with the aid of Swedenborg’s guide to the other world we can journey in confidence through the mysteries of heaven and hell, as on a trip to the heavenly Jerusalem organised by Thomas Cook. And of course Swedenborg is the seer whom Cagliostro put to such brilliant use as fodder for his ignorant and simple-minded followers. For his purposes, the great mystics would have been of no use at all. Not one word of the teachings of Jalaluddin Rumi or Meister Eckhart would have been comprehensible either to him or to his disciples.

But we have not dwelt on Swedenborg at such length simply because it was from him that Cagliostro took everything that is intelligible in his theories, as he expounded them; rather it is because we feel that it is precisely through them that we come closest to the essence of the age, to the prevailing mentality and mood that both make it comprehensible and reveal the necklace trial as its most characteristic, dramatic and indeed symbolic event.

The second half of the eighteenth century is described in literary histories as the pre-romantic age. That is to say, it is the period that saw the birth and flowering of the ideas and general sensibility that came to dominate the first half of the following century, the romantic age proper. At this point these developments stood in relation to full-blown romanticism as the child does to the young adult and mature man. The people of the late eighteenth century found themselves living in an old civilisation, one that was approaching its end, a social order that was over-ripe in significant ways, but one whose notions of the world were naive and somewhat childlike. Childlike, and idyllic. No other generation lived at such a distance from tragedy. Beneath their powdered elegance, the earlier decades, those of Louis XV and the rococo, harboured a genuine sense of the tragedy of life, but with the accession of Louis XVI all that seemed to have melted away. People felt that they were standing on the threshold of a new golden age. The leading thinkers of the entire period all stood for optimism. Under Louis XV that optimism had remained a mere triumph of philosophy. Now it became a sense of life. The pre-romantics lived in expectation of some sort of miracle — a miracle that would make everything beautiful and happy, while leaving everything exactly as it had always been.

The people of the pre-romantic age were every bit as rational as those of the baroque and rococo, but — and this is what was new — they also believed in miracles. Or at least, they wanted to. The literature of the time certainly reveals this need for an element of the miraculous. Milton came into fashion, as did the ghost story (though Voltaire naturally would only allow his ghosts onstage in broad daylight), and the mystical, occult and other such movements of the time are evidence that it was not only writers who yearned for that element of the miraculous, but, as it were, life itself.

But this habit of living in the expectation of a miracle is also a widespread attribute of humanity in general; it is a feature of history to which no one age can lay exclusive claim. The early church lived in permanent expectation of miracles, which duly happened. In the year 1000 the whole of humanity waited in quivering excitement for the greatest miracle of all, the end of the world, which didn’t. This mentality is never itself the symptom of an age — what signifies is the nature of the expected miracle. The pre-romantics were looking for a pre-romantic one: gentle, idyllic, optimistic and perfectly simple. Which is why Swedenborg is its prophet — Swedenborg who dined in restaurants while the vision waited on him; Swedenborg, who knew in 1757, beyond the flicker of a doubt, that the last judgment was at hand, the new heaven would be built and a new world order come into being — though nothing of course would change, and everyone could carry on with his daily business (if a bourgeois) or simply enjoy the benefits (if an aristocrat).

Each of the actors in our story was waiting for that sort of miracle: Boehmer, that his wonderful bauble would, by some miraculous means, come to encircle some suitably miraculous imperial neck, and that the owner of that neck would pay him 1,600,000 livres with miraculous promptitude. Jeanne de la Motte looked for a miracle to restore her to her ancestral Valois status, and the longer she waited, the less it was likely to happen. Rohan waited for a miracle that would secure the Queen’s favour (and indeed favours), and the length of that wait kept him moping about in his fantastical rooms at Saverne. For Cagliostro, who was to enjoy the profits of everyone else’s hopes, miracles were his bread and butter. Marie-Antoinette meanwhile drifted from pleasure to pleasure while she waited for the true womanly miracle that would make all pleasure-seeking superfluous, and Louis XVI longed for a miracle-working finance minister who would make the deficit disappear, without the need to grind even more revenue out of the people, or curtail his household expenditure.

And the whole of France was waiting for the greatest miracle of all, the happiness of the people. They knew that a new age was at hand; they earnestly believed that the planned reforms would soon come to fruition. They rather imagined that some celestial monarch, surrounded by his courtiers, would descend between stage clouds while the angels Gluck and Grétry sounded an entrance on their silver-tongued trumpets; the King would raise his sceptre, and everyone in France would be happy. Not in their most fevered dreams did they imagine that, far from descending from above, the new age would burst forth from the underworld, from the Quartier St Antoine, with a Frisian cap on its head. The Lord punished his people’s blindness by granting them their wish. A few more years, and the miracle would indeed happen.

After this premonition of tragedy, let us return to the man who represents the burlesque element in our story, the alchemist’s Figaro.

In London, Cagliostro not only penetrated the secrets of the Freemasons, he also became involved in a highly complicated lawsuit which turned on a necklace — a foretaste of greater things to come. His defence was that his accusers, from whom he had swindled the necklace, had harassed him, constantly forcing presents on him to get him to name his price for allowing himself to be drawn into the whole shady business. But we must pass quickly over our friend’s picaresque adventures, however much they reflect the style of the period (the eighteenth century was the heyday of such adventurers and their escapades), apart from noting that he bamboozled his way with great success across the states of Eastern Europe, via The Hague, Leipzig, Mittau (the capital of the then independent Duchy of Courland), St Petersburg and Warsaw. Anyone who had known Cagliostro and his wife a few years earlier, as pilgrims in Spain or as a starveling couple haunting the inner-city districts of Paris and London, would not have recognised the mysterious Count and Countess they had become.

What a splendid sight it must have been, when the great adventurer arrived in a foreign city, outriders trotting before his four-horse carriage, with footmen clinging to the sides; taking rooms in the most elegant hostelry in town, and promptly inviting his new acquaintances to dinner. In no time at all a little sect would have formed around him, a secret circle of initiates. Among those flocking to his door would be the merely curious and those attracted by his wife’s beauty, but the greater part were there for the sage, the prophet, and the great magus.

Cagliostro was now travelling the world as the splendidly aristocratic and splendidly mysterious envoy of the Freemasonry lodges — a man on a cosmic-diplomatic mission. From the enigmatic shadows of his casual utterances one seemed to gather that he had been sent to Europe by Grand Masters dwelling in the depths of the pyramids, to inaugurate the Order’s most ancient and uniquely blessed ceremony, the ‘Egyptian Rite’. Its highest functionary was none other than the Great Kophta (“What, Your Excellency, you have never heard of the Great Kophta?!”), heir to the secret knowledge of the Prophet Elijah (almost certainly the Prophet Elijah) … and the Great Kophta must, surely, have been one and the same as this Count Cagliostro? These were truly great mysteries, not previously revealed to man, but patience was needed. The time for all these things was at hand, its hour was nigh — you had only to read the scriptures.

Meanwhile the Count was busy healing the sick — with varying results, just like the ‘real’ doctors, but with a few remarkable successes. He restored the once-unwrinkled faces of elderly ladies, and returned gentlemen of a certain age to their former youthful virility. He saw into the future. At his command spirits appeared in pitchers filled with water. The medium who actually saw these apparitions would be a young boy or a simple virgin, but it was Cagliostro who interpreted them. And he had vast amounts of money. Its source remains a secret to this day.

And so he arrived in Strasbourg.

If we struggle to believe that Cagliostro was the appointed saviour of mankind, but rather suspect that he was driven by somewhat more selfish and less honourable motives — as, sadly, we must conjecture — then we should consider his conduct in Strasbourg his truest work of art, the masterpiece of the genre.

He arrived on 19th September 1780, preceded by his fame as a miraculous healer. A huge crowd lined the banks of the Rhine to await his coming. Everyone had their own interesting story about him. He made his entrance in a carriage drawn by six horses, and his wife’s modest, virginal smile enchanted everyone. He wore his hair curled into little bunches; his blue taffeta robe was braided with pure gold and silver and glittered with jewels, both real and false. In his sheer elegance there was something slightly bizarre, a touch too flashy and not quite right, as was the case with his even greater compatriot Casanova. At the side of his hat he sported a tall white feather, an honest detail, since only quack doctors and market criers wore them at the time. For Cagliostro was certainly not the kind of charlatan who mesmerises his worshippers by his aristocratic appearance, his impeccably fine taste in costume and manners. He had no need for that sort of display. He had all the weapons at his command to retain the loyalty of the immediate associates by whom he was really judged. He could remain a mountebank, an organ-grinder, a monkey-tamer, and yet the great and the small prostrated themselves at his feet. A true triumph of the mind.

Nor did he live above his station. In Strasbourg his arrangements were decidedly simple and austere. He took lodgings first with a woman who sold tobacco, then with a canon’s wife. The common people adored him, and he in turn treated everyone with the same unvarying courtesy.

In Strasbourg, as in the cities of Eastern Europe, he founded another Egyptian lodge. But here, for the first time, he provided evidence of the sort of good deeds expected of a Freemason. He gave two hundred livres to a poor Italian to get him out of debtors’ prison, and followed it up with a full set of clothing when the man was released. He spent whole days visiting the sick, often staying late into the night. He treated the poor of the city without charge, and likewise the rich, who gradually came to seek him out in ever increasing numbers. They tried to press gratuities on him, but he would take nothing. This charlatan was generous, it seemed, to the point of naivety. It took a long time for him to realise that his assistant was diverting large sums into his own pocket, but when he did, he threw him out, and there was a very ugly lawsuit between the two of them.

Dr Mark Haven, quoting reliable witnesses, lists several occasions when Cagliostro’s treatment of the sick produced remarkable results. Many of his prescriptions and procedures are recorded. On the whole he knew little more, or not much less, than the official doctors of the time, though he did have one or two special remedies. He made use of the alchemists’ aurum potabile—‘drinkable gold’, a mixture of nitrate, grease and mercury. There was a ‘wine of Egypt’, reserved mainly for the elderly, and a ‘pick-me-up powder’ of which he was especially proud. When John Lavater, that rather odd philosopher and childhood friend of Goethe, founded the study of physiognomy and graphology, he called on Cagliostro to ask him what was the basis of his cures. The magus answered with an enigmatic smile: “In herbis, in verbis, in lapidibus”—through the magical power of herbs, words and stones — just like the doctors of the middle ages.

Nevertheless, his patients did get better. The obvious explanation, based on everyday experience, is that some of them would have recovered with or without medical intervention. A second reason was pointed out by his contemporary Baronne Oberkirch, whose notes on Cagliostro’s dealings with Rohan are extremely valuable. According to the Baronne, “Cagliostro cured only those who had a positive state of mind, or at least those whose imaginations were strong enough to assist the power of the remedy.” That is to say, Cagliostro practised what we would now call psychosomatic medicine — he cured his patients through the mind and imagination, directing the healing along an inner path. Like every other charlatan, he must have been a superb psychologist, and there is no doubt that his powers of suggestion were considerable. We should also remember that in past centuries the mentally ill produced many more physical symptoms than they do today. So whoever dealt with the psychic disorder removed the pathological accompaniment at the same time.

His own presence was mesmeric, as the Baronne knew well: “He was not particularly handsome” (Carlyle tells us that he had the broadest nose of anyone in the eighteenth century), “but I never saw a more striking physiognomy. In particular, his glance carried an almost supernatural profundity. It would be impossible to describe the expression in his eyes: at once fire and ice, it drew you in and repelled you; it demanded a response and aroused the most insatiable curiosity.”

Gradually, the upper echelons of Strasbourg society gathered round him. Marshall Contades, the Marquis de la Salle, Royal Councillor Béguin, Baron Dampierre, Count Lützelburg, Baron Zucmantel … their names are not very familiar to us but all were clearly members of the Alsatian nobility. A financier called Sarazin, whom Cagliostro helped to become a father, lived, with his wife, as a close neighbour of Cagliostro for many years, sharing a house for some of that time. Another person healed by the magus was Jeanne de la Motte’s patroness, Mme de Boulainvilliers. And all this entirely without charge.

The figure of the miraculous healer is naturally surrounded by countless legends, not all of them favourable. (We can imagine what the established doctors had to say about their unwelcome rival.) One of those stories, although very simple and entirely without foundation, is so delightful we cannot resist telling it.

A nobleman approached Cagliostro to ask for an elixir that would stop his wife being unfaithful. The man was given a little bottle.

“Before you go to bed,” he was told, “drink the contents of this phial. If your wife really is unfaithful, by the next morning you will have turned into a cat.”

The gentleman went back to Paris, told the story to his wife and drank the liquid in the bottle.

The next day the wife came into her husband’s room and saw a large black cat sitting on the pillow.

“Oh my God!” she wailed between her sobs, “I only deceived the poor fellow once, with that awful man next door, who really wasn’t worth it, and now I’ve lost the best man in the world, and I’ll never see him again!”

Whereupon the husband crept out from under the bed, and forgave her.

“Yes, yes,” I hear you say, my dear, long-suffering reader, “this is all very well, but where’s the profit in it? If he doesn’t charge the poor, or even the financiers and the aristocracy for his cures, what is he living on? It seems he really did take us all in. He wasn’t a charlatan, he was an idiot.”

Patience, gentle reader, you really must trust him. Cagliostro was a man of large views. He had no desire to get rich by healing the sick — the occupation of medicine was far beneath him. He was fired by a higher ambition, pursuing nobler game. The whole point of the miracle-doctoring was to bring him to the attention of the one person on whose account he had come to Strasbourg. The true mark of his genius is that he had calculated precisely which grand seigneur in all Europe would be the most susceptible to being completely taken in by someone like himself. That person was none other than Cardinal Rohan. Just as Boehmer had calculated that his wonderful necklace must end up around the neck of Marie-Antoinette, so Cagliostro had decided that if anyone would swallow the Great Egyptian mumbo-jumbo, the Great Pyramid moonshine, that person would be Rohan. And he waited — waited most patiently.

He did not have to wait too long. He had been residing in Strasbourg for just two or three months when the Cardinal, suffering from a severe attack of asthma, left Saverne and came into town to consult the miracle doctor. Cagliostro was summoned to the Palace.

He knew the hour had struck. He understood that everything he did now would be of critical importance, that everything would turn on first impressions. He returned the message:

“If my Lord Cardinal is ill, he may come to me and I will heal him. But if he is well, he has no need of me, nor I of him.”

Rohan was not accustomed to being addressed in this manner. Cagliostro won the first round, and the Cardinal went to him. The impression Cagliostro had on him is described by his secretary, the Abbé Georgel:

“In his somewhat uncommunicative face I saw such an imposing dignity that I was filled with a kind of religious veneration, and my first words were dictated by pure respect. Our conversation was fairly brief, but it filled me with the most ardent desire to get to know him better.”

So Rohan reacted precisely as Cagliostro might have imagined in his most optimistic daydreams. And the miracle he had been waiting for duly followed.

He continued to keep his distance; in fact his behaviour was at times almost hostile. But gradually he softened towards Rohan, and not long afterwards addressed him in these words:

“Your soul is worthy of mine. Your merits are such that I shall share all my secrets with you.”

They say that that day was the happiest day in Rohan’s life. Poor grand seigneur! Fairy godmothers had stood round his cradle to furnish him with everything a man might desire: glory, wealth, a sensitive appreciation of scholarship and art. His life was encompassed by beauty and the calm knowledge of his own superiority. But he was one of those men who burn with a thirst for the eternal that no earthly joy can assuage. Had he not lived at the end of the sceptical eighteenth century he might have found in the Church itself what he looked for elsewhere in vain, and perhaps even become a truly sainted pope. But such was his fate — a false prophet entangled him in a bogus eternity. People in former centuries knew that at the end of the world the Antichrist would appear, doing everything that Christ had done, but that every one of his deeds would be false and his gold would crumble to dust in the hands of his followers. Rohan’s age was, in its own small way, the end of the world: its destiny was that of a world approaching its end — the fate of impending revolution.

Before long, the false prophet had moved into the Bishop’s Palace and the Cardinal had placed his horse and carriage at his disposal. And soon enough, the two were deep in alchemical experiments. The Cardinal proudly showed Baronne Oberkirch an imposing diamond that Cagliostro had created for him before his very eyes. They even manufactured gold. They predicted, to the precise second, the death of Maria Theresa. They conjured up the souls of women with whom Rohan had once been deeply in love. In his workroom Rohan erected a bust with the subscription: “To the divine Cagliostro, the godlike Cagliostro”.

But stop! Is this possible? The cultured Rohan, son of the Age of Reason, believed in the making of gold? He certainly did, and in this respect he was no more credulous than his contemporaries. In truth, the eighteenth century was the heyday of alchemy. Large numbers of professional alchemists lived in the St Marceau quarter of Paris. Some were devilish poor, but others became wealthy through the patronage of people in high places. Casanova himself would cheerfully resort to making gold when things were not going well for him — at around this time he prised a large sum of money out of Prince Biron of Courland with a display of alchemical wizardry. In Hungary during the same period Sándor Báróczi, the guardsman and writer, was experimenting with the Philosopher’s Stone. Kazinczy, that most austere of literary critics, read his works with cries of delight, and Kazinczy’s uncle, Count József Török, put his entire fortune into alchemical experiments — which was why the Kazinczys lived in such poverty at Széphalom.

Mercantilism, the prevailing economic doctrine of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, contributed to the extraordinary rise of the art. Economic thinkers of the time taught — and the nations made their arrangements accordingly — that a country’s wealth increased with the amount of silver and gold in its domains. So people did everything they could to raise the price of their exports in the hope of increasing the amount of precious metal coming into the country in exchange for those goods. But the policy actually reduced imports generally, and obstructed the free movement of those metals. No one at the time stopped to consider that if you simply stockpiled your gold and silver, and stifled the flow of imports, thus making it impossible to use your bullion to buy raw materials or other commodities, it was a dead business. Your wealth became purely symbolic. It had no actual currency, and prevented both the state and the people from enjoying the benefits that real wealth would bring.

Nor did they consider that, as the quantity of precious metal increased, its value and purchasing power would be reduced, and the price of goods would rise. Today every child discovers for himself that there is no point in alchemy, because if you really could produce gold in vast quantities it would become worthless.

However, as we have already said, people in those days were unimaginably deficient in their economic reasoning, and unable to foresee the simplest of consequences.

For just this reason, anyone involved in historical research will sometimes feel extremely sceptical not only about historical materialism as such, but about the whole modern approach to the subject, which ascribes such central importance to economic conditions. If people were so little aware of the laws of economic life, then those laws probably had a much smaller influence on their actions than they would today — or, at the very least, the influence would not have been as straightforward and direct. People are swayed not by the real laws of economics but by their economic delusions and superstitions. For that reason it is dangerous to impose modern economic motives on historical periods, and even to believe that wars in those days were fought over raw materials or for reasons of trade.

By the reckoning of his biographer François d’Almeras, between 1780 and 1785 Cagliostro had extracted cash and jewellery from the Cardinal to the value of two to three hundred thousand livres.