The Queen's Necklace (11 page)

Jeanne waited in suspense for the packet to arrive. It was late. Perhaps Rohan after all … perhaps he was not as gullible as she had thought? Had it all come to nothing—the Baronne, the bower, that memorable night? But behold, it arrived, delivered
by Baron Planta. Shrewd as ever, Jeanne now urged Rohan in the Queen’s name to return to Saverne for a while, and send her another 50,000 livres from there. The Cardinal duly obeyed.

So—as no doubt many a gypsy had assured Jeanne it would—money came at last to the La Motte household. But Jeanne was not the sort to lack ideas of how to squander it all at the first opportunity. She immediately bought two houses, one back home in Bar-sur-Aube, and a summer holiday home; she paid the Baronne d’Oliva 4,000 livres and promptly threw her out; and she ran up a vast amount of debt.

We believe that this last 50,000 livres, together with the 100,000 francs she had borrowed from Rohan in the Queen’s name, was not an end in itself. It was just an experimental balloon, to satisfy her curiosity as to whether the Cardinal really would send her the money for the Queen. The real business, the great and fateful business, was still to come.

W
HILE JEANNE WAS DISPLAYING
this monumental burst of activity, her great rival for the Cardinal’s favour, Cagliostro, had not been sitting on his hands.

In 1781 Rohan had sent him to one of his relatives, the Duc de Soubise, who was ill in Paris. Cagliostro cured him completely, in no time at all. He then spent almost a year in Bordeaux, supposedly at the invitation of the French Foreign Minister the Comte de Vergennes. Here too he was hounded by the local doctors, and he seems also to have become entangled in amorous intrigues: there is no escaping the fact the magus was a child of the times. The sky was darkening over his head, but he extricated himself, just as Swedenborg had done, through a remarkable vision.

He was lying on his bed of illness, surrounded by a handful of his followers. Suddenly he opened his eyes wide, like someone waking from a dream. His face was deathly pale. In a voice trembling with emotion, he revealed what he had seen.

In his vision he was taken by two unknown gentlemen (obviously angels) and led into a vast cave. There, in the darkness, a mighty door swung open and the place was flooded with heavenly light. He stepped into a hall, where supernatural beings in long white robes disported themselves. There were many Freemasons among them, all adherents, naturally, of the Egyptian Rite. He quickly donned the same white robes and took up a sword, in order not to feel out of place. He came before the throne of the Highest Being, whom he thanked most properly for allowing him to experience
the delights of the other world while still a mortal. At this point an ‘unknown’ voice declared: “Behold, you see now what your reward will be, but meanwhile you still have much to do.”

This vision was a notable success.

Next he moved to Lyons, the capital of French mysticism. Here, in the sixteenth century, the souls of poets had taken wing and soared to the greatest heights of the arcane world of Platonic ideas. The tendency to the mystical had never deserted the citizens, and there St Martin himself had founded the occult Freemasonry Lodge known as the Chevaliers Bienfaisants. Cagliostro knew where he needed to be.

In Lyons he made contact with the lodges, gave talks, recruited followers and established another lodge of the Egyptian order, which he modestly named Sagesse Triomphante—Wisdom Triumphant. He personally consecrated the site amidst highly festive ceremonies. The foundation document begins with these words:

The time has come for us to say a few words about what constituted the Egyptian Rite. Cagliostro followed Swedenborg in teaching that man must completely renew himself, both morally and physically.

His prescriptions for moral renewal were not especially difficult to follow. You had to withdraw from the world for forty days, preferably to a pavilion built on the peak of a high mountain, and spend your time there in meditation.

But Cagliostro’s followers were far less interested in moral rejuvenation than in its physical counterpart, which involved
much more challenging requirements. True, it promised enormous benefits: it would prolong life for several hundred years, bring the body to the condition of an innocent child, and heal every illness. Whoever sought to attain this had to lock himself away in a cell, by the light of the moon, in May, every year for fifty years, and live there for forty days on nothing but a soup made with certain prescribed herbs and boiled twice, otherwise drinking nothing but spring water. On the thirteenth day one of the patient’s veins would be slit open and six ‘white drops’ infused into them. On the thirty-second day the vein was opened again, this time at sunrise. The patient was then wrapped in a sheet and placed on a bed in the open air, where he received the
prima materia
, which God had created to make man immortal, only its use had been forgotten in consequence of original sin. Following this, the patient would actually become worse, but would recover soon after, and be like a completely different person.

Many of Cagliostro’s teachings were attempts to discover this cure, but none was ever brought to a conclusion, so we still do not know to this day whether he ever achieved the promised result.

Perhaps he had been taught how to make the elixir of eternal life by that most enigmatic figure of the whole eighteenth century, the Comte de St Germain. Legends of St Germain abound, but there are few reliable facts. He was a real historic personage who for a while enjoyed the confidence of Louis XV. The legends’ chief claim is that he was several thousand years old, that he was alive at the time of Christ, and knew the Redeemer personally. On one occasion, in the presence of an acquaintance, he said to his manservant:

“Do you remember, old chap, when we were walking with St Peter beside Lake Genazareth? …”

“Your mind is beginning to wander, sir,” the man replied. “You forget that I have only been in your service these last five hundred years.”

St Germain was an altogether more elegant kind of magician than Cagliostro. By the latter’s time, the end of the century, the whole business had been to some extent democratised. Among the real magi Cagliostro was a Figaro, an impudent barber and footman.

But as far as it is possible to judge from the high-flown metaphysical texts quoted by Haven, and the mass of gossip that has been passed down, there must have been at least some genuine occultism in the Egyptian rite, some communication with the spirit world. It was Swedenborg who, as we have remarked, made that connection so easy and familiar for people of the time. The literary critic Leigh Hunt records of the great English poet and artist William Blake, who was one of Swedenborg’s followers, that once, as they strolled beside the Thames, Blake suddenly raised his hat. Leigh Hunt looked around, but saw no one there for Blake to greet.

“Who was that?” he asked, in some alarm.

“No one, just St Paul flying past,” Blake replied.

Cagliostro had the same easy and natural relationship with spirits. He would invite them to dinner, lay places for them at the table, and tell his living guests which of the illustrious dead they had the good fortune to be dining with. Sometimes he used mediums, a young boy or an innocent girl (he called these his ‘doves’), but his followers had mostly to take his word for it that they were in the presence of the Seven Great Spirits around the Deity’s throne: Anael, Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, Uriel, Zobiachel and Anachiel. These last played a central role. The medium would see them in a pitcher filled with water, together, naturally, with candles and the three magical names: Helios, Mene and Tetragammon.

But most miraculous of all was the sheer number of Cagliostro’s adherents, and the depth of their belief. Haven quotes the letter of thanks written to Cagliostro by the members of the Wisdom Triumphant lodge:

Cagliostro achieved this enormous power through his oratory. People would listen enchanted, and believe everything he said. It is a commonplace that the power of a great orator depends not on what he says but on the way he says it. So what was the secret of Cagliostro’s performances?

Jeanne’s admirer Beugnot once dined at her house when Cagliostro was present, and recorded his impressions in the following words:

“He spoke double Dutch (
baragouin
)—half-French, half-Italian, peppered with words supposedly from Arabic, which he did not bother to translate. He was the only one who spoke, and he managed to touch on twenty different topics in the time. Every few seconds he would ask if we understood what he was saying, and we all nodded. Once he had warmed to a particular subject, he would go into a sort of trance, talking loudly and finishing with large gestures. Then he would suddenly come down from his soapbox and murmur tender compliments and amusing endearments to the lady of the house, calling her his little fawn, his gazelle, his swan and his dove, in short, endowing her with all the softest names of the animal kingdom. And so it went on for the entire meal. I didn’t understand very much, only that he talked about heaven, the stars, the Great Arcanum, Memphis, the hierophants, transcendental chemistry, giants, enormous beasts, a city in Central Africa ten times the size of
Paris, and how he had regular correspondents based there—and of course the great ignorance in which we found ourselves in so far as all those fine marvels were concerned, which were known to him without recourse to books.”

Beugnot and others confirm that he larded his sentences with bits of Arabic. A German orientalist once addressed him in the language, and he understood not a word. Perhaps his own version was simply mumbo-jumbo. To some extent this might have been forced on him. His command of French was so poor he could not have expressed himself clearly had he wanted to. Another witness said of his performance: “If gibberish (
galimatias
) equals ‘sublime’, then no one was more sublime than Cagliostro. He would pronounce long words in the middle of his incomprehensible sentences, and the less his audience understood the greater was the miracle he worked on them. They thought him oracular simply because he was obscure. His art consisted of addressing nothing to the understanding and trusting the imagination of the listener to supply a meaning. The truth is always obvious, but only to the wise. The bogus is incomprehensible, which is precisely why it impresses the multitude.”

This last witness more or less explains the secret of Cagliostro’s power. With these ‘Arabic’ terms he reduced his listeners to a kind of stupor. The people of the time must have been much as they are today—they might give their assent to wise and intelligent words, but they kept their fervour for those they did not understand. The astonishing power the magician has over the half-educated lies in his ill-formed concepts, his nebulous terminology and high-sounding incomprehensibilities. This is especially true in times of impending social upheaval, when people are looking for miracles. Cagliostro’s ‘Arabic’ words made the benign vision blaze before the devout eyes of his audiences. If he did say anything they could understand, they indulgently heard him out simply for the sake of what they did not.

By 1785, the fatal year of the necklace trial, Cagliostro saw that the time had finally come for him to conquer the capital of the world, and he made his move to Paris. There, he rented a house in the Marais district, as Jeanne had done. The house still stands, on the corner of the Rue St Claude and the Boulevard Beaumarchais. The present writer looked it over, but there is nothing memorable about it.

As we saw in his dealings with Rohan, Cagliostro was a master of the arts of choosing his moment and waiting for the right time. He arrived just as Paris was beginning to feel the need for a miracle doctor. Its citizens, like those of every great city, and the French by their nature, had a permanent hunger for sensation. This was even more true of the eighteenth century, of which that considerable expert Victor du Bled remarked that no other age was ever so bored. In the second half of the century doctors became highly fashionable. Their connection with the flourishing natural sciences steadily raised their social status, and they began to fulfil the role in aristocratic houses once played by the priestly confessor.

In his standard history of medicine, Garrison claims that their social position was even higher than it is today. They wore swords like the nobility, and muffs in winter to protect their fingers, whose sensitive touch was so important in reaching a diagnosis. Voltaire and Rousseau’s doctor, Tronchin, was one of the best-known figures of the age. (He was the person who made the then revolutionary discovery that physical activity was not harmful to the constitution.) Also widely celebrated was a M Pomme, who ascribed the
vapeurs
, as nervous disorders were known at the time, to a general dehydration of the central nervous system, and immersed his patients in water. Medical science had become a kind of mania, like everything else at the time. Women threw themselves into it with a passion. The young Comte de Coigny was so keen on his anatomical studies that he kept a cadaver in his luggage to dissect even when travelling. Followers of the Comtesse du Voisenon smuggled a
‘news’ item into a copy of the
Journal des Sages
announcing that the society of doctors had elected her as their president, and in true eighteenth-century style the Comtesse found this entirely natural. (L V du Bled.)

When Cagliostro arrived in Paris, the previous miracle-doctor, Mesmer, who discovered animal magnetism and produced miraculous forces with his magical buckets, had now gone out of fashion and disappeared from the scene, his pockets bulging with cash. Cagliostro’s fame had gone before him, and he arrived in a blaze of publicity. His followers had distributed thousands upon thousands of copies of his portrait, adorned with the inscription: