The Queen's Necklace (6 page)

But a person who falls under the spell of erotic dreams does not remain immune to their power for long. Rohan had dreamt for so many years that the Queen was in love with him that he ended up falling desperately in love with her himself. In this
he showed some taste, especially when we consider who he was, and who the Queen was, and we can forget the shades of Mazarin and the other great cardinals. Marie-Antoinette was both young and one of the most beautiful women in France. Rohan, however, was approaching fifty, and in those days, as we all know, people aged more rapidly and died younger: the average life expectancy in France was twenty-eight years and nine months. Perhaps Rohan was seized by
Torschlusspanik
, the sexual passion bordering on madness that is triggered by approaching old age.

And here is something else. The varieties of sexual attraction can be analysed in terms of sociological type. There are some people who can love only those of lower standing than themselves—gentlemen of birth who pursue female servants, and ladies of rank who adore coachmen. There are those whose passions are strictly confined to members of their own stratum, and those who can love only those from a bracket higher than their own—people in whose minds sex and ambition are inseparably fused. These are the main groups, and most of us fall into one of them or another. And if Rohan was indeed one of those who could love only their superiors, then there was just one woman of higher rank than himself—the Queen. He was like the very tall man whose fate is to be attracted only by women taller than himself. In Rohan’s adoration of the Queen there may well have been a similar element of fatal compulsion.

Neither contemporary sources nor later historians like Funck-Brentano raise the question of Rohan’s actual feelings for her. But there is one piece of information well known to scholars that supports my theory, psychologically improbable as it might seem. Mme Campan records the following story, which makes very little sense unless we assume that Rohan was indeed in love with her.

In the summer of 1782 Archduke Paul Petrovics, the son of Catherine the Great who became Paul I of Russia and later went mad, came to Paris with his wife. They travelled incognito,
as the Count and Countess North—a poetic name indeed. The Queen gave a banquet in their honour at Trianon, and the park was illuminated. Rohan bribed the concierge (a ‘janitor’ in the sense that Mme Campan was a ‘chambermaid’? Indeed not, but a genuine concierge) to let him into the park, claiming he wanted to see the lights after the Queen had left for Versailles. So he hid himself in the porter’s lodge. But he failed to keep his promise to go out only after the Queen’s departure, and when the man’s attention was distracted he slipped out into the park. He was ‘in disguise’, but that consisted only of a greatcoat beneath which his purple stockings were clearly visible. Once in the park, he stood, thus strangely attired, and with a ‘face of mystery’, as Mme Campan writes, peering out, from two separate locations, at the royal family and their train of attendants. Marie-Antoinette was deeply shocked and wanted to sack the porter the next day, but Mme Campan successfully intervened on his behalf.

What was His Eminence hoping for in the park? Was it to reveal himself in the confident expectation that her heart would melt when she saw him? Rohan was not that stupid: he had a paunch, he was no longer young, and the ludicrous disguise would hardly have advanced his cause. The only possible explanation is that he desperately wanted to see the Queen, and that was why he had gone there.

But whatever the case, there is no doubt that he was driven by the desire, verging on compulsion, to diffuse the Queen’s anger and win her favour. This is the second such
idée fixe
in the story, according to Carlyle, the first being Boehmer’s with his necklace. And when two such obsessions come together, a force comes into being that could destroy a nation. All that is needed is for them to combine with a third.

And that was how Jeanne de la Motte found Rohan when she met him at Saverne, the Bishop of Strasbourg’s country seat. The old manor house had burnt down in 1779, but Rohan had rebuilt it in fashionable pomp and splendour and fitted it out,
again in the taste of the time, with collections of natural history and art, and splendid libraries. The number of his guests had not diminished since his days in Vienna. He lived like a prince. They came in such numbers, from all over Germany and France, and even from the Court at Versailles, that often there was no room for them all in the mansion, despite its seven hundred awaiting beds. “There was no noblewoman of such good family that she did not dream of Saverne,” wrote a contemporary. “The hunts were especially magnificent.” Six hundred peasants drove the game into the gentlemen’s guns, with the women following on horseback or in carriages. At one o’clock the entire party assembled for luncheon, in a marquee erected in some picturesque spot on the banks of a stream. So that the pleasure should be shared by everyone, there were even tables waiting on the lawn for the peasantry: it was Rohan’s wish that every one of them should have a pound of meat, two pounds of bread and half a bottle of wine. At Saverne they certainly enjoyed to the full what Talleyrand calls ‘the sweetness of life’.

It was to this fairytale castle that Jeanne de la Motte, dissatisfied and inwardly eaten up as ever, came with her husband. Her great patron Mme de Boulainvilliers introduced her to the Cardinal and commended her to his favour. She told him her story while he listened in rapt silence—which is hardly surprising, given the details that might have come from a novel. The unvarnished realities of a defenceless life, the bitter taste of poverty, would have been particularly fascinating to a man whose own days had been passed in the most cushioned elevation, and to whom the woes of ordinary life were comprehensible only as some sort of exotic and compelling tale. And Jeanne knew supremely well how to present her tale with steadily mounting effect. On a number of occasions her later writings reveal—it is quite noticeable—that she had practised extensively and this was the form she finally evolved. One can imagine her using her spare moments to rehearse it over and over again, honing it down to one particular version with its ever-increasing drama.

So Rohan listened, and believed everything. He usually believed what people told him. Two days before his arrest, Cagliostro persuaded him that he would be dining with Henry IV, though he would not actually see his illustrious guest. If one were writing a play on the subject one would have to ignore everything else and focus on this trait alone, because in the entire drama of the necklace it is the most significant. He showed the most extraordinary, indeed unbelievable, gullibility. The most problematic aspect of the whole affair, Funck-Brentano tells us, was the degree of credulity we are required to attribute to him. It is the most improbable feature in the whole improbable story—but it is undeniable.

The most obvious explanation for it, other than some character trait of unknown origin, can once again lie only in his social position. How would anyone born into the purple, and destined to become a cardinal, get to know people, the circumstances of their lives—and the sheer nastiness circumstances can provoke in them? Any other nobleman, busying himself with affairs of state or military matters, would have rapidly discovered what people are really like. But Rohan was a man of the Church, and he took no interest in his diocese. People showed him only their better side and revealed only the noblest of their motives to him. And Rohan was himself a thoroughly benevolent man. Where would he possibly learn about the sheer malice of ordinary people? He was as innocent as a king—as his own King, Louis XVI.

To this social conditioning was added another determinism, that of blood—which, again, and most remarkably, not one of the great historians of the necklace affair considers worth a mention. Rohan was a Celt. His family origins were Breton. True, by this time several hundred years had passed since they had left Brittany, but there must have been constant intermarrying with the Breton nobility, and there is always the possibility of genetic regression. The Celts, as we know, are a fantastical and superstitious people. Matthew Arnold, the great
English essayist of the last century, writing in his study of Celtic literature, tells us they lived “in a state of permanent rebellion against the tyranny of facts”. In the Arthurian Cycle, which lasted from the time of the Middle Ages through to Tennyson and Wagner, and had such a seminal influence on European poetry, it was the old kings of the Irish and the Highland Scots who could produce the greatest giants, the tiniest dwarves, and the most magical fairylands. By the eighteenth century the Highlanders had added many other proudly distinctive gifts, including second sight, by which they could see the souls of those who had just died. Dr Samuel Johnson, the leading light of eighteenth-century English literature, made a special journey to Scotland to enquire into it. Until very recently, all four Celtic peoples—the Irish, Welsh, Highland Scots and Bretons—inhabited a world that verged on the theocratic. They consulted their priests in almost everything and looked to their magical powers for instruction in even the most mundane of matters.

Thus Rohan too, with the blind faith inherited from his Breton ancestors, turned for guidance to the great magus with whom fate had linked him—Cagliostro.

F
IRST 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.