The Queen's Necklace

by Antal Szerb

  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 h
usband’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.

  Chapter Five

  The Bower of Venus

  EVERY TYPE OF HOSPITALITY must come to an end, and Jeanne de Valois and the illustrious Comte her husband could not live for ever in the fairytale castle at Saverne. With grieving hearts they returned to Lunéville. But after Saverne t
he drabness of life in a garrison town had even less appeal for them. Jeanne’s old restlessness reasserted itself, La Motte longed for a more comfortable life, and one fine day they turned their backs on the town and set off to try their luck in Paris.

  Luck they certainly needed. Their sole patroness, Mme de Boulainvilliers, had now died. The Cardinal sent them a few pieces of gold from time to time, and the pension Mme de Boulainvilliers had obtained for them was a regular source of income—but what was that in terms of their pretensions?

  Thus began for them that peculiar form of penury that anyone familiar with the great realist novels of the eighteenth century, Lesage, Fielding and Smollett, will instantly recognise—endless quarrels with landlords, with restaurant owners, with pursuing creditors, and always the sword hanging over their heads that one day they might be locked up in a debtors’ prison.

  Nonetheless in 1782 they rented a house in the Rue Neuve, in St Gilles, among the old palaces of the Marais district.

  Under the Valois kings the Marais had been the aristocratic quarter, and in the present Place des Vosges there still stands that relic of Paris’s most supremely interesting architecture, the wonderful Place Royale. You step through an archway into an enclosed square lined with identical houses—it is like diving beneath the sea into a different world, where time has stood still. Rohan’s palace was also in the Marais, next to that of the Soubises. Nowadays this part of the city is full of immigrants from Eastern Europe, of the poorest and most teeming sort, living in dire congestion and poverty. With city districts it is as with the fashions—they make their way steadily down to the lowest strata of society. The once-proud moustache of the Hungarian nobility is nowadays sported by elderly village carpenters, and the old palace of Henry IV’s favourites now accommodates métèque families, all tailors and furriers, with eight children. Like everything else, the metropolis is the symbol of constant change.