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.
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.