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.