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.
Freemasons are pleased to trace the history of the ‘Royal Art’ back to the earliest biblical times. James Anderson, the first historian of the movement, claimed in a work published in 1723 that, “During their wanderings in the wilderness, Moses, in his capacity of Grand Master, would often assemble the Israelites in a regular lodge which they all attended.” King Solomon was also a Grand Master, since he built the temple, and so too, for reasons which are rather less clear, was Nebuchadnezzar.
Other writers trace the origins of the movement back to the Knights Templar, and others again to the mysterious and, properly speaking, non-existent Rosicrucian fraternity of the seventeenth century. Less fanciful observers settle for English precursors of the lodges in the medieval stonemason corporations, or guilds. That suggestion has the ring of probability, but even it cannot be proved. The theory is that at some point in the seventeenth century the stonemasons, by now rather isolated and very much in decline, admitted (in full accordance with their basic constitution) members of the gentry and upper middle class who wished to exchange views and opinions of the world in a secure atmosphere under the protection of the guild. These would be people who were disenchanted with religious wars, thus entrenching the principles of tolerance and open-ended inquiry into ideas that were ahead of their time. The records of some of these lodges go back a very long way. Those of Edinburgh Mary’s Number One, for example, claim to date from 1599.
The movement finally emerges from this twilight of myth and conjecture in 1717, when, on St John’s day (St John being their patron saint), the first English Grand Lodge was founded, absorbing most of the other English lodges that were still active. Its French counterparts had come into being a few years earlier.
It is difficult to be very sure what these first lodges actually did, and on what sort of ideological basis they existed. What is sure is that dinners had a prominent place on their agendas, often with the Grand Master as presiding host. By this time he probably considered the lodge as his own property, effectively a component of his business or factory, and no doubt this further softened the general ethos towards one of ‘enlightened’ Epicureanism.
The history of the French lodges in the eighteenth century is rather more troubled. In 1737 the authorities began persecuting them, and in the following year Clement XII issued a Papal Bull excommunicating their members. But neither the religious or secular authorities took this very seriously.
In 1737 a Scottish nobleman called Ramsay reformed the French lodges and founded the so-called Scottish Order, creating a great many more ranks than the original three, the better to reward members’ loyalty. In this celebrated refoundation the ethical principles of Freemasonry are more clearly manifest. Ramsay wrote to his brethren about four ideals: first, philanthropy, the love of one’s fellow man, regardless of nationality or religious denomination, thus giving an element of universal brotherhood to the organisation; second, moral purity (a homosexual, for example, could not be admitted until he changed his ways and affirmed that he would pay appropriate respect to the ‘fair sex’); third, absolute secrecy; and finally, love of the fine arts. Among these he included academic scholarship, and held out certain universal disciplines as the most ideaclass="underline" his hope was that the Order would undertake something like the project which, a few years later, became the Grande encyclopédie.
In 1738 the French Freemasons elected a member of the royal family, Louis de Bourbon-Condé, Duc de Clermont, as their Grand Master. Clermont fulfilled his duties with the usual Bourbon insouciance, deputing a dancing master, Lacorne, in his place. Lacorne’s rather dubious character alienated the more serious elements in the membership, and this led to rifts and divisions that lasted for decades. To counterbalance this they instituted the Grand Orient. Its Grand Master, the Duc de Chartres, finally reunited the warring lodges after Clermont’s death in 1771. This Duc de Chartres was none other than Philippe-Égalité, the future revolutionary Duc d’Orléans, who, though a Grand Master and supporter of the Revolution, did not himself escape the guillotine, but whose descendants became the ruling (junior Bourbon) House of Orléans.
What were the Freemasons doing when not at war with one another, and what did their work consist of? They organised meetings, initiated new members, progressed up the ranks via elaborate ceremonies, dined, performed charitable deeds, and practised philanthropy. It was an intensely theatrical age — as early as 1754 the appearance of the actor Manelli in a new opera buffa had led to such heated conflict between the devotees of French and Italian music that the Parisian Jansenists and ultramontanes set aside their mutual hostility that had been threatening a religious civil war. In such a climate, when everything was played out in the full glare of publicity, and the arrival of a new theatre company could put a temporary stop to revolutionary activity, the Freemasons no doubt took a charitable view of all varieties of theatrical genre.
In 1782 a market vegetable stall-holder called Mme Menthe was disinherited by her wealthy sister. Despite this she then gave a home to this wicked sibling’s illegitimate son, even though she already had ten children of her own. Shortly afterwards she gave birth to her nineteenth child (eight having died young), and to mark the occasion the Sincerity Lodge arranged a grand surprise for her. “The meeting,” wrote a contemporary, “took place with more than one hundred and forty illustrious members, of both sexes, present. After the usual ceremonies, the curtain rose and there on the stage, seated on a throne, was the worthy Mme Menthe, surrounded by her ten children, and, at her feet, the child she had so magnanimously taken in. The entire family (so deserving of compassion!) had been fitted out with new clothes at the Lodge’s expense. The presiding Marquis, in a speech that was as harrowing as it was eloquent, explained the meaning of the striking tableau before our eyes. At the most moving point in his address, the Comtesse X placed a citizen’s crown on the lady’s head, the Marquise Y held out a purse to her containing a considerable sum of money, and the Comtesse Z profferred a trousseau for the infant so newly brought into the world. The child that Mme Menthe had taken in was then adopted by the Lodge, who undertook to raise it and take every care of it.”