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 welclass="underline" “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 husband’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 Georgeclass="underline"
“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.