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 the 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.
So how did they make their living, Jeanne and her husband? Partly by their basic quality as fraudsters, their lordly self-confidence. They could always find trusting souls to believe them. One particular line of business that occasionally did very well for them was to buy dress material or something similar on credit, and immediately pawn it. Sometimes they received donations from high-ranking people, in response to their begging letters. They were even supported by loyal old retainers of the Ancien Régime, and were fed for quite some time by the mother of a chambermaid called Jeanne Rosalie.