The young woman was completely charmed by the Comtesse, especially when she came to understand whom she was dealing with — the intimate friend of Marie-Antoinette. And since the Baronne d’Oliva was a particularly, indeed infinitely, well-intentioned soul, how could she possibly refuse when the Comtesse asked her one day if she would do her a personal favour, really just a trifle, but it would be doing the Queen a very great service. And of course she could count on the Queen’s gratitude. She would get 15,000 livres, and a present, my dear, a personal present, to at least the same value, though what it would be she couldn’t yet say. What she would have to do, it was really nothing, just hand over a letter, and a single rose, to a noble gentleman at Versailles.
“It wasn’t difficult persuading her,” Jeanne admitted later. “She was really stupid.”
“O Ixion de Rohan, happiest mortal of this world!” exclaims Carlyle, comparing the Cardinal to the character in Greek mythology who fell in love with Hera, the Queen of the Skies, and was made by the malicious gods to embrace her in the semblance of a cloud. If ever there were happy days in Rohan’s life they must have been those that followed the scene in the bower. What an experience for his soul, with its deep yearning for mysticism and wonder: the park, the dark night, the Queen’s appearance out of the gloom — almost like something imagined — the fevered words, the rose let fall to the ground, and the secrecy surrounding everything. Why had the Queen been so nervous? What lay behind that? Perhaps she was ashamed of her feelings that night? … And indeed perhaps it was better that she did vanish, like an apparition. Had she stayed there a moment longer the truth would have come out — and the Cardinal had had his fill of truth, which had lavished too many of its gifts upon him:
You who are weary of the truth,
Embrace the slippery pearls of dreams.
Jeanne was indeed a kindly villain. Like Faust, and other devils of myth and legend, she gave Rohan what his heart desired. No other mortal could have done more than that.
And she seemed to realise it, because she quickly set about cashing in. On the Queen’s behalf she let Rohan know that she would look very kindly on it if he could lend her 50,000 livres: an impoverished relative was in urgent need of assistance, and just at that moment she did not have the ready cash to hand. Rohan was delighted that the Queen had taken him so far into her confidence as to ask him for money. He quickly raised the sum from a moneylender, since he too had no cash to spare at that time …
Jeanne waited in suspense for the packet to arrive. It was late. Perhaps Rohan after all … perhaps he was not as gullible as she had thought? Had it all come to nothing — the Baronne, the bower, that memorable night? But behold, it arrived, delivered by Baron Planta. Shrewd as ever, Jeanne now urged Rohan in the Queen’s name to return to Saverne for a while, and send her another 50,000 livres from there. The Cardinal duly obeyed.
So — as no doubt many a gypsy had assured Jeanne it would — money came at last to the La Motte household. But Jeanne was not the sort to lack ideas of how to squander it all at the first opportunity. She immediately bought two houses, one back home in Bar-sur-Aube, and a summer holiday home; she paid the Baronne d’Oliva 4,000 livres and promptly threw her out; and she ran up a vast amount of debt.
We believe that this last 50,000 livres, together with the 100,000 francs she had borrowed from Rohan in the Queen’s name, was not an end in itself. It was just an experimental balloon, to satisfy her curiosity as to whether the Cardinal really would send her the money for the Queen. The real business, the great and fateful business, was still to come.
Chapter Six. Spirits in Glass Pitchers
WHILE JEANNE WAS DISPLAYING this monumental burst of activity, her great rival for the Cardinal’s favour, Cagliostro, had not been sitting on his hands.
In 1781 Rohan had sent him to one of his relatives, the Duc de Soubise, who was ill in Paris. Cagliostro cured him completely, in no time at all. He then spent almost a year in Bordeaux, supposedly at the invitation of the French Foreign Minister the Comte de Vergennes. Here too he was hounded by the local doctors, and he seems also to have become entangled in amorous intrigues: there is no escaping the fact the magus was a child of the times. The sky was darkening over his head, but he extricated himself, just as Swedenborg had done, through a remarkable vision.
He was lying on his bed of illness, surrounded by a handful of his followers. Suddenly he opened his eyes wide, like someone waking from a dream. His face was deathly pale. In a voice trembling with emotion, he revealed what he had seen.
In his vision he was taken by two unknown gentlemen (obviously angels) and led into a vast cave. There, in the darkness, a mighty door swung open and the place was flooded with heavenly light. He stepped into a hall, where supernatural beings in long white robes disported themselves. There were many Freemasons among them, all adherents, naturally, of the Egyptian Rite. He quickly donned the same white robes and took up a sword, in order not to feel out of place. He came before the throne of the Highest Being, whom he thanked most properly for allowing him to experience the delights of the other world while still a mortal. At this point an ‘unknown’ voice declared: “Behold, you see now what your reward will be, but meanwhile you still have much to do.”
This vision was a notable success.
Next he moved to Lyons, the capital of French mysticism. Here, in the sixteenth century, the souls of poets had taken wing and soared to the greatest heights of the arcane world of Platonic ideas. The tendency to the mystical had never deserted the citizens, and there St Martin himself had founded the occult Freemasonry Lodge known as the Chevaliers Bienfaisants. Cagliostro knew where he needed to be.
In Lyons he made contact with the lodges, gave talks, recruited followers and established another lodge of the Egyptian order, which he modestly named Sagesse Triomphante — Wisdom Triumphant. He personally consecrated the site amidst highly festive ceremonies. The foundation document begins with these words:
GLORY, UNITY, WISDOM, CHARITY, PROSPERITY
We, the Great Kophta, founder and Grand Master of the High Egyptian Order both in the East and now part of the West, declare, to all whom it may concern …
The time has come for us to say a few words about what constituted the Egyptian Rite. Cagliostro followed Swedenborg in teaching that man must completely renew himself, both morally and physically.
His prescriptions for moral renewal were not especially difficult to follow. You had to withdraw from the world for forty days, preferably to a pavilion built on the peak of a high mountain, and spend your time there in meditation.
But Cagliostro’s followers were far less interested in moral rejuvenation than in its physical counterpart, which involved much more challenging requirements. True, it promised enormous benefits: it would prolong life for several hundred years, bring the body to the condition of an innocent child, and heal every illness. Whoever sought to attain this had to lock himself away in a cell, by the light of the moon, in May, every year for fifty years, and live there for forty days on nothing but a soup made with certain prescribed herbs and boiled twice, otherwise drinking nothing but spring water. On the thirteenth day one of the patient’s veins would be slit open and six ‘white drops’ infused into them. On the thirty-second day the vein was opened again, this time at sunrise. The patient was then wrapped in a sheet and placed on a bed in the open air, where he received the prima materia, which God had created to make man immortal, only its use had been forgotten in consequence of original sin. Following this, the patient would actually become worse, but would recover soon after, and be like a completely different person.