How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (19 page)

Freemasonry offered Cagliostro an opportunity to direct his mountebank speciousness, his quicksilver talents as a thespian and huckster, at an audience that might lift him out of the gutter. Masons were respectable figures who had vowed to help their brethren in any way they could, but they had a weakness for fanciful tales that burnished their order’s prehistory. In whatever town he arrived, Cagliostro was welcomed hospitably by the brothers; in The Hague they formed an
‘arch of steel’ with their swords to salute his departure. Physically, he was unprepossessing: medium height, podgy, tanned and with an upturned nose. What drew the eye was his hair: braided into dreadlocks and tied at the back in a ponytail. His furious charisma, his strange mode of speech that flickered between languages, the blast of his voice like a ‘trumpet muted
with a crepe veil’, fascinated all who met him, even those whose scepticism was barricaded and entrenched.

He was careful to ration his prodigious charm, which kept his acolytes eager to ingratiate: effusive one moment, he could rapidly turn cold and would speak only in elliptical pensées. He was canny
when taking money from his eager, often immensely rich supporters, ostentatiously refusing payment for his services on a number of occasions, in order to bolster his reputation for selflessness. The further Cagliostro travelled in time and space from Palermo, the more aristocratic endorsements he rustled up, and the easier it became to convince people of his outlandish cosmology.

A number of nobles in the duchy of Courland, a small Germanic state in present-day Latvia, were so taken by the man they saw transmute mercury to silver that they wished to make him duke in place of their Russian-imposed ruler. Cagliostro travelled to St Petersburg, hoping that Catherine the Great would join the Egyptian Rite (in the event, Catherine, who believed that Masonry was a dangerous harbinger of democracy, wanted nothing to do with him). While there he cured sufferers from cancer, insanity and other severe ailments, employing only a ‘delicious
distilled water’ – otherwise known as water – and exorcisms. But Cagliostro’s rampant belief that he had been chosen started to alienate his fellow Masons. In the summer of

1780 he was forced out of Warsaw after accusations of legerdemain during his alchemical demonstrations. Travelling westwards, he arrived in Strasbourg in September that year, foppishly dressed in an outfit of Turkish taffeta, Artois shoes with diamond buckles and a musketeer’s hat quiffed with white feathers.

Strasbourg’s Franco-German cosmopolitanism made it fertile territory for Masonry – the city contained twenty-nine lodges. But the native Masons shunned Cagliostro, who by now had decided that he was not merely the Great Copt’s plenipotentiary but the Great Copt himself – he made out, if not explicitly, that he was an immortal being who conversed with the angel of light and the spirit of darkness. Cagliostro offered free healthcare to the poorest members of society, which incurred the enmity of the doctors’ guild, irate that their business was being undercut, and the suspicion of the authorities, who worried about the radicalism inherent in any individual who attracted the adulation of the masses.

You only read of unlikely recoveries in the works of Cagliostro’s advocates, though there must have been many cases for which he was unable to offer any remedy. But it is worth considering why this self-anointed healer had any success at all. His medicines, whose recipes
he guarded fiercely, were, for the most part, utterly innocuous: tinctures, herbal laxatives, cough mixtures. More importantly, he placed great emphasis on two aspects of treatment then ignored by the medical profession – nutrition and pastoral care. Cagliostro ran a soup kitchen alongside his practice, which meant that the malnourished could regain the strength to defeat their illnesses through their own resources. And he spent many hours talking to and consoling his patients, counselling them against despair and, with his effervescent confidence, firing their belief that their health would be restored.

The most important reason why Cagliostro’s treatments sometimes worked, however, was simply because he was not a doctor. Even by the late eighteenth century, medical theory had not progressed significantly beyond the Galenic suppositions of Ancient Greece, in which disease was considered to be the result of an imbalance of humours. The primary means of treatment for a wide range of conditions was bloodletting, a deleterious procedure that sapped the sufferer and hurried him towards death. Only since the beginning of the twentieth century have doctors healed more than harmed.
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Cagliostro had no formal medical training and lacked the anatomical expertise to tap veins. Any patient was, therefore, more likely to recover if treated by Cagliostro than by the most experienced doctor in Strasbourg.

The energy which Cagliostro expended on tending his impoverished charges suggests he had begun to believe he was truly the saviour of mankind. But his efforts were not entirely altruistic. He was accompanied by an apothecary who was the sole custodian of Cagliostro’s patent cure-all, which his patients were encouraged to buy. When he healed the wife of the Swiss banker Jacques Sarasin, who was dying from an undiagnosed illness that had necrotised her flesh, Sarasin, in gratitude, gave Cagliostro permission to draw on his bank’s funds at will. Cagliostro’s clinic was a very public bid for patronage, and within weeks of arriving in Strasbourg in September 1780, he had attracted the interest of the greatest magnate in Alsace: the cardinal de Rohan.

Rohan invited Cagliostro to Saverne. Cagliostro declined with disdain: ‘If the cardinal is ill, then he should come and I will cure him; if he’s well, he has no need for me,
nor I of him.’ Rohan travelled up to town to have his asthma treated and was instantly convinced on meeting Cagliostro that he was in the presence of the greatest man alive: he saw in him ‘a dignity so imposing that he felt himself penetrated by
religious awe’. After compelling the cardinal to pay court, Cagliostro recognised Rohan as a ‘soul worthy of mine’. Rohan considered the comte ‘his oracle, his guide, his compass’; Saverne and its servants were placed at Cagliostro’s disposal, and Rohan encouraged his research into a panacea that would ‘cure illness and
prolong life’, and experiments which would fatten small diamonds into larger ones. While at the cardinal’s, Cagliostro continued to live like an anchorite, refusing to sleep in a bed – he used a sofa instead – and eating only cheese.

There is a continuity between Rohan’s belief in Jeanne’s stories of her influence with the queen and his reverence of Cagliostro; when you have lived a life of such privilege that practically everything you’ve wished for has been granted, it is easy to slump into trusting those who offer to fulfil your remaining desires – greater wealth, higher office. Rohan’s upper-crust enervation meant he gladly welcomed enthusiasts willing to expend their energy on his behalf. But there were more impersonal cultural forces which sustained his faith.

Many of the idols of superstition may have been smashed during the Enlightenment, but simply positing a materialistic explanation of nature – in which the hand of God was no longer a final explanatory resort – did not bring philosophers any closer to understanding its mechanics. From the detritus of older certainties, scientists were as likely to build blind alleys and false walls as durable monuments of knowledge. In an environment where understanding of the universe was underdeveloped, lacking in evidence and theoretically flawed, many people seized upon scientific language to varnish their gimcrack schemes. Particularly celebrated were those who flexed their mastery over the physical world, usually in theatrical demonstrations, as the evidence to the eye was evidence enough to the scientifically illiterate – the water dowser Barthélemy Bléton and
Léon the Jew, who cured the sick using mirrors, briefly captivated the French public. But one figure exemplifies more than anyone the involution of science with pseudo-science, a man whose fame was as great as Cagliostro –
Franz Anton Mesmer.

Mesmer practised ‘animal magnetism’, a form of healing in which he directed the ‘agent of nature’, an invisible fluid that suffused the universe. The body, he claimed, comprised a number of small magnets, the poles of which could be manipulated to remove any blockages to the fluid’s flow. He treated patients using a number of dramatic techniques that entertained spectators: inducing fits and trances, arranging mirrors to reflect the fluid, and submerging patients in a bath of iron filings and ‘mesmerised’ water, while resting iron bars on crucial organs: the stomach, the liver, the spleen.

In the way it related the health of the human body to the harmony of the heavens, Mesmer drew on Renaissance ideas of the interdependence of macrocosm and microcosm. But the emphasis on the transmission of invisible forces chimed with more recent research: Newton’s discovery of gravity, and Franklin and Galvani’s experiments with electricity. To the interested though scientifically unsophisticated layman, one invisible force seemed just as plausible as another. And not just to laymen – the medical faculty of the University of Paris split over his controversial methods.

The case of Mesmer shows how deeply entangled the reasonable and the fantastic were in the late eighteenth century. It was a period characterised not so much by fixity of knowledge as febrility – a frogspawn of ideas, some of which evolved over subsequent centuries and some of which were buried stillborn. Rohan’s faith in Cagliostro’s dominion over nature was not an aberration. It was as symptomatic of his milieu as Diderot’s atheism or Linnaean taxonomy. In eras of uncertainty, false beliefs can thrive because their challengers are still unproven. Like Jeanne, Cagliostro provided ocular proof for his boasts. Like Othello, Rohan would discover that ocular proof was no proof at all.

Not everyone at Saverne was as smitten with Cagliostro. Georgel was especially disgruntled, since the comte had displaced him as Rohan’s most trusted advisor. ‘I do not know’, he wrote ‘which monster, enemy of the happiness of honest souls, vomited onto our
land an enthusiast empiric, a new apostle of the religion of Nature, who despotically seized his proselytes
and subjugated them.’ And Cagliostro was rapidly accumulating other detractors among the medical profession and sceptical dignitaries.

Though three ministers wrote letters of support to the provincial notables, Cagliostro and Seraphina were forced out of Strasbourg in 1783. They went first to Bordeaux, then Lyons, establishing lodges in each town. On 30 January 1785, two days before Rohan was due to hand over the necklace to the queen, the Cagliostros arrived in Paris. They were greeted as though they had lifted a siege. Any object with a printable surface – fans, buckles, scarves, snuffboxes – was stamped with his portrait. ‘The best of men is
now in Paris,’ said the writer Breffroy de Reigny. Cagliostro took a spacious house in the Marais, set back from the rue St Claude and screened by trees, not far from Rohan’s
hôtel
.

The cardinal dined regularly with the newcomers – Rohan supplied the food, cooked in his own kitchens – and through him Jeanne became acquainted with Cagliostro. They had met briefly, five years earlier, when she had travelled to Saverne in pursuit of the Boulainvilliers. Now they became friends,
‘hand in glove’ according to Beugnot. There is no evidence that Cagliostro suspected Jeanne of wielding a malign power over the cardinal. And though Jeanne may have realised Cagliostro was a charlatan, it was not in her interest to expose him and place Rohan on his guard. She knew that Rohan looked unfavourably on those who did not share his admiration for the comte.

It was difficult to hold a conversation with Cagliostro since he chirruped in a melange of Italian and mangled French, interspersed with declamations in cod Arabic that he refused to translate (one doubter said that ‘he is taken for an oracle because he has the
obscurity of one’). He repeatedly asked if he was understood, while staring ferociously at his interlocutor to ensure that the answer was yes. A typical encounter comprehended discussion of ‘the sky, the stars, the Great Mystery, Memphis, hierophancy, transcendental chemistry, giants, huge animals [and] a city in the middle of Africa ten times
the size of Paris’.

Cagliostro’s presence in Paris provided Rohan with a further
opportunity to serve the queen. Marie Antoinette was in the last stages of pregnancy and, Jeanne told the cardinal, terrified of dying in childbirth. Could she consult the Great Copt so that the queen’s perturbations might be settled? Raising the prospect of the queen’s death was dangerous, since it risked stirring Rohan’s worries about his possible liability for the necklace. But Jeanne may have been planning for the future – at some point it would no longer be possible to maintain the fiction that Marie Antoinette possessed the necklace – and by intimating a profound shift in the queen’s emotional state, she tenderised the cardinal for a potential break.

It is hard to tell how seriously the participants treated the ensuing seance, since their accounts are integrated within accusations and counter-accusations over culpability for the necklace’s disappearance. But it is likely that Cagliostro was more serious and Jeanne less sceptical than they would later claim. Rohan treated the proceedings with the utmost solemnity. Foretelling the future required a virginal child, the younger the better (blue eyes and favourable star signs enhanced the results). Fortuitously, Jeanne’s niece, Marie de La Tour, had been living with the La Mottes since November (though Cagliostro was taken aback when presented with a fifteen-year-old, rather than the five-year-olds he normally worked with – teenagers are much less biddable, and there’s a good chance they’re less virginal than they admit).

In a room in the Hôtel de Rohan, Cagliostro arranged a screen behind which stood a glass vase filled with water, in which spirits would appear. Two smouldering candles in silver candlesticks were arranged on a table covered in a black cloth decorated with Kabbalistic symbols. Vials of lustral water, crucifixes and Egyptian figurines were placed about the candles. Marie was dressed in a silver apron and swaddled with four sashes – blue, green, black and white. From the bottommost hung a silver cross.