The Countess von Rudolstadt

by George Sand

  “Indeed, who is this Count de Saint-Germain?” asked the king, calm as could be. He took a seat and held out his glass so that La Mettrie would replenish his champagne.

  They talked about the Count de Saint-Germain, and the storm was diverted without explosion. The initial impact of the remarks he had overheard—the impertinence of Poelnitz, who had betrayed him, and the audacity of La Mettrie, who had dared tell him so—had transported the king with rage. Yet, while La Mettrie was saying a word or two, Frederick remembered telling Poelnitz, at the first opportunity, to gossip about a certain topic and get the others going. So he repossessed himself with the supreme ease and freedom of mind that he enjoyed to the highest degree. There was no further mention of his nocturnal outing, as if no one had noticed a thing. Had it occurred to him, La Mettrie would have dared return to the charge. Yet his frivolous mind followed Frederick down the new path the king was blazing. In this way Frederick often managed to keep even La Mettrie under control. He treated him like a child ready to smash a mirror or jump out a window, to whom one showed a new toy to distract and divert him from his whim. Everybody had something to say and a good anecdote about the famous Count de Saint-Germain. Poelnitz claimed to have seen him in France twenty years earlier. “And when I saw him this morning,” he added, “he looked as though it had been only yesterday. I remember one evening in France when, hearing mention of the passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, he burst out in the most amusing and incredibly earnest fashion, ‘But I’d told him that he’d wind up being killed by those nasty Jews. I even told him more or less everything that would happen to him, but he wouldn’t listen. His zeal was such that he scorned every danger. That’s why I’ll never get over his tragic death. Just thinking about it brings tears to my eyes.’ At that point the wretched little count began to weep, and he nearly made the rest of us weep, too.”

  “I’m not surprised to hear that about you,” said the king. “After all, you’re such a good Christian.”

  Three or four times already Poelnitz had, within the course of a day, changed religion to apply for various benefices or positions with which the king had led him on, as practical jokes.

  “People tell that story everywhere,” d’Argens said to the baron, “and it’s nothing but a silly yarn. I’ve heard much better ones. To my mind, what makes this Count de Saint-Germain a person of interest and note is the quantity of observations, altogether new and ingenious, with which he explains events that have remained profound enigmas in history. No matter the topic or time period on which he is questioned, everyone finds it amazing, or so I’m told, that he either knows so much or comes up with so many plausible, interesting insights that are apt to shed a new light on the greatest mysteries.”

  “If he says plausible things,” Algarotti remarked, “he must be a man of prodigious learning and extraordinary memory.”

  “Better than that!” said the king. “Scholarship alone cannot explain history. The man must have a powerful mind and profound knowledge of the human heart. Yet it remains to be seen if that fine constitution has been perverted by the desire to play a bizarre role, claiming to enjoy eternal life and the remembrance of things that preceded his life as a human. Or it may be that his brain, after long study and deep meditation, has become deranged and subject to monomania.”

  “I can at least vouch for our man’s good faith and modesty,” said Poelnitz. “It’s not easy to get him to talk about the marvelous things he believes to have witnessed. He knows that people have called him a dreamer and a charlatan, and it’s had quite an effect on him. That’s why he won’t discuss his supernatural power anymore.”

  “So, Sire, aren’t you dying to hear and see the man?” asked La Mettrie. “I certainly am.”

  “Why so eager?” replied the king. “Seeing a madman is anything but jolly.”

  “If he’s mad, right, but what if he isn’t?”

  “Are you listening, gentlemen?” asked the king. “This man, the epitome of unbelief and atheism, is falling for the supernatural and already believes in the eternal life of Saint-Germain! But that shouldn’t come as any surprise, since everybody knows that La Mettrie is terrified of death, thunder, and ghosts.”

  “Fear of ghosts, that’s a weakness, I confess,” said La Mettrie. “As for fear of thunder and everything that is capable of killing us, I maintain that it’s reasonable and wise. What the devil should we be afraid of, I ask you, if not of the very things that jeopardize our lives?”

  “Long live Panurge!” said Voltaire.

  “Back to Saint-Germain,” La Mettrie continued, “Master Pantagruel should invite him to sup with us tomorrow.”

  “Certainly not,” said the king. “You’re crazy enough as it is, my poor fellow. If that man were to set foot in my house, the superstitious minds that here abound would instantly dream up a hundred ludicrous tales, and they’d soon make the rounds of the whole continent of Europe. Oh, reason! my dear Voltaire, may we soon see the reign of reason! That’s the prayer that ought to be on our lips night and morning.”

  “Reason, reason!” spouted La Mettrie. “Reason is fine and good when it helps excuse and justify my passions, vices, or appetites. . . . Call them what you will! But when it becomes a bother, I demand the freedom to throw it out the door! What the hell, I want no part of any reason that forces me to act brave when I’m frightened, put on a stoical face when I’m suffering, look meek when I’m fuming with rage. . . . Enough of it! That’s not my kind of reason! It’s a monster, a chimera dreamed up by those dotty old Greeks and Romans that you all admire, God knows why. May the reign of such reason never come! I don’t like absolute power of any kind, and if somebody tried to force me not to believe in God, whose existence I happily and wholeheartedly reject, I believe that I’d go straight to the confessional, just for the sake of contradiction.”

  “Oh! You’re capable of anything, as we all well know,” said d’Argens, “even believing that Saint-Germain has a philosopher’s stone.”

  “And why not? That would be so nice, and I could really use one!”

  “Ah!” exclaimed Poelnitz, shaking pockets so empty that they refused to jingle while shooting a meaningful glance at the king, “may the reign of the philosopher’s stone come as soon as possible! That’s the prayer that night and morning. . . .”

  “Right,” interrupted Frederick, who always turned a deaf ear to such insinuations. “So this Saint-Germain also believes in the secret of making gold? That you hadn’t mentioned!”

  “Now then, let me invite him, on your behalf, to supper tomorrow night,” said La Mettrie, “for I’m of the opinion that a bit of his secret wouldn’t do you any harm either, Sire Gargantua! Both as king and reformer, you’ve got huge needs and a gigantic stomach.”

  “Pipe down, Panurge,” Frederick replied. “Here’s my verdict on Saint-Germain. He’s an impudent impostor that I plan to put under strict surveillance, for we all know that someone with that fine secret takes more money out of a country than he leaves behind. Now then, gentlemen, have you already forgotten Cagliostro, the great necromancer, whom I wisely expelled from Berlin no more than six months ago?”

  “And who made off with a hundred crowns of mine,” said La Mettrie. “May the devil give him a dose of his own medicine!”

  “And who would have done the same to Poelnitz, if he’d had a hundred crowns,” d’Argens chimed in.

  “You had him expelled,” La Mettrie said to Frederick, “and he played a fine trick on you, no less.”

  “What trick?”

  “Oh! so you don’t know? Well, well, I’ve got a treat of a story for you.”

  “Brevity is the soul of wit,” observed the king.

  “Mine is brief. On the day Your Pantagruelian Majesty ordered the sublime Cagliostro to pack up his alembics, specters, and demons, it is common knowledge that he, in person, in his own carriage, at the stroke of noon, passed through all the city gates at one and the same time. Oh! more than twenty thousand people have attested to the fact.
The guards posted at every gate all saw him, with the same hat, wig, carriage, baggage, horses, and you’ll never rid them of the idea that there were five or six Cagliostros afoot that day.”

  Everyone had a good laugh, except for Frederick. The progress of reason, his dear reason, was something that he took very seriously. Superstition, which inspired Voltaire with such wit and glee, caused him merely scorn and indignation.

  “That’s the common man for you,” he exclaimed, shrugging his shoulders. “Ah! Voltaire, that’s the common man, and while you’re alive and waving your torch with its splendid flame over the world! You’ve been exiled, persecuted, and embattled in every way, and Cagliostro only has to show his face, and everybody falls under his spell! They all but carry him in triumph.”

  “Are you aware,” asked La Mettrie, “that your greatest ladies here at court believe in Cagliostro quite as much as the women in the street? Let me tell you that it was one of the finest beauties at your court who told me that remarkable tale.”

  “Mme von Kleist, I’ll wager!” said the king.

  “It is thou who hast named her!” recited La Mettrie.

  “And now he’s using informal address with the king,” grumbled Quintus Icilius, having returned a few seconds earlier.

  “That Kleist woman is insane,” Frederick continued. “The most intrepid visionary, the most fanatic about horoscopes and spells. . . . She needs a good lesson and had better watch out! She addles the brains of all the ladies, and it’s even said that she drove her husband mad, that he was sacrificing black billy goats to Satan so as to discover hidden treasure beneath our Brandenburg sands.”

  “But such things are the very height of fashion and refinement at your court, my dear old Pantagruel,” said La Mettrie. “Why on earth do you want women to submit to your grumpy goddess of Reason? Women are on this earth to amuse themselves and us, too. By God, when they stop being silly, we men will be real fools! Mme von Kleist is charming with all her tales about sorcerers. She regales Soror Amalia with them. . . .”

  “What does he mean by this Soror Amalia?” asked the king, taken aback.

  “Well, your noble and charming sister, the abbess of Quedlinburg, who, as everyone knows, wholeheartedly believes in magic. . . .”

  “Hush up, Panurge!” thundered the king, beating his snuffbox on the table.

  1. Frederick gave abbeys, canonries, and bishoprics to his favorites, military officers, and Protestant relatives. As Princess Amalia refused to marry, Frederick endowed her with the abbey of Quedlinburg, a royal benefice that provided an income of 100,000 pounds and the title which she bore after the fashion of Catholic canonesses.

  Chapter III

  There was a moment of silence as the bells slowly tolled the midnight hour.1 Ordinarily, when a cloud came over his dear Trajan’s face, Voltaire knew how to get the conversation rolling again and erase the bad feeling washing over the other guests. Yet that particular evening Voltaire, gloomy and out of sorts, was feeling the insidious attack of that Prussian spleen that promptly seized all the happy mortals summoned to contemplate Frederick in his glory. Just that morning La Mettrie had repeated to him Frederick’s lethal quip, which turned the feigned friendship between the two great men into very real aversion.2 So Voltaire kept quiet. “Indeed,” he thought to himself, “let him throw away La Mettrie’s peel when he so desires, let him glower and suffer, and let supper be over. I’m having a bout of colic, and all these compliments won’t stop me from feeling it.”

  So Frederick had to give in and regain his philosophical composure all by himself.

  “Since we’re on the topic of Cagliostro,” he said, “and the hour for ghost stories has just tolled, I’ll tell you mine, and you’ll decide what ought to be believed about sorcerers and their skills. My story is very true, and I learned it from the very person to whom it happened last summer. What happened at the theater tonight brings it back to mind, and perhaps there’s a link between that and the story you’re about to hear.”

  “Will it be a bit scary?” asked La Mettrie.

  “Perhaps!” replied the king.

  “In that case, I’m shutting the door behind me. I can’t stand having a door open when people are talking about ghosts and the supernatural.”

  La Mettrie closed the door, and the king began his tale.

  “Cagliostro, as you all know, had a knack for showing credulous folks blackboards, rather magic mirrors, in which he would make absent individuals come into view. He claimed to be able to catch them unawares at the very moment and to reveal their most secret pursuits and deeds. Jealous wives went to him to learn about the infidelities of their husbands or lovers. There are even some lovers and husbands who have had from him strange revelations about the behavior of certain ladies, and I’ve heard that the magic mirror has betrayed some secret iniquities. One evening, in any case, the Italian singers at the Opera got together and offered him a lovely supper with good music in exchange for seeing a few of his tricks. He agreed and set up an appointment with Porporino, Conciolini, Signora Astrua, and Signora Porporina at his place in order to show them all the heaven or hell that they wished to see. The Barberinis even went along. Signora Giovanna Barberini asked to see the late doge of Venice, and as Cagliostro very properly raises the dead, she saw him, took a terrible fright, and was all in a state when she stepped out of the little dark room where the sorcerer had put her alone together with the ghost. I strongly suspect that the Barberini woman, who likes to poke a bit of fun, as Voltaire says, was pretending to be terrified to make fools of our Italian histrions, who by trade are not very brave and flatly refused to subject themselves to the same ordeal. Signora Porporina, with that sedate look you know, told Cagliostro that she would believe in his skill if he were to show her a person who was in her thoughts just then; there was no need for her to name that person since he, Cagliostro, was a sorcerer and was supposed to read her soul like a book. ‘What you’re asking of me is no trivial matter,’ replied Cagliostro, ‘and yet I believe that I can satisfy you as long as you swear by all that is most solemn and most terrible not to say a single word to the person that I’ll show you, nor to make the slightest motion, gesture, or noise during the apparition.’ Porporina pledged her word and very determinedly entered the little dark room. It is useful to remind you, gentlemen, that this young person has one of the most rigorous, soundest minds you can encounter; she is educated, reasons well about all matters, and I have cause to believe that she is impervious to any false and narrow ideas. She stayed in the viewing room long enough to amaze and worry her colleagues. Yet no one made a sound. When she came out, her face was exceedingly pale and, it is said, covered with tears. Yet she immediately said to them, ‘Friends, if Cagliostro is a sorcerer, he’s a sorcerer who lies; don’t believe a single thing he shows you.’ She refused to explain herself further. But after Conciolini, at one of my concerts a few days later, told me about that supernatural evening, I vowed to question Porporina and did just that the first time she came to sing at Sans-Souci. It wasn’t easy to get her to talk.

  “Here’s what she finally told me: ‘Without a doubt, Cagliostro has an extraordinary ability to create apparitions that are so like reality that even the coolest heads cannot fail to be moved. Yet he is no sorcerer, and he claimed to read my mind only because he surely knew a few particulars about my life. But his knowledge was incomplete, and I would not advise you, Sire (this is still Porporina talking, observed the king) to hire him as your minister of police, for he would make serious blunders. So, when I asked him to show me the absent person that I desired to see, I had in mind Professor Porpora, my music teacher, who is now in Vienna; and instead of him I saw appear in the magic room a very dear friend whom I lost this year.’ ”

  “Good heavens!” d’Argens blurted out. “That’s far trickier than producing a live one!”

  “Wait, gentlemen,” continued the king. “Cagliostro, ill-informed, had no idea that the person he had shown was dead; for, when the ghost had dis
appeared, he asked Signora Porporina if she was satisfied by what she had just seen. ‘First of all, sir,’ she said, ‘I would like to understand what that was. Kindly explain it to me.’ ‘That is beyond my power,’ he replied. ‘Be content with knowing that your friend is calm and making himself useful.’ Hearing that, she said, ‘Alas, sir, you’ve unwittingly done me great harm. You’ve shown me a person that I never dreamed of seeing again, and now you claim that he is alive, whereas I closed his eyes six months ago!’ That, gentlemen,” Frederick continued, “shows you how sorcerers delude themselves while attempting to delude others, and how their schemes are foiled by something their secret police missed. Up to a certain point they penetrate the mysteries of families and intimate feelings. Given that all the stories in this world are more or less alike, and that those with an inclination for the supernatural don’t generally take a close look at things, these sorcerers guess right twenty times out of thirty, but a third of the time they miss the mark. No one pays any attention to that, whereas everybody makes a great fuss when they get it right. It’s absolutely the same thing with horoscopes and their predictions of a humdrum series of events that must of course happen to everybody, such as voyages, illnesses, the loss of a friend or relative, an inheritance, a meeting, an interesting letter, and other commonplaces of human life. Yet just imagine the catastrophes and domestic woes to which the false revelations of a Cagliostro expose weak, impassioned minds! A husband who takes his word for it and kills his innocent wife, a mother who goes mad with grief because she thinks that she has seen her absent son die, and a thousand other disasters caused by this purported divinatory skill of magicians! It’s all infamous, and you must agree that I was right to expel from my realm this Cagliostro with all his great guesses and wonderful news about people dead and buried.”