The Queen's Necklace

by Antal Szerb

  But the real attraction of Freemasonry in this period lay in its secrecy. Members were bound to that absolutely. Most of the time those secrets, involving special symbols, practices and so forth, would have had no significance whatsoever: mystique was practised for its own sake. Of course, people have always loved secrets—they still do. But in eighteenth-century France, when life was lived in permanent public view, when non-stop gossip ensured that everyone knew everyone else’s business and the whole country was one great, malicious family, privacy held an especially powerful attraction. The favoured Court style, rococo, with its exquisite, tiny interiors, was an art of intimacy; and the rest of the nation also lived in confined spaces. The idea of a shut door was unknown. In such an age, the concept of a closed and secret meeting fulfilled an important spiritual need.

  Everyone—especially the very young and the adolescent—adores a secret. Youth is a time of secret writing, secret languages, secret symbols daubed on walls. Some secrets are to be shared only between boys, never with women, not even mothers (especially, Freudians would say, not with mothers). Within young male groups, by some atavistic process, some ancient primitive impulse rises out of the deep layer that Jung calls the collective unconscious, a race-memory of the male-bonding and male-only societies of primitive peoples. In ancient times, and even today in rural parts of Africa and New Guinea, pubescent youths are initiated into manhood in harsh tests involving cruel rites. Thereafter they become independent of their families and live with other youths in all-male compounds, where women are admitted only on very special occasions. The juveniles form a separate little social group in defiant opposition to the adults, and leave these closed communities only to establish families of their own. It is from these all-male societies that the great negro outlaw gangs are formed, such as the Leopard People of Liberia, who hold entire countries in terror.

  The higher civilisations were founded on the family unit, thus abolishing these exclusive pre-adult and adult male-only societies. But they could not root out the innate tendency which still sometimes surfaces, the eternal impulse of the man to turn his back on women and the family, return to his boyhood-self and join some all-male group in a great, daring, heroic and pointless adventure. The same primal impulse gave rise to the knightly orders, whose initiation ceremonies are a vestige of the old puberty rites. And initiation was the central feature of the Freemasons’ ceremonies too, because the movement was, at base, another such all-male society, much tamed, of course, and gentrified. This, after the element of secrecy, must have been its second most important attraction.

  The secretiveness of the Freemasons tempted certain individuals to set up imitation lodges for the sort of people who wanted to be part of a secret society but were deterred by their own frivolous natures from the more serious, or morally daunting, purposes of the real ones. Thus we find the Mopsli Order (in Austria) whose initiation rites required the new member to kiss a dog of that breed, not on the mouth but at the opposite end. However, when the intrepid candidate bent over to approach his task, a pleasant surprise awaited him: the dog was made of silk and velvet. In the Tappo Order in Italy (the name means ‘cork’ or ‘plug’) would-be knights and ladies were required to kiss the Grand Master in a similar place, only to discover that it wasn’t actually the Grand Master, etc etc. Members of the French Ordre de la Félicité would set out on a journey to the Blessed Isles carrying Freemason-style emblems. For these fellowships, as with the Fendeurs Charbonniers and the Nymphes de la Rose, the purposes were purely erotic, involving secret orgies … if indeed these societies did exist, and were not simply an invention of the gossiping tendency of the age.

  Goethe, as we have already mentioned, was so fascinated by the case of the Queen’s necklace that he wrote a play about it, Der Gross-Kophta. In it he writes: “Der Menschen lieben die Dämmerung mehr als den hellen Tag, und eben in der Dämmerung erscheinen die Gespenster”—Men prefer twilight to the full glare of day, and it is in the twilight that the ghosts show themselves. In the mysterious darkness that the lodges exploited to satisfy people’s eternal longing for secrets, the ghosts were not slow to appear. Eighteenth-century Freemasonry became the home of occultism. For more mystical souls, the secrets that existed merely for their own sake, the noble aspirations and symbols, were not enough. They held meetings separately from the lodges to seek out the real mysteries, those of nature itself, and the supernatural. In other words, to pursue alchemy and spiritualism.

  Thus eighteenth-century Freemasonry became associated with Satanism, black magic and even the conjuration of devils. The Grand Master, Philippe-Égalité himself, personally believed in the black arts and, if we can trust the retrospective memoirs of the Marquise de Créquy, even invoked Satan, who appeared in the form of a naked man, very pale, with black eyes and a scar across his left temple (apparently the result of a lightning strike), pronounced the ominous words: “Victoire et malheur! Victoire et malheur!”—Victory and disaster!—and vanished into thin air.

  The various strands of eighteenth-century occultism all converge in the person of the great seer Emanuel Swedenborg. It was he who gave form and direction to the mystical aspirations of the time, and his considerable influence is with us still. There are sects in America today whose beliefs derive from his teachings.

  Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a natural scientist and engineer in his younger days, who went on to become an important person in his native Sweden, was ennobled, and was elected to membership of most of the learned societies in Europe. In 1745, he was dining in a private room in his favourite restaurant in London. When he finished, a kind of fog filled the room and hideous creatures appeared, writhing on the floor. The fog dispersed, and in a corner of the room he saw a man bathed in light. The man commanded him, in ringing tones: “Do not eat so much!” and vanished. Swedenborg went home, but the man reappeared the next day, dressed in purple, and informed him that he was God.

  From that point onwards, Swedenborg was a prophet. He gave up all his official positions in order to live for and by his revelations. In his books he writes (at incredible length) about his supernatural experiences as dictated to him by spirits.

  What most surprises the modern reader about his visions is the easy, natural, phlegmatic way he moves among scenes of the other world. As he records the location of the heavenly cities, the variety of their citizens and their manner of living, and explains their various theological preoccupations and other related questions, we almost feel as if we are reading a Baedeker. According to his writings, he had travelled much where few mortals had gone before, and on these journeys had made the acquaintance of a great many angels and devils, together with spirits belonging to an intermediate group who “live between heaven and hell”. These and many other things he discussed with Martin Luther. Luther, having arrived in the other world, moved first into much the same sort of house as he had occupied back home in Eisleben, and here he would sit on a throne and declaim his sermons. But in 1757, when his period of transformation in the spirit world had been completed, the house was taken from him, and shortly afterwards, under the influence of Swedenborg and others, he renounced those of his ideas that differed from those of the author. Swedenborg also met the philosopher Melanchton, who spent long periods at his heavenly desk writing, just as he had on earth, that good works did not matter, only faith. But when the new heaven was built, in 1757, he too corrected his original ideas. He now resides in the south-eastern region of heaven, and when he goes for a stroll his footsteps produce the clang of someone treading in iron shoes across a stone pavement.

  Swedenborg also discovered that in the other world the Dutch generally did rather well. They ran flourishing businesses that were highly profitable because they were working for the sake of it and not for money. They could be easily identified by the affluence displayed by the way they lived. The Jews, on the other hand, did the dirty jobs, huddled amid stench and squalor; otherwise their main occupation was buying and selling precious stones, and a few
of them became extremely rich. From time to time robed angels dressed as Christian converts would seek them out to try and win their souls, but with little success. The English, given their love of independence, of the instinctual life, and of freedom of thought, did relatively well up there. The Germans did much worse, since they “live in separate little states under local despots and, unlike the English and Dutch, enjoy no freedom of speech, spoken or written—and where those freedoms are shackled, so too is thought”.

  Incidentally, the other world has none of the eternal, impassable borders of Dante’s vision. According to Swedenborg, it is simply a state of mind: people are sent to hell or raised up to heaven not by God but by their own mentality, and when they change their spiritual condition they are moved from one place to another accordingly. So how could it be that the denizens of hell, on discovering that their beliefs have been misguided, and that they have been sent there because of their spiritual state, do not instantly change their ways and thus claim their ticket to eternal salvation? The answer, according to Swedenborg, is that hell is not especially unpleasant. Everyone there is comfortable in his or her own way: the inhabitants rather like the revolting smell and feel thoroughly at home. They do occasionally visit heaven, but find it all rather alarming and disconcertingly unfamiliar, and cannot wait to get back to the comforts of the Other Place.

  In all this deep philosophising it is the matter-of-factness and surprisingly narrow range of his theological interests that make Swedenborg the belated child of earlier centuries. He has been the subject of some remarkable comparisons, for example with the sort of man whose desires fail to keep pace with the growth in his understanding, like the lecher who hides a whore in his cellar, goes upstairs and has a perfectly sensible conversation with his wife and guests on the subject of virginity, then returns downstairs to give free rein to his passions. But despite these comparisons, Swedenborg’s style is in the end somewhat arid and coldly rationalistic. In a strange way what he says rings true, but he lacks a soaring imagination. It could be that he was a great visionary, but a poor poet. He was certainly not Dante. Perhaps he did genuinely see the other world with the eye of the soul, but his vision is much less compelling than that of the great Florentine, who found himself lost ‘at the mid-point of our life’s journey’ in imagination only.

  And perhaps that is the secret of his power. Swedenborg is the petty-bourgeois of the supernatural. He stands in the same relation to Dante as the ‘blood brotherhood’ of the Freemasons does to the Leopard People of West Africa. It would have been no use talking to him about such grandiose matters as the Rose of Heaven or the Worm at the Heart of the World. For him the whole business is really quite simple if approached in a common-sense way. Such is his manner whenever he talks about souls. His souls—this point he cannot stress sufficiently—are no different from the living. They possess everything that humans do; they eat and drink, and live married lives. It is just that they do all this on a spiritual plane, though their spirit status should not be overemphasised. Souls are still human. The secret of Swedenborg’s power is that he reduces the spirit world to an everyday level, thus popularising it. Not everyone can pick his or her way through the grim tercets of Dante’s vision: not everyone can breathe the alarming air of the world of magic. But with the aid of Swedenborg’s guide to the other world we can journey in confidence through the mysteries of heaven and hell, as on a trip to the heavenly Jerusalem organised by Thomas Cook. And of course Swedenborg is the seer whom Cagliostro put to such brilliant use as fodder for his ignorant and simple-minded followers. For his purposes, the great mystics would have been of no use at all. Not one word of the teachings of Jalaluddin Rumi or Meister Eckhart would have been comprehensible either to him or to his disciples.

  But we have not dwelt on Swedenborg at such length simply because it was from him that Cagliostro took everything that is intelligible in his theories, as he expounded them; rather it is because we feel that it is precisely through them that we come closest to the essence of the age, to the prevailing mentality and mood that both make it comprehensible and reveal the necklace trial as its most characteristic, dramatic and indeed symbolic event.

  The second half of the eighteenth century is described in literary histories as the pre-romantic age. That is to say, it is the period that saw the birth and flowering of the ideas and general sensibility that came to dominate the first half of the following century, the romantic age proper. At this point these developments stood in relation to full-blown romanticism as the child does to the young adult and mature man. The people of the late eighteenth century found themselves living in an old civilisation, one that was approaching its end, a social order that was over-ripe in significant ways, but one whose notions of the world were naive and somewhat childlike. Childlike, and idyllic. No other generation lived at such a distance from tragedy. Beneath their powdered elegance, the earlier decades, those of Louis XV and the rococo, harboured a genuine sense of the tragedy of life, but with the accession of Louis XVI all that seemed to have melted away. People felt that they were standing on the threshold of a new golden age. The leading thinkers of the entire period all stood for optimism. Under Louis XV that optimism had remained a mere triumph of philosophy. Now it became a sense of life. The pre-romantics lived in expectation of some sort of miracle—a miracle that would make everything beautiful and happy, while leaving everything exactly as it had always been.

  The people of the pre-romantic age were every bit as rational as those of the baroque and rococo, but—and this is what was new—they also believed in miracles. Or at least, they wanted to. The literature of the time certainly reveals this need for an element of the miraculous. Milton came into fashion, as did the ghost story (though Voltaire naturally would only allow his ghosts onstage in broad daylight), and the mystical, occult and other such movements of the time are evidence that it was not only writers who yearned for that element of the miraculous, but, as it were, life itself.

  But this habit of living in the expectation of a miracle is also a widespread attribute of humanity in general; it is a feature of history to which no one age can lay exclusive claim. The early church lived in permanent expectation of miracles, which duly happened. In the year 1000 the whole of humanity waited in quivering excitement for the greatest miracle of all, the end of the world, which didn’t. This mentality is never itself the symptom of an age—what signifies is the nature of the expected miracle. The pre-romantics were looking for a pre-romantic one: gentle, idyllic, optimistic and perfectly simple. Which is why Swedenborg is its prophet—Swedenborg who dined in restaurants while the vision waited on him; Swedenborg, who knew in 1757, beyond the flicker of a doubt, that the last judgment was at hand, the new heaven would be built and a new world order come into being—though nothing of course would change, and everyone could carry on with his daily business (if a bourgeois) or simply enjoy the benefits (if an aristocrat).

  Each of the actors in our story was waiting for that sort of miracle: Boehmer, that his wonderful bauble would, by some miraculous means, come to encircle some suitably miraculous imperial neck, and that the owner of that neck would pay him 1,600,000 livres with miraculous promptitude. Jeanne de la Motte looked for a miracle to restore her to her ancestral Valois status, and the longer she waited, the less it was likely to happen. Rohan waited for a miracle that would secure the Queen’s favour (and indeed favours), and the length of that wait kept him moping about in his fantastical rooms at Saverne. For Cagliostro, who was to enjoy the profits of everyone else’s hopes, miracles were his bread and butter. Marie-Antoinette meanwhile drifted from pleasure to pleasure while she waited for the true womanly miracle that would make all pleasure-seeking superfluous, and Louis XVI longed for a miracle-working finance minister who would make the deficit disappear, without the need to grind even more revenue out of the people, or curtail his household expenditure.

  And the whole of France was waiting for the greatest miracle of all, the happiness of the people. Th
ey knew that a new age was at hand; they earnestly believed that the planned reforms would soon come to fruition. They rather imagined that some celestial monarch, surrounded by his courtiers, would descend between stage clouds while the angels Gluck and Grétry sounded an entrance on their silver-tongued trumpets; the King would raise his sceptre, and everyone in France would be happy. Not in their most fevered dreams did they imagine that, far from descending from above, the new age would burst forth from the underworld, from the Quartier St Antoine, with a Frisian cap on its head. The Lord punished his people’s blindness by granting them their wish. A few more years, and the miracle would indeed happen.

  After this premonition of tragedy, let us return to the man who represents the burlesque element in our story, the alchemist’s Figaro.

  In London, Cagliostro not only penetrated the secrets of the Freemasons, he also became involved in a highly complicated lawsuit which turned on a necklace—a foretaste of greater things to come. His defence was that his accusers, from whom he had swindled the necklace, had harassed him, constantly forcing presents on him to get him to name his price for allowing himself to be drawn into the whole shady business. But we must pass quickly over our friend’s picaresque adventures, however much they reflect the style of the period (the eighteenth century was the heyday of such adventurers and their escapades), apart from noting that he bamboozled his way with great success across the states of Eastern Europe, via The Hague, Leipzig, Mittau (the capital of the then independent Duchy of Courland), St Petersburg and Warsaw. Anyone who had known Cagliostro and his wife a few years earlier, as pilgrims in Spain or as a starveling couple haunting the inner-city districts of Paris and London, would not have recognised the mysterious Count and Countess they had become.