by Antal Szerb
“Monseigneur, down on thy knees,” Carlyle shouts at this point to Rohan, from the distance of half-a-century. “Never can red breeches be better wasted.” Rohan knelt.
Then a shadow loomed.
“Quick, quick, you must be off!” it hissed, with theatrical huskiness. “Madame and the Comtesse d’Artois are coming.”
La Motte stepped into the bower and plucked the Queen away, while Jeanne took the Cardinal by the arm and led him off. Rohan pulled his hat even further down over his eyes. A sweet delirium filled his soul. It did not occur to him to wonder what the King’s sister and sister-in-law might be doing in the darkness of the park.
We can inform our gentle readers that the husky theatrical tones were those of Réteaux de Villette, Jeanne’s confidant (no doubt in the fullest sense of the word) and the one who had written the Queen’s letters, at her dictation, in his exquisite, feminine hand. Later he admitted that there had been an element of inclination—seductiveness—in the letters, but he then withdrew the remark and would only concede that the their tone had been agréable.
But who was ‘the Queen’?
La Motte would often stroll in the garden of the Palais Royal, the residence of the Duc d’Orléans. It was during this period that the building attained the form and outline we see today, but while it was being built the garden remained open to the public. It was here that all sorts of lesser nobility, people like La Motte himself, would take the air—cardsharpers, rumour-mongers, gigolos, the whole aristocratic underworld, whose prince was the palace’s owner, Philippe-Égalité. Of course they were not the only people moving about. “There is nowhere like it in the round world,” writes Mercier. “You can visit London, Amsterdam, Madrid and Vienna, and see nothing that resembles it. A prisoner could live there and never get bored: it would be years before he even thought about freedom. They call it the capital of Paris. Here you can find everything: a young man of twenty with an income of 50,000 livres might enter this fairy garden and never be able to leave.”
Here, under the trees, came all those children of the age whose passion was for free and open talk about the deepest questions of the time—religion, politics, the future of the monarchy, and the great changes impending. This is where public opinion was born. This is where the Revolution was born.
All Europe has at some time or another had much to thank the Palais Royal for. You too, gentle reader, will at some point take a stroll there, or we hope you will. When you do, take a good look at the statue of Camille Desmoulins. He seems to have leapt up into his chair just this instant; his huge head of hair flies in the wind, like the hair of a madman. The very air around him trembles with the excitement of youth—the youth of all mankind.
The Palais Royal was in effect a coffee house. People sat, either beneath the arcades or outside, in the kiosks dotted about the garden, sipping those cunning potions you can still buy in St Mark’s Square in Venice, which they so closely resembled. Inside was the Exchange, where the life of commerce pulsed and raged before it was given a palatial building of its own. In the eighteenth century the speculator was still part of a colourful democracy, rubbing shoulders with the gigolo, the oral reporter (that is, gossip columnist) and the streetwalker. It was all very Bohemian, not yet lent a corpulent dignity by wealth. And there were foreigners here too. Foreigners usually end up in the Bohemian district, as a consequence of their own lack of social position. (The English were making trips to Paris for a bit of immorality even then.) In August 1785 five theatres were playing in the Palais Royal: the Ombres Chinoises, the Pygmées Françaises, the Vrais Fantoccini Italiens, Les Variétés Amusantes and Mme de Beaujolais’s Petits Comédiens.
Beneath the arcades stood a cheerful assembly of jewellers’ shops and boutiques selling women’s things, in front of which paraded les filles, as the French euphemistically termed those young ladies whose careers guaranteed that filles—maidens—was the one thing they were not. At the time of our story the Palais Royal was the most famous place not just in Paris but in the whole world, for such maidenly gatherings.
Among the regulars was a young woman called Marie-Nicole Leguay. By day she was a worker in one of the fashion shops where Jeanne had begun her career. In her free time she walked the Palais Royal, and it was there that La Motte first came across her.
He must have been instantly struck by her single interesting feature—her remarkable resemblance to Marie-Antoinette. On this every contemporary source agrees. The portrait still in Funck-Brentano’s collection reveals the same round, listless face, the slightly protruding lower lip, the soft features, the tall, fine head of hair. La Motte stood before her as before the Angel of the Lord.
He instantly propositioned her.
Next, he accompanied her to her home, where what passed between them took the same course as it would between many thousands of similar acquaintances made at the Palais Royal that evening. But at first La Motte preserved a deep silence about his real intentions. Some time later he invited the girl back to his house, where the Comtesse received her with a conspicuous display of friendliness. Soon, she even gave her a more suitable name so that she could deal on equal terms in the fashionable quarter. She became the Baronne d’Oliva—the letters deriving from ‘Valois’, further evidence of Jeanne’s strange obsession.
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 Plan
ta. 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.
Many of Cagliostro’s teachings were attempts to discover this cure, but none was ever brought to a conclusion, so we still do not know to this day whether he ever achieved the promised result.
Perhaps he had been taught how to make the elixir of eternal life by that most enigmatic figure of the whole eighteenth century, the Comte de St Germain. Legends of St Germain abound, but there are few reliable facts. He was a real historic personage who for a while enjoyed the confidence of Louis XV. The legends’ chief claim is that he was several thousand years old, that he was alive at the time of Christ, and knew the Redeemer personally. On one occasion, in the presence of an acquaintance, he said to his manservant:
“Do you remember, old chap, when we were walking with St Peter beside Lake Genazareth? …”
“Your mind is beginning to wander, sir,” the man replied. “You forget that I have only been in your service these last five hundred years.”
St Germain was an altogether more elegant kind of magician than Cagliostro. By the latter’s time, the end of the century, the whole business had been to some extent democratised. Among the real magi Cagliostro was a Figaro, an impudent barber and footman.
But as far as it is possible to judge from the high-flown metaphysical texts quoted by Haven, and the mass of gossip that has been passed down, there must have been at least some genuine occultism in the Egyptian rite, some communication with the spirit world. It was Swedenborg who, as we have remarked, made that connection so easy and familiar for people of the time. The literary critic Leigh Hunt records of the great English poet and artist William Blake, who was one of Swedenborg’s followers, that once, as they strolled beside the Thames, Blake suddenly raised his hat. Leigh Hunt looked around, but saw no one there for Blake to greet.
“Who was that?” he asked, in some alarm.
“No one, just St Paul flying past,” Blake replied.
Cagliostro had the same easy and natural relationship with spirits. He would invite them to dinner, lay places for them at the table, and tell his living guests which of the illustrious dead they had the good fortune to be dining with. Sometimes he used mediums, a young boy or an innocent girl (he called these his ‘doves’), but his followers had mostly to take his word for it that they were in the presence of the Seven Great Spirits around the Deity’s throne: Anael, Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, Uriel, Zobiachel and Anachiel. These last played a central role. The medium would see them in a pitcher filled with water, together, naturally, with candles and the three magical names: Helios, Mene and Tetragammon.
But most miraculous of all was the sheer number of Cagliostro’s adherents, and the depth of their belief. Haven quotes the letter of thanks written to Cagliostro by the members of the Wisdom Triumphant lodge:
Sire and Master,
Nothing can match the goodness of your deeds unless it be the happiness they bring us … if you will deign to take us under your wing and bestow on us your continuing protection, your sons will be always grateful, being ever inspired by the proclamation which you in your lofty eminence established among us through the
‘dove’ who implored you on his own behalf and ours: ‘Tell them that I love them, and always will’. We promise, each and everyone, our eternal gratitude, respect and love to you, and crave your blessing to crown the pledge of your obedient, respectful sons and disciples.
Cagliostro achieved this enormous power through his oratory. People would listen enchanted, and believe everything he said. It is a commonplace that the power of a great orator depends not on what he says but on the way he says it. So what was the secret of Cagliostro’s performances?
Jeanne’s admirer Beugnot once dined at her house when Cagliostro was present, and recorded his impressions in the following words:
“He spoke double Dutch (baragouin)—half-French, half-Italian, peppered with words supposedly from Arabic, which he did not bother to translate. He was the only one who spoke, and he managed to touch on twenty different topics in the time. Every few seconds he would ask if we understood what he was saying, and we all nodded. Once he had warmed to a particular subject, he would go into a sort of trance, talking loudly and finishing with large gestures. Then he would suddenly come down from his soapbox and murmur tender compliments and amusing endearments to the lady of the house, calling her his little fawn, his gazelle, his swan and his dove, in short, endowing her with all the softest names of the animal kingdom. And so it went on for the entire meal. I didn’t understand very much, only that he talked about heaven, the stars, the Great Arcanum, Memphis, the hierophants, transcendental chemistry, giants, enormous beasts, a city in Central Africa ten times the size of Paris, and how he had regular correspondents based there—and of course the great ignorance in which we found ourselves in so far as all those fine marvels were concerned, which were known to him without recourse to books.”