rope around her neck, in front of the Conciergerie, and to be publicly whipped and branded by the hangman with the letter V (Voleuse-thief) on each shoulder. She was further sentenced to life imprisonment in the prison for abandoned women. She escaped from the latter place, however, to London, where she was killed on the 23d day of August, 1791, by a fall from a window. The Count de la Motte was sentenced in contumacium. He was safe in London at the time and had disposed of the diamonds to various dealers. The d'Oliva was set free without punishment. The man who forged the letter for Madame de la Motte, her secretary Vil

discharged.

Countess Cagliostro was honorably

The Cardinal was unquestionably innocent, as was fully established at the trial. His overweening ambition and his mad love for Marie Antoinette had rendered him an easy dupe to the machinations of the De la Mottes. But how was it with Cagliostro? The essayist Greeven, in an article published a few years ago in the Calcutta Review, seems to think that the alchemist was more or less mixed up in the swindle. He sums up the suspicions as follows: "First, his [Cagliostro's] immense influence over the Cardinal, and his intimate relations with him, render it impossible that

so gigantic a fraud could have been practiced without his knowledge. Second, he was in league with the Countess for the purpose of deceiving the Cardinal, in connection with the Queen." M. Frantz Funck-Brentano, in his admirable history of the Diamond Necklace, based upon documents recently discovered in Paris [page 283, Edwards's translation, Philadelphia, 1901]: "The idea of implicating Cagliostro in the intrigue had been conceived, as Georgel says, with diabolical cunning. If Jeanne de Valois had in the first instance made a direct accusation against Cardinal de Rohan, no one would have believed in it. But there was something mysterious and suspicious about Cagliostro, and it was known what influence he exercised on the mind of the Cardinal. The alchemist,' she suggested, 'took the necklace to pieces in order to increase by means of it the occult treasures of an unheard-of fortune.' 'To conceal his theft,' says Doillot [Madame de la Motte's lawyer], ‘he ordered M. de Rohan, in virtue of the influence he had established over him, to sell some of the diamonds and to get a few of them mounted at Paris through the Countess de la Motte, and to get more considerable quantities mounted and sold in England by her husband.'....Cagliostro had one unanswerable argument: the Cardinal had made his agreement with the jewelers on the 29th of January, 1785, and he, Cagliostro, had only arrived in Paris at nine in the evening of the 30th."

He

Cagliostro refuted the charges with wonderful sang froid. appeared in court "proud and triumphant in his coat of green silk embroidered with gold." "Who are you? and whence do you come?" asked the attorney for the crown.

"I am an illustrious traveller," he answered bombastically. Every one present laughed.

Cagliostro drove in triumph from the court house to his residence, after hearing his order of discharge. His coach was preceded by "a fantastic cripple, who distributed medicines and presents among the crowd." He found the Rue St. Claude thronged with friends and sympathisers, anxious to welcome him home. At this period revolutionary sentiments were openly vented by the people of France. The throne was being undermined by the phi

losophers and politicians. Any excuse was made to revile Louis XVI. and his queen. Scurrilous pamphlets were published declaring that Marie Antoinette was equally guilty with the de la Mottes in the necklace swindle. Cagliostro consequently was regarded as a martyr to the liberties of man. His arrest under the detested lettre-de-cachet, upon mere suspicion, and long incarceration in the Bastille without trial, were indeed flagrant abuses of justice and gave his sympathisers a whip with which to lash the King and Court.

The day after

His wife had been liberated some time before him. She met him at the door of the temple of magic, and he swooned in her arms. Whether this was a genuine swoon or not, it is impossible to say, for Cagliostro was ever a poseur and never neglected an opportunity for theatrical effect and self-advertisement. He accused the Marquis de Launay, Governor of the Bastille-he who had his head chopped off and elevated upon a pike a few years later-of criminal misappropriation of his effects, money, medicines, alchemical powders, elixirs, etc., etc., which he valued at a high sum. The Commissioner of Police who arrested him was also included in this accusation. He appealed to his judges, who referred him to the Civil Courts. But the case never came to trial. his acquittal he was banished from France by order of the King. At St. Denis, "his carriage drove between two dense and silent lines of well-wishers, while, as his vessel cleared from the port of Boulogne, five thousand persons knelt down on the shore to receive his blessing." He went direct to London. No sooner there, than he filed his suit against the Marquis de Launay, "appealing, of course, to the hearts of all Frenchmen as a lonely and hunted exile." The French Government, through its ambassador, granted him leave to come in person to Paris to prosecute his suit, assuring him of safe conduct and immunity from all prosecution, legal as well as social. But Cagliostro refused this offer, hinting that it was merely a stratagem to decoy him to Paris and reincarcerate him in a dungeon. No clear-headed, impartial person believed that the Marquis de Launay was guilty of the charge laid at his door. Whatever else he may have been, tyrannical, cold, unsympathetic, the

Governor of the Bastille was a man of honor and above committing a theft. In fact, Cagliostro's accusation was a trumped-up affair, designed to annoy and keep open "a running sore in the side of the French authorities." Notoriety is the life of charlatanry. Cagliostro was no common quack, as his history shows. He next published a pamphlet, dated June 20th, 1786, prophesying that the Bastille would be demolished and converted into a public promenade; and, that a ruler should arise in France, who should abolish lettres de cachet and convoke the Estates-General. In a few years the prediction was fulfilled. Poor De Launay lost his life, whereupon Cagliostro issued a pamphlet exulting over the butchery of his enemy. In London, Cagliostro became the bosom friend of the eccentric Lord George Gordon. Eventually he became deeply involved in debt, and was obliged to pawn his effects. He was unable to impress the common-sense, practical English with his pretentions to animal magnetism, transcendental medicine, and occultism. One of his vaunted schemes was to light up the streets of London with sea water, which by his magic power he proposed to change into oil. The newspapers ridiculed him, especially the Courier de l'Europe, published and edited by M. Morande, who had "picked up some ugly facts about the swindler's early career." The freemasons repudiated him with scorn, and would have nothing to do with his Egyptian Rite. There is a rare old print, a copy of which may be seen in the Scottish Rite Library, Washington, D. C., which depicts the unmasking of the famous imposter at the Lodge of Antiquity, published Nov. 21, 1786, at London. It was engraved by an eye-witness of the scene. French gentlemen, Cagliostro visited the the banquet which followed the working of the degree, a certain worthy brother named Mash, an optician, was called upon to sing. Instead of a post-prandial ditty, he gave a clever imitation of a quack doctor selling nostrums, and dilating bombastically upon the virtues of his elixirs, balsams (Balsamos), and cordials. Cagliostro was not slow in perceiving that he was the target for Brother Mash's shafts of ridicule. His "front of brass," as Carlyle has it, was beaten in, his pachyderm was penetrated by the barbed arrows

In company with some Lodge one evening. At

of the ingenious optician's wit. He left the hall in high dudgeon, followed by the jeers of the assembled masons. Alas, for the Grand Kophta, no "vaults of steel," no masonic honors for him in London.

The verse appended to the engraving of Cagliostro and the English lodge is as follows:

"Born, God knows where, supported, God knows how,

From whom descended, difficult to know.

Lord Crop adopts him as a bosom friend,

And manly dares his character defend.

CAGLIOSTRO UNMASKED AT THE LODGE OF ANTIQUITY, LONDON.

From a rare print in the possession of the Supreme Council, A. A. S. R., Washington, D. C.