Magic, Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography. Albert A. Hopkins
in gorgeous liveries. Balsamo changed his name to the high-sounding title of the Comte de Cagliostro, and scattered money right and left. “At Strasbourg,” says one of his biographers, “he reaped an abundant harvest by professing the art of making old people young; in which pretension he was seconded by his wife, Lorenza Feliciani, who, though only twenty years of age, declared that she was sixty and that she had a son a veteran in the Dutch service.” Cagliostro also pretended to be of a great age, and solemnly declared that he had hobnobbed with Alexander and Julius Cæsar; that he was present at the burning of Rome under Nero and was an eye-witness of the crucifixion of Christ. Cardinal de Rohan, of France, who became a firm believer in the pretensions of the charlatan, entertained him in Paris, introducing him to that gay world of the Old Régime which went out forever with the French Revolution. This was in 1785. All Paris went wild over the enchanter, and thronged to his magical soirées at his residence in the Rue St. Claude. Cagliostro coined money in the French capital with his spurious Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry, which promised to its votaries the length of life of the Noachites, and superhuman power over nature and her laws. Imbert Saint-Amand, the interesting author of “Marie Antoinette and the End of the Old Régime,” says (Scribner Edition): “The mania for the supernatural, the rage for the marvelous, prevailed in the last years of the eighteenth century, which had wantonly derided every sacred thing. Never were the Rosicrucians, the adepts, sorcerers, and prophets so numerous and so respected. Serious and educated men, magistrates, courtiers, declared themselves eye-witnesses of alleged miracles. … When Cagliostro came to France, he found the ground prepared for his magical operations. A society eager for distractions and emotions, indulged to every form of extravagance, necessarily welcomed such a man and hailed him as its guide. Whence did he come? What was his country, his age, his origin? Where did he get those extraordinary diamonds which adorned his dress, the gold which he squandered so freely? It was all a mystery. … So far as was known, Cagliostro had no resources, no letter of credit, and yet he lived in luxury. He treated and cured the poor without pay, and not satisfied with restoring them to health, he made them large presents of money. His generosity to the poor, his scorn for the great, aroused universal enthusiasm. The Germans, who lived on legends, imagined that he was the Wandering Jew. … Speaking a strange gibberish, which was neither French nor Italian, with which he mingled a jargon which he did not translate, but called Arabic, he used to recite with solemn emphasis the most absurd fables. When he repeated his conversation with the angel of light and the angel of darkness, when he spoke of the great secret of Memphis, of the Hierophant, of the giants, the enormous animals, of a city in the interior of Africa ten times as large as Paris, where his correspondents lived, he found a number of people ready to listen and believe him.”
The interior of Africa was an excellent place in which to locate all these marvels. Since no traveler in that age of skepticism and credulity had ever penetrated into the mysterious land of Ham, it was impossible to deny the Munchausen-like stories of the magician. All this bears a close analogy to the late Madame Blavatsky and her Tibetan Mahatmas. Cagliostro, like all successful and observant wizards, was keenly alive to the effects of mise en scène in his necromantic exhibitions; he was a strong believer in the spectacular. To awe his dupes with weird and impressive ceremonies, powerfully to stimulate their imaginations—ah, that was the great desideratum! His séance-room was hung with somber draperies, and illuminated with wax lights in massive silver candlesticks which were arranged about the apartment in mystic triangles and pentagons.
Says Saint-Amand: “As a sorcerer he had a cabalistic apparatus. On a table with a black cloth, on which were embroidered in red the mysterious signs of the highest degree of the Rosicrucians, there stood the emblems: little Egyptian figures, old vials filled with lustral waters, and a crucifix, very like, though not the same as the Christian’s cross; and there too Cagliostro placed a glass globe full of clarified water. Before the globe he used to place a kneeling seer; that is to say, a young woman who, by supernatural powers, should behold the scenes which were believed to take place in water within the magic globe.
“Count Beugnot, who gives all the details in his Memoirs, adds that for the proper performance of the miracle the seer had to be of angelic purity, to have been born under a certain constellation, to have delicate nerves, great sensitiveness, and, in addition, blue eyes. When she knelt down, the geniuses were bidden to enter the globe. The water became active and turbid. The seer was convulsed, she ground her teeth, and exhibited every sign of nervous excitement. At last she saw and began to speak. What was taking place that very moment at hundreds of miles from Paris, in Vienna or Saint Petersburg, in America or Pekin, as well as things which were going to occur only some weeks, months, or years later, she declared that she saw distinctly in the globe. The operation had succeeded; the adepts were transported with delight.”
Cagliostro became involved in the affair of the Diamond Necklace, and was thrown into the Bastille. Though eventually liberated, he was compelled to leave Paris. He made one remarkable prediction: That the Bastille would one day be razed to the ground. How well that prophecy was realized, history relates. In the year 1789 the enchanter was in Rome, at the inn of the Golden Sun. He endeavored to found one of his Egyptian Lodges in the Eternal City, but the Holy Inquisition pounced down upon him, adjudged him guilty of the crime of Freemasonry—a particularly heinous offense in Papal Territory—and condemned him to death. The sentence, however, was commuted by the Pope to perpetual imprisonment in the gloomy fortress of San Leon, Urbino. The manner of his death, nay the day of his death, is uncertain, but it is supposed to have taken place one August morning in the year 1790. The beautiful Lorenza Feliciani, called by her admirers the “Flower of Vesuvius,” ended her days in a convent, sincerely repentant, it is said, of her life of impostures.
III.
With Cagliostro, so-called genuine magic died. Of the great pretenders to occultism he was the last to win any great fame, although there has been a feeble attempt to revive thaumaturgy in this nineteenth century by Madame Blavatsky. Science has laughed away sorcery, witchcraft, and necromancy. Prior to Cagliostro’s time a set of men arose calling themselves faiseurs, who practiced the art of sleight-of-hand, allied to natural magic. They gave very amusing and interesting exhibitions. Very few of these conjurers laid claim to occult powers, but ascribed their jeux, or tricks, to manual dexterity, mechanical and scientific effects. These magicians soon became popular.
Towards the middle of the eighteenth century we hear of Jonas, Androletti, Carlotti, Pinetti, Katerfelto, Philadelphus Philadelphia, Rollin, Comus I. and II. Pinetti, when he arrived in London in 1784, displayed the following advertisement: “The Chevalier Pinetti with his Consort will exhibit most wonderful, stupendous, and absolutely inimitable, mechanical, physical, and philosophical pieces, which his recent deep scrutiny in those sciences, and assiduous exertions, have enabled him to invent and construct; among which Chevalier Pinetti will have the special honor and satisfaction of exhibiting various experiments of new discovery, no less curious than seemingly incredible, particularly that of Madame Pinetti being seated in one of the front boxes, with a handkerchief over her eyes, and guessing at everything imagined and proposed to her by any person in the company.” Here we have the first mention of the second-sight trick, which in the hands of latter-day artists has become so popular. Houdin rediscovered it, passed it on to Robert Heller who improved it, and at the present time the conjurer Kellar makes it his pièce de résistance. Rollin had a romantic career. He accumulated a fortune at conjuring, and purchased the chateau of Fontenay-aux-Roses, in the department of the Seine. Says H. J. Burlingame, an interesting writer on magic: “Rollin incurred the suspicions of the Committee of Public Safety in 1793, and suffered death by the guillotine. On the warrant for his execution being read to him, he turned to those about him, and observed, ‘This is the first paper I cannot conjure away.’ Rollin was the grandfather of the late political celebrity of that name, who was minister of the interior in the provisional government of France of 1848.”
Comus II., who played in London in the year 1793, gave a curious exhibition of conjuring tricks and automata. His programme announced that the Great Comus would present “various uncommon experiments with his ‘Enchanted Horologium,’ ‘Pyxidus Literarum,’