parently
in the bloom of manhood, was believed to have survived a thousand
winters.

Accident had supplied Cagliostro with an accomplice of suitable
depravity. In the course of his eccentric peregrinations among the
continental cities, he had formed the acquaintance of a female,
remarkable for her consummate loveliness and her boundless sensuality.
Married to this Circe, the adventurer began to thrive beyond his most
sanguine anticipations. It must be remembered, however, that in his
nefarious proceedings, Balsamo was aided by a faculty of invention
almost miraculous in its fruitfulness, and occasionally almost sublime
in its audacity. By these means, he ultimately became the most
astonishing impostor the world had ever beheld, with the solitary
exception of Mohammed.

As a forerunner of a disastrous revolution, the appearance of this
fantastic personage in the capital of civilisation was at once dismal
and prophetic. Unconsciously, he was the prophet of disaster.
Unconsciously, he was the prelude--half-solemn, half-grotesque--of a
bloody and diabolical saturnalia. History, both profane and inspired,
tells us that when the Euphrates forsook its natural channel, and the
hostile legions trampled under its gates at nightfall; when the
revellers of Belshazzar, drunk with prolonged orgies and haggard with
the shadow of an impending doom, staggered through the marble vestibules
and out upon the marble causeways, rending their purple vestures in the
moonlight, there was weeping among the lords of Chaldea,--"Wo! wo! wo!"
was walled in the streets of Babylon. A similar destiny awaited Paris,
but as yet a different spectacle was visible; as yet the carousals of
the metropolis were at their zenith; as yet the current flowed in its
ancient channel; as yet the woes of the empire were not written on the
wall of the palace. Festivities were never conducted with more
magnificence than immediately before the downfall of the monarchy and
the general desolation of the kingdom. The pomps of the religion, the
pageantries of the court, and the munificence of the nobility, were
never before characterised by so much grandeur and profusion. The
church, the sovereign, and the oligarchy, were crowning themselves for
the sacrifice.

* * * * *

Opposite the Rue de Luxembourg, and parallel with the Rue de Caumartin,
there stood, in the year 1782, a little villa-cottage or rustic
pavilion. It was separated from th