appearance in
France. His fame had soon flown from Strasburg to Paris, the magnet of
vices and the seat of criminals. The Prince-Cardinal, known of old as a
seeker after everything of notoriety, soon became the intimate of one who
flattered him with the accomplishment of all his dreams in the
realization of the philosopher's stone; converting puffs and French paste
into brilliants; Roman pearls into Oriental ones; and turning earth to
gold. The Cardinal, always in want of means to supply the insatiable
exigencies of his ungovernable vices, had been the dupe through life of
his own credulity--a drowning man catching at a straw! But instead of
making gold of base materials, Cagliostro's brass soon relieved his blind
adherent of all his sterling metal. As many needy persons enlisted under
the banners of this nostrum speculator, it is not to be wondered at that
the infamous name of the Comtesse de Lamotte, and others of the same
stamp, should have thus fallen into an association of the Prince-Cardinal
or that her libellous stories of the Queen of France should have found
eager promulgators, where the real diamonds of the famous necklace being
taken apart were divided piecemeal among a horde of the most depraved
sharpers that ever existed to make human nature blush at its own
degradation!

[Cagliostro, when he came to Rome, for I know not whether there had been
any previous intimacy, got acquainted with a certain Marchese Vivaldi, a
Roman, whose wife had been for years the chere amie of the last Venetian
Ambassador, Peter Pesaro, a noble patrician, and who has ever since his
embassy at Rome been his constant companion and now resides with him in
England. No men in Europe are more constant in their attachments than
the Venetians. Pesaro is the sole proprietor of one of the moat
beautiful and magnificent palaces on the Grand Canal at Venice, though he
now lives in the outskirts of London, in a small house, not so large as
one of the offices of his immense noble palace, where his agent transacts
his business. The husband of Pesaro's chere amie, the Marchese Vivaldi,
when Cagliostro was arrested and sent to the Castello Santo Angelo at
Rome, was obliged to fly his country, and went to Venice, where he was
kept secreted and maintained by the Marquis Solari, and it was only
through his means and those of the Cardinal Consalvi, then known only as
the musical Abbe Consalvi, from his great attachment to the immortal
Cimarosa,