The Count of Cagliostro maintained that he knew not where he had been born. His parents, he wrote, were Christians of noble extraction; his preceptor, Althotas, had allegedly concealed their names from him. He situated his early years in Medina, beneath the roof of a mufti, before embarking upon travels through Arabia, Egypt, Rhodes, and Malta. The man who thus presents himself to the reader is scarcely an impartial narrator: Borrow observes that he transcribes the accused man's own memoirs, only to denounce him summarily as a charlatan.
Within this autobiographical account, the youth, named Acharat, grew to manhood under the tutelage of Althotas. The governor, he asserts, instructed him in foreign tongues and sciences, teaching him to revere God, the laws, and the religions of mankind. At the age of twelve, the boy was seized with a desire to travel. He describes the palaces of Medina and Mecca, the favour of the Sharif, and the tears wept by that prince upon their parting. Prior to his departure, a Black servant cautioned him never to venture unto Trebizond.
In 1766, according to his own relation, he arrived at Malta in the company of Althotas and three domestics. He claimed to have obtained an exemption from quarantine and to have been lodged within the palace of the Grand Master, Pinto, hard by the laboratory. It was there that he adopted European dress and assumed the name of Cagliostro. Here Borrow interpolates a decisive observation: the Maltese ambassador at Versailles, following the publication of these pages, formally declared both the exemption from quarantine and the wearing of the Order's insignia by Althotas to be utter fabrications.
Cagliostro claimed to have declined admission into the Order of Malta despite the entreaties of the Grand Master. Deprived by death of Althotas, whom he mourned as both father and master, he resumed his peregrinations. The autobiography unfolds thereafter in a succession of courtly encounters, assumed names, distant journeys, medical consultations, and sufferers whom he asserted he had healed without fee. He explained that he had assumed sundry aliases—Count Starat, Count Fenix, the Marquis d'Anna—solely to preserve his incognito. In Rome, he claimed to have wed Serafina Felichiani; at the hour of his arrest, his wife shared his captivity. In Strasbourg, he maintained, envious rivals accused him of charlatanry, yet ministers of state interceded on his behalf. In Paris, he professed to have dedicated his days entirely to his patients.
This posture of benign virtue was put to the proof upon the entrance of the Cardinal de Rohan. Cagliostro relates that the prelate came to consult him, first regarding his own health, and subsequently concerning that of the Prince de Soubise. In 1785, the Cardinal proposed that he meet Madame de La Motte. The Queen, he was told, was deeply perturbed by a prophecy foretelling her death in childbed. Cagliostro consented to offer reassuring counsel, while disclaiming any pretension to foretell the future. He proceeds to recount an episode which he characterizes as a harmless jest devised to dispel these terrors.
Madame de La Motte arrived accompanied by a maiden whom she described as a pure innocent. The Count had expected a child of six; the young woman, Mademoiselle de La Tour, was fifteen years of age. He bade her step behind a folding screen, close her eyes, and fix her mind upon whatever object she wished to behold. The Cardinal took his station on the opposite side, beside the hearth. Cagliostro insists that he could barely contain his laughter as he enacted the part of the augur. At first, the maiden professed to see nothing. He rapped upon the screen, chiding her for a lack of innocence; whereupon she at last described a queen in childbed, robed in white, and avowed that the delivery would proceed without mishap.
In the Count's account, the girl believed herself to have furnished unassailable proof of her innocence. He bade her kiss the hand of the spectral queen: she kissed her own hand, then emerged from behind the screen. Madame de La Motte and her niece partook of sweetmeats, drank lemonade, and departed by the back stairs. He insists throughout: there was nothing pernicious in the matter, nothing beyond an idle jest. Such, at least, is his version; we possess neither the testimony of the maiden nor that of the Cardinal, who, Cagliostro asserts, was likewise suppressing his mirth.
When Rohan subsequently inquired what he thought of Madame de La Motte, Cagliostro claimed to have warned him that she was an artful deceiver. The Cardinal departed for Saverne. Upon his return, he appeared visibly unsettled and broached the matter of the diamond necklace. According to the Count, Rohan harboured suspicions that the jewel had never reached the Queen. Madame de La Motte and her husband had allegedly sought refuge at the Cardinal's residence before soliciting letters to facilitate their flight from France. Cagliostro counselled the Cardinal to surrender them to the police and lay the entire business before the King. Rohan demurred out of misplaced generosity, according to his visitor; the couple departed for Burgundy.
On the fifteenth of August, Rohan was placed under arrest. Seven days later, officers presented themselves at Cagliostro's domicile. He recounts that a police commissioner, an exempt, and eight constables ransacked his furnishings, marched him ignominiously through the streets on foot, and presently bundled him into a passing hackney carriage. His wife was likewise immured in the Bastille. After five months of captivity, he was brought forth for interrogation. The magistrates questioned him closely regarding his relations with the Cardinal, the necklace, and the sources of the wealth that sustained his lavish household.
When pressed to explain how he could bestow so lavishly while accepting nothing in return, he initially declined to answer. The query, he contended, had no bearing upon the case. Then he turned it back upon his inquisitors: what matter whether a man be the son of a king or of a mendicant, so long as he obeys the laws, pays his debts, and aids his fellow man? At last, he disclosed what he termed his secret: certain bankers financed his needs in every realm, while his occult knowledge afforded him further resources.
Cagliostro persisted in asserting his innocence. He went so far as to name the gentlemen who, he assured his judges, placed their fortunes at his command: Sarrasin of Basel and Sancolaz of Lyon. He had merely enjoined them, he claimed, to keep their quality as bankers secret. After so many princes, palaces, and wanderings, his defence narrowed to two names that the interrogators might verify. The Count made a show of revealing his secret, yet produced no ledger of accounts, nor did he explain why these men should have reposed in him so absolute a trust.
He was ultimately released from the Bastille and compelled to quit the realm of France. His wanderings carried him thence to Italy, where the Inquisition apprehended him. His final imprisonment unfolded within the fortress of San Leo, wherein he was immured in 1791. There he died on the twenty-sixth of August 1795. The man whose legal defence had been populated with open chambers in the palaces of the great ended his days in a subterranean dungeon accessible only by a trapdoor from above.