Diddler diddled
ROBERT HUGHES
Cagliostro Francois Ribadeau Dumas (Allen and Unwin 50s) A few weeks ago, Count Cagliostro's silver shoe-buckles, engraved with zodiacal emblems, made £80 at Sotheby's. How much the relics of other magi—Horatio Bottomley's spats, the Maharishi's cheque-stubs—might fetch is un- guessable, but it is not likely that their myth will ever prove as durable as Cagliostro's. For the brass, gall and success of Giuseppe Balsamo from Palermo (to give Cagliostro his real name and origin) were so vast as to make him unique as a phoney in society. Most of the appeal and all the historical significance of this gar- licky hierophant, with his mumbo-jumbo of Lesser Arcanas and Egyptian Lodges, his snake- oils, yellow powders and aphrodisiacs, rest in the fact that, in the midst of the Enlighten- ment, he managed to persuade thousands of more or less educated Europeans—including the Cardinal de Rohan and an otherwise hard- headed Minister of War, the Comte de Segur —that he could raise the dead, change base metal into gold, make diamonds swell and concoct the Elixir of Eternal Youth.
In a sense, therefore, Cagliostro was to eighteenth century medicine what Goya's freaks were to art—proof that the skin of reason and scepticism was stretched thin over Europe, and that, despite the efforts of the encyclopaedists, man remained at bottom an irrational, gullible and superstitious animal. El suetio de la razOn produce monstruos, and a society which could believe that Louis XIV was Apollo could also think this grubby Sicilian pimp a Magus. Only in the presence of a Cagliostro does one realise the necessity of Voltaire.
Nevertheless, one would not wish, even on Cagliostro, the kind of biography which Fran- cois Ribadeau Dumas has written. It consists of a stream of impacted yet vague rhetorical clichés of the sort one normally expects only from minor French art critics. Thus, faced with the fact that Cagliostro always lied about his past, M Dumas solemnly tells us that 'the waters of magical transformation, in which the new Cagliostro bathed, also led him to con- ceive of his youth as a fable.' And so Bal- samo's late-flowering adept, whose claim on the flap that this book is the product of long years of research among many important and unpublished documents' has not impelled him to favour the reader with a single note, a line of bibliography or even an index, has against all probability written a stunningly boring book about one of the most interesting rogues in history.
It is a devotional tract which, for tenden- tiousness, credulity and cloudy thinking, is rivalled only by the sort of pamphlets Irish nuns write on the Little Flower. For instance, it never occurs to Dumas to wonder if Cagliostro's ersatz spirituality could have ap- pealed, for political reasons, to aristocrats who saw rationalism as a menace. 'Is not everything possible in the realm of magic?' asks the author, thus setting the leitmotiv of his book. He is thereby absolved from checking facts or even giving them.
When Cagliostro returns to Palermo in 1775, for instance, after his wife, the 'Countess Serafina,' is released from prison, we have a touching scene of 'a family reunion .. . where the old Mama welcomed her son with tears of joy.' What we are not told is that Serafina was flung into Sainte-Pelagie for prostitution, and that Cagliostro was jailed for forgery almost as soon as he arrived, calling himself the 'Marchese di Pelligrini,' in Palermo. Again, the fact that Cagliostro gave away large sums, and lived like a prince, seems evi- dence enough for Dumas to compare him to St Paul and think that, since his hero was axiomatically honest, the gold must have been got by transmutation. To less generous souls, it might suggest that Cagliostro was fleecing titled suckers.
But, whichever view you take, to write about Cagliostro without some curiosity about the social currents of his time is pointless. Despite his ill-expressed lucubrations on alchemy and Masonry, and even his efforts to revive the idea that Mozart was inspired to write Die Zauberflate by the Egyptian Lodge—which, as usual, Dumas gets wrong: according to that theory, Tamino was Ignatz von Born, not Cagliostro—our author does not for a moment display a gift, or even- an appetite, for under- standing Cagliostro at all. Instead, he wants a hero; an impulse which, unchecked, is the nemesis of biographers. In the end, Caglios- tro emerges as a version of de Nerval's lobster, but covered with whitewash and dragged around on a leash by a man who be- lieves that the creature knew the secrets of the sky and did not bite.
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