Necklace affairs and power games regarding Catherine II and J.W. von
Goethe.
As usual,
Prof. Frick
gave a remarkable lecture this time at the
Museumsgesellschaft. Red Baron reports, but as usual, makes his comments.
In fact, two stories are loosely connected, Cagliostro's (hi)story and the
affaire du collier de la reine, on which Goethe's reactions will be
described in a third part.
Cagliostro
Giuseppe Balsamo, born on June 8, 1743, one day
and 192 years before Red Baron, called himself
Alessandro, Count of Cagliostro. He was a Sicilian occultist, alchemist, and adventurer.
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Alessandro Count Cagliostro, pseudonym of Giuseppe Balsamo
(©Bibliotheque
Polonaise De Paris)
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He was said to have traveled widely in Greece, Egypt, Arabia, Persia, and
Rhodes, where he claims to have taken lessons in alchemy and related sciences
from the Greek Althotas. Finally, he showed up in Malta.
There, as Count Cagliostro, he visited the Grand Master of the Order of
Malta, who wrote recommendations for him for noble houses in Rome and
Naples. This set the stage for the career of a high stacker, quack, and
charlatan, who also claimed to be the founder of Egyptian Freemasonry. From
then on, this was the central part of his high-stacking activities. Contrary
to regular Freemasonry, Cagliostro believed that women should be admitted to
the lodges on equal footing.
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Elisabeth Charlotte Konstatia von der Recke in 1785 (©Gleimhaus)
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In 1779, he gained access to the Kurland nobility in Mitau in the Baltic,
where he succeeded in introducing some of the ladies to his adoption lodges.
The Countess
von der Recke finally exposed Cagliostro.
In 1780, he went to St. Petersburg and tried to introduce his Egyptian
Freemasonry under the benevolence of
Catherine II. However, this failed when Countess von der Recke warned the czarina. During
a spiritualist séance, Cagliostro was exposed as a charlatan.
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Catherine II of Russia (©Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien)
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Catherine's anger against Freemasonry lasted until 1786 when she wrote to her
confidant
Baron von Grimm* about Cagliostro:
He is a wicked scoundrel who should be hanged, that would stop the new
craze of believing in occult sciences, which is now so prevalent in Germany
and Sweden and which is also beginning to gain ground here. Still, we are
putting it in its place.
*Grimm had bought Voltaire's book collection for her in 1778.
In the same year, Catherine published three comedies –
The Impostor, The Blinded, and
The Siberian Magician – discrediting Freemasonry as such and ordering
her courtiers to attend the performances as didactic plays.
Elisa von der Recke did not want to be outdone, and in 1787, she published the
news of the infamous Cagliostro's stay in Mitau in 1779 and his magical
operations.
Cagliostro, who had been exposed in St. Petersburg, fled to Warsaw and
passed himself off as the Great Cophta of the Egyptian high-degree
Memphis-Misraim Rite until, due to his legerdemain, he was forced to flee the
city.
In 1781, he turned up in Strasbourg as a teacher of occultism
and as a magical healer. Needless to write he had an enormous following from
all sections of the population. In this stronghold of mystical masonry,
Cagliostro set up an Egyptian lodge, the rite of which he also implemented in
Basel.
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Cagliostro and Cardinal de Rohan at Alchemie (©Wikipedia)
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He soon made the acquaintance of the naive
Louis-René-Édouard Cardinal de Rohan, Archbishop of Strasbourg and Grand Almoner of France.
The Affair of the Diamond NecklaceAs the French ambassador to the Habsburg court in Vienna, de
Rohan's luxurious and libertine lifestyle displeasured the devoutly religious
Empress
Maria Theresa. Under pressure from her, he was recalled from his post in 1774.
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Louis René Édouard, Cardinal de Rohan (©Wikipedia)
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The cardinal was also out of favor at the French court because Maria Theresa's
daughter, Queen
Marie-Antoinette, shared her mother's dislike.
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Jeanne de St Remi de Valois comtesse de la Motte
(©Bibliothèque
nationale de France)
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De Rohan wanted to regain the favor of the French royal couple at all costs.
The refined swindler, Countess Jeanne de la Motte (
Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy), took advantage of his naivety and credulity, telling him she was in close
and friendly contact with the queen. Jeanne la Motte hired an old comrade of
her husband's who wrote false letters allegedly from Marie-Antoinette to the
cardinal. She successfully used them to convince him from early 1784 that the
queen was reconciled to him. On several occasions, Jeanne wheedled large sums
of money out of the cardinal for allegedly charitable purposes in the name of
Marie-Antoinette. With the swindled money, la Motte financed a luxurious life
for herself and her husband, Nicolas.
When Jeanne's web of lies became too incredible even for de Rohan, he
demanded an audience with the queen, which Jeanne was to arrange for him. So, in
August of that year, 1784, the swindler arranged a nocturnal meeting in one of
the bosquets of the Versailles park, at which a young veiled prostitute, who
bore a certain resemblance to Marie-Antoinette, played the part of the queen.
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Reconstruction of the Queen's necklace, Château de Breteuil, France
(©Jebulon/Wikipedia)
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The cardinal fell for the farce, and Jeanne was subsequently able to convince
him that the queen wished him to purchase a diamond necklace that two Parisian
jewelers had been offering for sale for several years – and to the king as well
– at the steep price of 1.8 million livres. De Rohan suspected nothing, and the
jewelers were deceived by forged letters. They handed the valuable piece of
jewelry to the cardinal on February 1, 1785, and he promptly gave it to Jeanne
de Saint-Rémy.
She broke the valuable diamonds out of their settings with her husband
and offered the stones to Parisian jewelers. However, the jewelers refused
to buy them, suspecting they were stolen goods. Nicolas de La Motte traveled
to England in April 1785 to turn the loot into cash and sold most of the
diamonds in London. Jeanne used some of the stones in Paris to pay off debts
to creditors and suppliers. In total, the couple received 600,000 livres for
their stolen goods.
Jeanne was finally sent to the Salpêtrière
prison when the fraud was discovered.
Since Cagliostro had often
provided de Rohan with spiritual guidance and alchemical advice, suspicions
arose that he might have been involved in manipulating the cardinal. Without
clear evidence, Cagliostro was arrested and imprisoned in the Bastille.
The public trial of the necklace affair demonstrated the general
corruption of the Ancien Regime to the people and laid a foundation for the
French Revolution of 1789.
The sensational trial ended on May
31, 1786. Jeanne La Motte was sentenced to be branded and imprisoned, and
her husband was convicted in absentia to life imprisonment in the galleys.
Cagliostro and his wife were acquitted.
Rohan was acquitted of
the banishment from the court by 26 votes to 22 but had to pay the Parisian
jewelers the price of the necklace.
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Jeanne de Saint-Rémy fleeing from the Salpêtrière
(©Bibliothèque
nationale de France)
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After about a year, Jeanne de Saint-Rémy escaped from the Salpêtrière and fled
to London. There, she learned that her husband had gambled away the money from
the diamonds.
Caglostro was banished from France by order of Louis XVI, and departed for
England and later for Rome, where he met two people who proved to be spies
of the Inquisition. On December 27, 1789, Cagliostro was arrested for
attempting to found a Masonic lodge in Rome and was imprisoned in the Castel
Sant'Angelo. He was tried and convicted of heresy, witchcraft, and
Freemasonry and sentenced to death. In 1791, the sentence was commuted to
life imprisonment at the Forte di San Leo, where Cagliostro would die from a
stroke on August 26, 1795.
Goethe
Goethe wrote about the court
proceedings in Verdun in October 1792 in his war diary Campaign in France:
The shock caused by that trial shook the state to its foundations and
destroyed respect for the queen and the upper classes in general.
Unfortunately, everything discussed only clarified the terrible ruin in
which the court and the more distinguished were caught up.
A little later, on the return journey from the campaign to
Weimar in November in Münster, Goethe wrote: As early as 1785, the story of the necklace frightened me like the head of
Gorgone. Through this outrageous criminal act, I saw the dignity of
majesty undermined and destroyed in advance, and all subsequent steps from
that time on, unfortunately, all too much confirmed the terrible
forebodings. I carried them with me to Italy and brought them back even
more sharply.
When Goethe wrote this, his trip to Italy (September 1786 - May
1788) was already long behind him. On April 18, 1787, in Palermo - Goethe
was 38 years old at the time - he was seized by a voyeuristic desire to
visit the Balsamo family. He did everything he could to see them and learned
from a local clerk who acted as his contact that Cagliostro's mother and
sister were still alive.
Here is a brief summary of the family,
which then lived in poor conditions in Palermo: Peter Balsamo, the father of
the infamous Joseph, went bankrupt and died at age forty-five. His widow,
Felicitas Balsamo, bore him another daughter, Johanna Joseph-Maria. She was
married to Johann Baptista Capitummino, who fathered three children with her
and died.
Shortly after my retirement, a quarter of a century
ago, I read Goethe's Italian Journey. At the time, I paid little attention
to the section about his visit to the Balsamos, but now my senses were
sharpened.
Goethe pretended to be an Englishman to the Balsamo family and brought news
of Cagliostro, who had just left the Bastille prison for London.
After re-reading the passage, I have to say that, to put it
mildly, the Englishman in disguise did not behave like a gentleman when
visiting the Balsamos.
At the appointed hour, it might have been about three o'clock in the
afternoon, we set off. The house was at the corner of a small lane, not
far from the main road, called il Cassaro. We climbed a miserable
staircase and immediately came to the kitchen. A woman of medium height,
strong and broad, without being fat, was busy washing the kitchen dishes.
She was neatly dressed, and as we entered, she pushed one end of her apron
up to hide the dirty side from us.
The clerk said, "Here is [ ... ] a stranger who brings a greeting from your brother and
can tell you how he is currently doing." The greeting I was to bring was
not quite in our agreement; however, the introduction had been made. "You
know my brother?" she asked. "All Europe knows him," I replied, "I think
you will be pleased to hear that he is safe and well since you have been
worried about his fate." "Come in," she said, "I'll be right behind you,"
and I entered the room with the clerk.
The conversation developed.[ ... ] Mrs. Capitummino saying that her brother still owes her fourteen ounces*;
she had redeemed items for him when he left Palermo in a hurry, but since
then, she has neither heard from him nor received any money or support
from him, even though, she hears, he has great riches and makes a princely
display. Would I not undertake to remind him of the debt in a proper
manner after my return and to obtain support for them? Would I not want to
take a letter with me or at least order one? I offered to do so. She asked
where I lived and where she should send the letter. I refused to say where
I lived and offered to pick up the letter myself the next day in the
evening.
*in silver, about 300 US$
Does Goethe's conscience stir at the farewell?
One can imagine the impression that this poor, pious, well-meaning family
had made on me. My curiosity was satisfied, but their natural and good
behavior aroused my sympathy, which increased with reflection.Goethe coldly reports:
I had achieved my goal, and it only remained for me to end this adventure
appropriately. Therefore, the next day, after lunch, I went to her house
alone. They were surprised when I entered. They said the letter was not yet
ready, and some of their relatives also wanted to meet me, who would arrive
in the evening. I replied that I had to leave early the following day, that
I still had to make visits and pack, and that I would have preferred to come
earlier rather than not at all.Then, the son
brought the letter they wanted me to take. As is customary in those parts,
it had been written at one of the public notaries' offices away from
home.After the visit, when he arrived at his lodgings, Goethe had some
thoughts:
I need not say that my interest in this family aroused the keen desire to
apply to them and help them in their need. They had been deceived by me
again, and their hopes of unexpected help were about to be disappointed for
the second time by the curiosity of northern Europe. My first intention was
to send them the fourteen ounces that the fugitive owed them before I left
and to cover my gift by assuming that I hoped to get this amount back from
him, but when I did the math at my lodging, went over my cash and papers, I
saw that in a country where distance seems to grow infinitely due to a lack
of communication, I would put myself in a difficult position if I presumed
to right the injustice of a cheeky person through a heartfelt good
nature. Making excuses, Goethe left.
Much later, in the
Tag- und Jahreshefte of 1789, Goethe recalled the necklace affair:
I had hardly settled back into Weimar life and its conditions, in terms of
business, studies and literary work, when the French Revolution developed
and attracted the attention of the whole world.As early as 1785, the necklace story had made an unspeakable impression on
me. In the immoral depths of the city, court, and state that opened up here,
the most horrific consequences appeared to me in a ghostly manner, the
appearance of which I could not get rid of for quite some time, whereby I
behaved so strangely that friends, among whom I was staying in the country
when the first news of this reached us, only confessed to me late, when the
revolution had long since broken out, that I seemed to them to be insane at
the time.
I followed the trial with great attention, tried to obtain news of
Cagliostro and his family in Sicily, and finally, in my usual manner, to
get rid of all the considerations, I transformed the whole event into an
opera titled "The Great Cophtha," for which the subject might have been
better suited than for a play.
So, in 1792, Goethe eventually turned the plot into a five-act comedy, The Great
Cophta.
In The Great Cophta, Goethe deals with the moral decay of the ancien régime.
He defuses the piece by "renaming" the characters. Queen Marie-Antoinette is
called a princess, but she does not appear at all. Cardinal de Rohan is the
Canon, and the Comtesse de La Motte is called the Marquise in Goethe.
Cagliostro becomes Count Rostro.
Cagliostro was acquitted in the necklace affair but had to appear in the
play for dramaturgical reasons. Goethe knew Schiller's views on
the theater as a moral institution. Did he want to educate the
Weimar audience?
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