His fame as a professor of the occult arts spread faster than the knowledge of his evil deeds. Wherever he went he was received with rapturous enthusiasm. At Mittau in Germany the people were so frantic about him that they seriously entertained the idea of deposing their rightful sovereign and making Cagliostro their ruler. In Paris, however, the rascal received somewhat of a check, for he was proved to be the prime instigator in the affair of the famous diamond necklace, in which both Cardinal Rohan and the Countess de la Motte-Valois were implicated. He was at first imprisoned in the Bastile and afterward expelled from the country on twenty-four hours’ notice. Yet such was the faith of the people in this strange creature that the arbitrary decision of the authorities almost produced an uprising in his favour, and his departure from France was more in the nature of a triumph than a disgrace. He went from Paris to London, and there on the 20th June, 1786, he issued a kind of manifesto to the French people in which he used these remarkable words:--“The time is coming when the Bastile will be destroyed; when a prince shall reign who will abolish ‘_lettres de cachet_,’ convoke the States-General and reform religion;” all of which afterward came to pass. But his stay in London was short. One de Morande, editor of the _Courrier de L’Europe_, denounced him as a charlatan and he had to make a hasty departure for Basle. He was next heard of in Savoy, then in Vienna--whence he was expelled by order of Joseph II--and later in Trent, where he was welcomed by the prince archbishop until the emperor’s orders arrived to drive him out, after which he returned again to Rome. Cagliostro reached Rome for the last time in May, 1789, and after staying for a short time at the Locanda della Scalinata in the Piazza di Spagna he took a private house in the Piazza Farnese. It was just at the time when so-called “Egyptian Masonry” was being introduced into Rome, and a large and powerful lodge was established at the Villa Malta, near the Porta Pinciana, where meetings were held which were almost public gatherings. An account of one of these meetings which was attended by the Abbé Benedetti, a Roman litterateur, is given in his own words. “I have just been to a meeting presided over by Cagliostro at the Villa Malta near the Porta Pinciana. It was the Marchese M. P. who insisted upon my going and who accompanied me thither. We went about two o’clock in the evening (nine o’clock according to English time) and entered the precincts of the villa after giving the countersign to the servant in livery who answered our ring. We were then introduced into a large, brightly lighted saloon, whose walls were painted with representations of the square, level, plumb lines and other masonic emblems. There were besides a number of statuettes of Egyptian, Assyrian and Chinese idols and one of the walls had on it in large letters the mottoes:--