Rumour which wove a web of romance round all his doings, did not leave him even here, and stories were circulated that he had escaped from his dungeon and was living in Russia. There appears, however, to be no doubt that neither Count nor Countess long survived their incarceration, and when the French soldiers invaded the Papal States in 1797 and the Polish Legion under General Daubrowski captured the fortress of San Leo, in which the Count had been confined, the officers who inquired after the once famous magician, hoping to set him free, were informed that it was too late, and that he was already dead. The Queen, whose vindictive spite had ruined these two lives, went to her doom first; but her instrument, the blackmailer Morande, retired to a quiet corner of France on his ill-gotten fortune, escaped the furies of the French Revolution, and ended his life surrounded by an atmosphere of the most unquestioned respectability. And what of the man with whom not only his own fate, but the misrepresentations of history have dealt so hardly? What manner of man was he for whom even those who denounce him as mountebank might not unreasonably, one would think, feel a passing sympathy? On two points we have ample testimony. All those who knew him bore witness to the marvellous magnetism of his personality and to the fascination and beauty of his extraordinary eyes. “No two eyes like his were ever seen,” says the Marquise de Crégny, “and his teeth were superb.” “He was not, strictly speaking, handsome,” says Madame d’Oberkirch, “but I have never seen a more remarkable face. His glance was so penetrating that one might almost be tempted to call it supernatural. I could not describe the expression of his eyes; it was, so to speak, a mixture of flame and ice. It attracted and repelled at the same time, and, whilst it inspired terror, it aroused along with it an irresistible curiosity. I cannot deny,” she adds, “that Cagliostro possessed an almost demoniacal power.” Not less noteworthy is the opinion of so hostile a witness as Beugnot, who confesses, while ridiculing him, that his face, his attire, the whole man, in fact, impressed him in spite of himself. “If gibberish can be sublime,” he continues, “Cagliostro was sublime. When he began speaking on a subject he seemed carried away with it, and spoke impressively in a ringing, sonorous voice.” This was the man whose appearance Carlyle caricatured in the following elegant phraseology: A most portentous face of scoundrelism; a fat snub abominable face; dew-lapped, flat-nosed, greasy, full of greediness, sensuality, ox-like obstinacy; the most perfect quack face produced by the eighteenth century. Carlyle, however, who would say anything or write anything in his moods of irritability, also alluded to the late Cardinal Newman as “not possessing the intellect of a moderate-sized rabbit”; and the two statements may fairly be juxtaposed.