Cagliostro’s greatest triumph was achieved in Paris. A gay and frivolous aristocracy, mad after new sensations, welcomed the magician with open arms. The way had been paved for him by St. Germain and Mesmer. He made his appearance in the French capital, January 30, 1785. Fantastic stories were circulated about him. The Cardinal de Rohan selected and furnished a house for him, and visited him three or four times a week, arriving at dinner time and remaining until an advanced {58} hour in the night. It was said that the great Cardinal assisted the sorcerer in his labors, and many persons spoke of the mysterious laboratory where gold bubbled and diamonds sparkled in crucibles brought to a white heat. But nobody except Cagliostro, and perhaps the Cardinal, ever entered that mysterious laboratory. All that was known for a certainty was that the apartments were furnished with Oriental splendor, and that Count Cagliostro in a dazzling costume received his guests with kingly dignity, and gave them his hand to kiss. Upon a black marble slab in the antechamber carved in golden letters was the universal prayer of Alexander Pope. “Father of all! in every age,” etc., the parody of which ten years later Paris sang as a hymn to the Supreme Being. Says Funck-Brentano:[13] “At Paris Cagliostro showed himself what he had been at Strasburg, dignified and reserved. He refused with haughtiness the invitations to dinner sent to him by the Count of Artois, brother of the king, and the Duke of Chartres, prince of the blood. He proclaimed himself chief of the Rosicrucians, who regarded themselves as chosen beings placed above the rest of mankind, and he gave to his adepts the rarest pleasure. . . . To all who pressed him with questions as to who he was, he replied in a grave voice, knitting his eyebrows and pointing his forefinger towards the sky, ‘I am he who is’; and as it was difficult to make out that he was ‘he who is not,’ the only thing was to bow with an air of profound deference. “He possessed the science of the ancient priests of Egypt. His conversation turned generally on three points: (1) Universal Medicine, of which the secrets were known to him. (2) Egyptian Freemasonry, which he wished to restore, and of which he had just established a parent lodge at Lyons, for Scotch masonry, then predominant in France, was in his eyes only an inferior, degenerate form. (3) The Philosopher’s Stone, which was to ensure the transmutation of all the imperfect metals into fine gold.” {59} [13] _The Diamond Necklace. Being the true Story of Marie Antoinette and the Cardinal de Rohan. From the new documents recently discovered in Paris._ By Frantz Funck-Brentano. Translated from the French by H. S. Edwards. Philadelphia, 1901. 8vo.