He drove in triumph from the Bastille to his residence, after hearing his order of discharge. His coach was preceded by “a fantastic cripple, who distributed medicines and presents among the crowd.” He found the Rue Saint Claude thronged with friends and sympathizers, anxious to welcome him home. At this period revolutionary sentiments were openly vented by the people of France. The throne was being undermined by the philosophers and politicians. Any excuse was made to revile Louis XVI and his queen. Scurrilous pamphlets were published declaring that Marie Antoinette was equally guilty with the de la Mottes in the necklace swindle. Cagliostro consequently was regarded as a martyr to the liberties of man. His arrest under the detested _lettre de cachet_, upon mere suspicion, and long incarceration in the Bastille without trial, were indeed flagrant abuses of justice and gave his sympathizers a whip with which to lash the King and Court. His wife had been liberated some time before him. She met him at the door of the temple of magic, and he swooned in her arms. Whether this was a genuine swoon or not, it is {71} impossible to say, for Cagliostro was ever a _poseur_ and never neglected an opportunity for theatrical effect and self-advertisement. He accused the Marquis de Launay, Governor of the Bastille—he who had his head chopped off and elevated upon a pike a few years later—of criminal misappropriation of his effects, money, medicines, alchemical powders, elixirs, etc., etc., which he valued at a high sum. The Commissioner of Police who arrested him was also included in this accusation. He appealed to his judges, who referred him to the Civil Courts. But the case never came to trial. The day after his acquittal he was banished from France by order of the King. At St. Denis “his carriage drove between two dense and silent lines of well-wishers, while, as his vessel cleared from the port of Boulogne, five thousand persons knelt down on the shore to receive his blessing.” He went direct to London. No sooner there, than he filed his suit against the Marquis de Launay, “appealing, of course, to the hearts of all Frenchmen as a lonely and hunted exile.” The French Government, through its ambassador, granted him leave to come in person to Paris to prosecute his suit, assuring him of safe conduct and immunity from all prosecution, legal as well as social. But Cagliostro refused this offer, hinting that it was merely a stratagem to decoy him to Paris and reincarcerate him in a dungeon. No clear-headed, impartial person believed that the Marquis de Launay was guilty of the charge laid at his door. Whatever else he may have been, tyrannical, cold, unsympathetic, the Governor of the Bastille was a man of honor and above committing a theft. In fact, Cagliostro’s accusation was a trumped-up affair, designed to annoy and keep open “a running sore in the side of the French authorities.” Notoriety is the life of charlatanry. Cagliostro was no common