[Illustration: Very rare Testot handbill printed about 1800, presented by Testot to Henry Evanion. From the Harry Houdini Collection.] In 1789, while in Rome, he was seized by that invincible power, the Holy Inquisition, and was condemned to death. Later Pope Pius VI. changed the sentence to life imprisonment. Confinement made him more daring than ever. He asked for a confessor, and when a Capuchin monk was permitted to enter his cell in this capacity Cagliostro endeavored to choke him and escape in his robes. The monk fought for his life so effectually that it was he, and not Cagliostro, who escaped. Cagliostro was literally buried alive in a subterranean dungeon, as punishment for his final offence, and his wife immured herself in a Roman convent, where she died in 1794. [Illustration: Testot programme, featuring "Cabalistic Art" in 1826. From the Harry Houdini Collection.] In Paris, perhaps, Cagliostro enjoyed his greatest triumphs of charlatanism, and it is not remarkable that the appearance of his seal in the midst of Robert-Houdin's trick should seem almost uncanny to the royal family. But to return to the disappearing-handkerchief trick. Robert-Houdin did not invent this trick. It was presented by a number of conjurers before Robert-Houdin was known in the world of magic. Robert-Houdin simply employed the trick familiar to both his predecessors and contemporaries and redressed it to tickle the fancy of his royal patron. In England this trick was known among old conjurers as "The Ne Plus Ultra of the Cabalistic Art." In 1826 one M. Félix Testot, who claimed to be a compatriot of Robert-Houdin, presented the trick in the British provinces, and one of his bills I am reproducing because it shows that the trick he offered the provincial Britons and the trick which Robert-Houdin offered the royal family at St. Cloud were identical. It also proves that London had seen the trick; and what London had seen, Paris, including Robert-Houdin, had heard of. [Illustration: Marriot programme featuring "Cabalistic Art" in 1831, or fifteen years before Robert-Houdin claims to have invented the disappearing handkerchief trick. From the Harry Houdini Collection.] A programme used by "The Celebrated Mr. Marriot, Professor of Recreative Philosophy," in 1831, contains word for word the announcement of the trick used on Testot's bill, which goes to show that a popular test was to have articles passed from the Adelphia Theatre to the gun which was being watched by a sentinel. [Illustration: Jefferini handbill, dated 1833, in which he announces that any article will be made to fly 500 miles a minute.] February 22d, 1833, found a Mr. Jefferini at the Royal Clarence Theatre, Liverpool Street, King's Cross, Liverpool. He agreed to make "an article fly at the rate of five hundred miles an hour, from King's Cross to the Centre of Greece."