QI The Book of the Dead

tricksters, intent on relieving him of his alchemical formulae, took advantage of his ignorance of English law and summonsed him for debt. Much of the money he had made inducting men and women into his Egyptian Order went to bribe his way out of debtor’s prison. In France, his friend Cardinal de Rohan became embroiled in the ‘Affair of the Diamond Necklace’ implicating Marie Antoinette. Without a shred of evidence, Cagliostro was thrown into the Bastille. Even there he left a lasting impression: graffiti he scrawled on his cell wall was said to have predicted the Bastille would be ‘pulled down’ in 1789.
    Ejected from France, almost bankrupt and tired of their rootless and increasingly hazardous travels, Serafina persuaded Cagliostro to return to Rome. It was a terrible mistake. The Inquisition had Freemasonry in its sights and the great illusionist was caught trying to recruit two papal spies into his EgyptianOrder. To save herself, Serafina testified against him. Cagliostro received a death-sentence but, after an audience with the Pope, this was commuted to life imprisonment. The unique life of Giuseppe Balsamo, Count di Cagliostro ended in a stone box high up in the fortress of San Leo, near Urbino. For four years, his only connection with the outside world was through a tiny trapdoor. Tormented by his captors, starving and louse-ridden, he gradually lost his mind and died of a stroke in 1795. As a heretic, he was refused the last rites and buried in the grounds of the castle in an unmarked grave. So many people refused to believe the news that Napoleon was forced to commission an official report: detailing beyond doubt that Cagliostro – inventor of the elixir of life – really was dead.
    Some years earlier, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) had visited Sicily, fascinated by rumours that Cagliostro wasn’t really a count at all, but a jumped-up guttersnipe from Palermo. He tracked down Cagliostro’s mother, who was living with her daughter and two grandchildren crammed into a one-room apartment. Rather touchingly, they were thrilled to hear that their Giuseppe had done so well for himself, but disappointed that he hadn’t thought to help them. Goethe later sent them some money but the visit proved far more valuable for him. The idea of a man whose life is based on a lie and who claims to possess supernatural powers found its niche in history many years later in his great play Faust . Cagliostro’s journey from poverty, to fame and riches, to penury and disgrace has an undeniably mythic quality. Even today, some people make claims for him as a great seer, with the courage and energy to do what few of us manage: to dream up a better life for himself and then to live it. Just as Oates had exploited people by playing on their nameless fears of impending doom, Cagliostrotapped into the common sense that there is more to life than meets the eye; that what happens to us is driven by unseen forces. It may be that he succeeded because people wanted to believe him.

     
    Cagliostro never admitted his humble origins and most impostors never do. Some are unveiled by others; some move through a succession of disguises; very few unmask themselves. One who did is George Psalmanazar (1679–1763) who first appeared in England in 1704, feted as a Prince of Formosa, the first from his remote land (modern-day Taiwan) ever to visit Europe. It was the culmination of several years roaming the Continent trying on personalities. The first of these was as an Irish pilgrim on his way to Rome – the pilgrim’s cloak gave him the right to beg for money – but people’s knowledge of Ireland proved to be annoyingly widespread, so he developed a new persona: that of a ‘heathen’ from Japan, fond of swearing and eating heavily spiced raw meat and sleeping upright in a chair. In Germany, he enlisted as a mercenary, using his leisure to methodically build up corroborative evidence of his new identity: a ‘Japanese’ alphabet of twenty characters that read from right to left; the rules of ‘his’ language and pagan religion; and a calendar of twenty months. By the time he reached the Netherlands in 1701, he had adjusted his point of origin to the even more obscure Formosa and called himself Psalmanazar, a name he had borrowed from the biblical Assyrian king Shalamaneser, adding the foregoing ‘P’ for a natty alien flourish.
    In Holland he met an ambitious young Scottish army chaplain called Alexander Innes. One