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CAGLIOSTRO OAGOTS 549 good stead. His audacity grew with his suc- cess. In 1770 he visited the grand master of the knights of Malta, and introduced himself as the count di Oagliostro, a name which he invented for this special occasion, and which he afterward retained. His subsequent bril- liant career was due to this interview, for the commander of the knights of Malta supplied him with letters of introduction which gave him for the first time access to the Italian no- bility. Fearing that this recommendation would not be sufficient, after his arrival at Venice he married a beautiful woman, Lorenza Felieiana, and travelled with her through upper Italy. She succeeded in making dupes, by her femi- nine cunning, in quarters where his coarser deceptions would have failed. Her business was to captivate the hearts of the people, while he, by turns doctor, naturalist, alchemist, freemason, fanatic, sorcerer, spiritualist, necro- mancer, exerciser, seized hold of the mind and the imagination of his dupes. After having done a thriving business in Italy, he made his appear- ance in Germany, where he offered for sale an elixir which insured perpetual life and never- fading beauty ; its operation, he used to say, was manifest in his own person, as he fre- quently passed himself off for 100, 150, or 200 years old, his wife assisting him by speaking of their son as being a captain in the naval ser- vice of the king of Holland, and 50 years old, while she herself hardly looked older than 20. From Germany he passed to Russia, but in- stead of repairing at once to St. Petersburg, he halted in Oourland, where many of the no- bles resided. In 1779, while at Mitau, he gathered around him the first ladies of the town, and founded a masonic lodge in which high-born ladies were admitted as members. He conjured spirits before the nobility of Mitau, and delivered mystic lectures ; and be- fore the enthusiasm of his dupes had reached its climax, lie departed for St. Petersburg. But here he was disappointed. Catharine II. laughed at him, and at his female disciples of Courland. Ho left Russia for France, arrived at Strasburg in 1780, and at once went to work upon the bishop of the city by apparently ef- fecting some wonderful cures. The news of this miracle spread over France. The Pari- sians received Cagliostro with open arms, anil in 1785 he took up his abode in the rue St. Claude. His laboratory was thronged with persons eager for elixirs and for communion with spirits. Here he revived what he called an old Egyp- tian masonic order, of which he had become the grand kophta, whose chief mission it was to impart to the members the power of making gold and of keeping death at a distance. The most notable personages of the French court were his disciples ; above all, Cardinal Rohan. Cagliostro became implicated in the diamond necklace scandal, and was taken to the Bastile. As nothing could be proved against him, he was liberated ; but he was expelled from France, and repaired to England, where he met with little success. Elisa von der Recke, his most fervent Mitau disciple, turned against him, and exposed him in a book entitled Nach- richt von des bertichtigten Cagliostro Avfent- halt in Mitau (Berlin, 1787). This caused his expulsion from Germany. He went to Switzerland, then to Sardinia, and at last to Rome, where he attempted to found a new masonic lodge, but fell into the hands of the inquisition, and was sentenced to death. The sentence being commuted to imprisonment for life, he passed his last eight years in a dun- geon. His wife, who was kept in durance in a convent, died a few years afterward. Many accounts of Cagliostro have been published, the best being that by Thomas Carlyle, contained in his "Essays." CACNOLA, Lnlgi, marquis, an Italian architect, born in Milan in 1762, died Aug. 14, 1833. Although born of a noble family and educated for political life, a passion for architecture nev- ertheless absorbed him. His greatest works are two triumphal arches at Milan, one known as the area delta pace, originally built of wood on occasion of the marriage of Eugene Beau- harnais in 1806, but finally finished in marble after Cagnola's death ; the other is the Porta di Marengo, an Ionic propylasum of great beauty. He also built the campanile at Ur- gnano, an ornate structure 190 ft. high, and several churches at Milan and elsewhere, the finest being at Ghisalba in the Bergamese. Some of his designs were on a scale so magnifi- cent as to be wholly impracticable. One of these was for a hospice on Mont Cenis, with 110 columns, each 11 ft. in diameter. CAGNOL1, Antonio, an Italian mathematician, born at Zante, Sept. 29, 1743, died in Verona, Aug. 6, 1816. The son of a functionary of the republic of Venice, he spent some time as sec- retary of legation at Madrid, and subsequently went to Paris, where he devoted himself to the study of astronomy, and built an observatory. Afterward he lived at Verona till 1797, when the French invasion compelled him to leave the city. He taught astronomy at Modena for a time, and finally returned to Verona. He was the author of works on astronomy and trigonometry, and of many papers in the me- moirs of the Italian society. CAGOTS, a formerly proscribed and outcast race of E. and S. France and N. Spain, whose origin has been ascribed to the Visigoths of Aquitaine, whence the somewhat forced deri- vation from caos Goths or Gothic dogs. Ac- cording to other and equally vague traditions, they sprang from the Saracens who lingered behind in Franco after their defeats by Charles Martel in 732-'9 ; and they were also various- ly regarded as descendants of leprous crusaders and Jews, and as heretics and sodomites. Ban- ished from all human haunts, their degenerate condition was chiefly attributable to their in- termarrying, and' to their miserable way of life in the recesses of the Pyrenees; and the belief in their being lepers has become obsolete.