The Queen's Necklace by Antal Szerb Page B

and saw a large black cat sitting on the pillow.
    “Oh my God!” she wailed between her sobs, “I only deceived the poor fellow once, with that awful man next door, who really wasn’t worth it, and now I’ve lost the best man in the world, and I’ll never see him again!”
    Whereupon the husband crept out from under the bed, and forgave her.
    “Yes, yes,” I hear you say, my dear, long-suffering reader, “this is all very well, but where’s the profit in it? If he doesn’t charge the poor, or even the financiers and the aristocracy for his cures, what is he living on? It seems he really did take us all in. He wasn’t a charlatan, he was an idiot.”
    Patience, gentle reader, you really must trust him. Cagliostro was a man of large views. He had no desire to get rich by healing the sick—the occupation of medicine was far beneath him. He was fired by a higher ambition, pursuing nobler game. The whole point of the miracle-doctoring was to bring him to the attention of the one person on whose account he had come to Strasbourg. The true mark of his genius is that he had calculated precisely which
grand seigneur
in all Europe would be the most susceptible to being completely taken in by someone like himself. That person was none other than Cardinal Rohan. Just as Boehmer had calculated that his wonderful necklacemust end up around the neck of Marie-Antoinette, so Cagliostro had decided that if anyone would swallow the Great Egyptian mumbo-jumbo, the Great Pyramid moonshine, that person would be Rohan. And he waited—waited most patiently.
    He did not have to wait too long. He had been residing in Strasbourg for just two or three months when the Cardinal, suffering from a severe attack of asthma, left Saverne and came into town to consult the miracle doctor. Cagliostro was summoned to the Palace.
    He knew the hour had struck. He understood that everything he did now would be of critical importance, that everything would turn on first impressions. He returned the message:
    “If my Lord Cardinal is ill, he may come to me and I will heal him. But if he is well, he has no need of me, nor I of him.”
    Rohan was not accustomed to being addressed in this manner. Cagliostro won the first round, and the Cardinal went to him. The impression Cagliostro had on him is described by his secretary, the Abbé Georgel:
    “In his somewhat uncommunicative face I saw such an imposing dignity that I was filled with a kind of religious veneration, and my first words were dictated by pure respect. Our conversation was fairly brief, but it filled me with the most ardent desire to get to know him better.”
    So Rohan reacted precisely as Cagliostro might have imagined in his most optimistic daydreams. And the miracle he had been waiting for duly followed.
    He continued to keep his distance; in fact his behaviour was at times almost hostile. But gradually he softened towards Rohan, and not long afterwards addressed him in these words:
    “Your soul is worthy of mine. Your merits are such that I shall share all my secrets with you.”
    They say that that day was the happiest day in Rohan’s life. Poor
grand seigneur
! Fairy godmothers had stood round his cradle to furnish him with everything a man might desire: glory, wealth, a sensitive appreciation of scholarship and art. His lifewas encompassed by beauty and the calm knowledge of his own superiority. But he was one of those men who burn with a thirst for the eternal that no earthly joy can assuage. Had he not lived at the end of the sceptical eighteenth century he might have found in the Church itself what he looked for elsewhere in vain, and perhaps even become a truly sainted pope. But such was his fate—a false prophet entangled him in a bogus eternity. People in former centuries knew that at the end of the world the Antichrist would appear, doing everything that Christ had done, but that every one of his deeds would be false and his gold would crumble to dust in the hands of his