Free The Queen's Necklace by Antal Szerb Page A

days of her wonder-working husband; a woman so lovely that her beauty had no equal; and yet, for all that, she is a model of gentleness and obedience, submitting to her fate because she could not conceive of any other way to bear it. Her radiant nature, and her perfection above all other mere mortals, hold out a symbol which we can worship but not understand. And this angel, so incapable of sinning, is now held under lock and key. It is a cruel absurdity, and one that must be put right forthwith. What can a being of this nature have to do with the business of a law court?” And the Paris Parlement took one look at her and set her free.
    Lorenza accompanied her husband on his escapades and in his rather unusual daily life, loyally and sometimes not so loyally, like the sort of favourite charm you might keep in your pocket to ward off bad luck. She was always the angel-doll, untouched by life because she simply didn’t understand what it was all about. Perhaps that explains her huge success in French society, where the women understood it only too well.
    Malicious minds knew of course that as soon as things started to go badly for Cagliostro he would put her on the market. According to some, he had the generosity of her ‘patrons’ to thank for his subsequent, undoubtedly huge, fortune. In her numerous statements to the court Lorenza regularly mentions some gentleman or other approaching her with less than honourable intentions, while she, generally, defends her innocence and honour. Generally, we insist, because there was an occasion when she moved in with a lawyer called Duplessis, who maintained the two of them for a while until he becamebored with the whole business and had Cagliostro locked up as a fraudster. She then gave evidence against her own husband, denouncing him as work-shy and a
coquin
, and was detained at his request in the St Pelágia prison. But she later withdrew her allegation, and he withdrew his, she got out of prison, and they loved one another just as much as before.
    One story says that she turned one of her suitors away on the grounds that she couldn’t possibly betray her husband because he could make himself invisible and be present in more than one place at a time.
    He certainly pops up in a great many places, whether passing himself off as a soldier in the Prussian army or as earning his living as a draughtsman and stage designer. He travelled to Madrid, made a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, then returned to Palermo, where the jeweller Marano took him to court, but a powerful local prince (Lorenza’s admirer) beat up the prosecution lawyer and put an end to the case. Finally, in 1777, he turns up in London once again—and here the true story begins. If we can believe his detractors, he had up to this point been a mere petty swindler—an underworld figure, an insignificant member of the social underclass. But his wanderings had shaped his character. He had matured, gained much useful experience, and come to the point where, as Almeras puts it, he still lived by throwing dust in people’s eyes, but its quality was now very much finer.
    The great change began on 12th April 1777, when Cagliostro and his wife were admitted to the Hope Lodge of Freemasons in London, whose members were mostly French and Italian craftsmen and manufacturers. It became the Archimedes point from which Cagliostro would move the world.
     
    When, dear reader, you hear what follows about the Order of Freemasons, think of it as quite unconnected with whatever else you know (or believe you know) about the organisation.Do not think of it now in terms of its links with the liberal-democratic powers, and whether those powers were the cause of past, present and future wars. In the eighteenth century the movement stood for something very different from what it later became. To support this argument we need only mention that most authorities are convinced that French Freemasonry had a strongly Catholic character from the