. His saloons were thronged with wealthy dupes who came to
purchase immortality. Beauty, that would endure for centuries, was the
attraction for the fair sex; health and strength for the same period were
the baits held out to the other. His charming countess, in the meantime,
brought grist to the mill by telling fortunes and casting nativities, or
granting attendant sylphs to any ladies who would pay sufficiently for
their services. What was still better, as tending to keep up the credit of
her husband, she gave the most magnificent parties in Bourdeaux.

But as at Strasbourg, the popular delusion lasted for a few months only,
and burned itself out; Cagliostro forgot, in the intoxication of success,
that there was a limit to quackery which once passed inspired distrust.
When he pretended to call spirits from the tomb, people became
incredulous. He was accused of being an enemy to religion, of denying
Christ, and of being the Wandering Jew. He despised these rumours as long
as they were confined to a few; but when they spread over the town, when
he received no more fees, when his parties were abandoned, and his
acquaintance turned away when they met him in the street, he thought it
high time to shift his quarters.

[Illustration: HOUSE OF CAGLIOSTRO, PARIS.]

He was by this time wearied of the provinces, and turned his thoughts to
the capital. On his arrival he announced himself as the restorer of
Egyptian Freemasonry, and the founder of a new philosophy. He immediately
made his way into the best society by means of his friend the Cardinal de
Rohan. His success as a magician was quite extraordinary: the most
considerable persons of the time visited him. He boasted of being able,
like the Rosicrucians, to converse with the elementary spirits; to invoke
the mighty dead from the grave, to transmute metals, and to discover
occult things by means of the special protection of God towards him. Like
Dr. Dee, he summoned the angels to reveal the future; and they appeared
and conversed with him in crystals and under glass bells.[48] "There was
hardly," says the _Biographie des Contemporains_, "a fine lady in Paris
who would not sup with the shade of Lucretius in the apartments of
Cagliostro; a military officer who would not discuss the art of war with
Caesar, Hannibal, or Alexander; or an advocate or counsellor who would not
argue legal points with the ghost of Cicero." These interviews with the
departed were very expensive; for,