years was, by some,
thoroughly believed. He ascribed his immortality to his own Elixir, and
his comparatively youthful appearance to his "Water of Beauty," his
Countess readily assisting him by speaking of her son, a Colonel in the
Dutch service, fifty years old, while she appeared scarcely more than
twenty.

At length, in Rome, he and the Countess fell into the clutches of the
Holy Office; and both having been tried for their manifold offences
against the Church, were found guilty, and, in spite of their contrition
and eager confessions, immured for life; the Count within the walls of
the Castle of Sante Leone, in the Duchy of Urbino, where, after eight
years' imprisonment, he died in 1795, and the Countess in a suburban
convent, where she died some time after.

The portraits of Cagliostro, of which a number are extant, are pictures
of a strong-built, bull-necked, fat, gross man, with a snub nose, a
vulgar face, a look of sensuality and low hypocritical cunning.

The celebrated story of "The Diamond Necklace," in which Cagliostro,
Marie Antoinette, the Cardinal de Rohan, and others were mixed in such a
hodge-podge of rascality and folly, must form a narrative by itself.

CHAPTER XLI.

THE DIAMOND NECKLACE.

In my sketch of Joseph Balsamo, alias the Count Alessandro de
Cagliostro, I referred to the affair of the diamond necklace, known in
French history as the _Collier de la Reine_, or Queen's necklace, from
the manner in which the name and reputation of Marie Antoinette, the
consort of Louis XVI, became entangled in it. I shall now give a brief
account of this celebrated imposition--perhaps the boldest and shrewdest
ever known, and almost wholly the work of a woman.

On the Quai de la Ferraille, not far from the Pont Neuf, stood the
establishment, part shop, part manufactory, of Messrs. Boehmer &
Bassange, the most celebrated jewelers of their day. After triumphs
which had given them world-wide fame during the reign of Louis XV, and
made them fabulously rich, they determined, with the advent of Louis
XVI, to eclipse all their former efforts and crown the professional
glory of their lives. Their correspondents in every chief jewel market
of the world were summoned to aid their enterprise, and in the course of
some two or three years they succeeded in collecting the finest and most
remarkable diamonds that could be procured in the whole world of
commerce.

The next idea was to combine all these superb