Page:Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds Vol 1.djvu/231

Rh 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. "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 Cæsar, 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, as Cagliostro