Twelve Against the Gods by William Bolitho

Author:William Bolitho
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

LE COMTE DE CAGLIOSTRO,

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CAGLIOSTRO

VI

CAGLIOSTRO (AND SERAPHINA)

THE case of a double adventure—Lola with Casanova, or Alexander with some honey-coloured chieftai-ness, instead of that little Persian gazelle Roxana—is an inevitable conjecture’, now we have come so far. Would not the natural duad, man and wife, survive in the life of risk longer and healthier than any mere monad of adventure, if male, doomed to fail of a surfeit of his luck, if woman, to peter out from inanition of hers ? In any case, one would look for important and amusing modifications of the laws (or rather dynamical habits) that seem to govern adventure. These are likely to be harmonic rather than logical, for life abominates logic; and this complication is heightened by the rareness of the case, almost necessarily confined to a particular class of adventure. For indeed what could Alexander have done with a partner, or Columbus; or Casanova for that matter, or Lola ? Their isolation was not a flaw, but the very order of the architecture of what they did, and suffered; the destruction of which would have turned all into that most insipid of fairy-tales, the novelette. For our duad chord, we must look among adventurers whose activity was a business. That is, we must steer between the opposing dullnesses of swindling and trade—I can hardly think of anyone but Cagliostro and his Seraphina, the last colours in the sunset of Old Europe.

The man’s real name was Giuseppe Balsamo. We are used to the habit of change of name, almost as regular in

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TWELVE AGAINST THE GODS

adventurers as in the three other professions that regularly use it, the monastery, the stage, and the streets. We know its almost ceremonial reason: the symbolical

abjuration of ties, tasks, duties, those of family preparatory to those of society; its most general motive: ambition in its plainest symptoms, even to the poetry of snobbery. His father was a small store-keeper in Palermo; the date 1743. This Giuseppe, for short Beppo, grew into a stout, blunt-faced gutter-hero, thievish, daring, calm, the bugbear of all the housewives and milksops of the neighbourhood. He cut washing lines, incited dog-fights, bullied the timid urchins and led the bold ones to expeditions against street vendors* carts, and added as much confusion as he could to the labyrinthine noise of the hot old city, where at any moment of the day or night there is a quarrel or a bargain being made. At the age of twelve he was sent to the seminary of St. Roch to learn his letters, was beaten industriously by the teachers and the porter, and ran away. His father was dead. His mother’s brother got him admitted to the Monastery of the Benfratelli—the entrance to the only career for a cleverish boy of his class. Here, after a time, he was set to work for the apothecary of the establishment; to clean phials, weigh herbs, tend the alembics and sweep the floor, as well as learn the elements of the most sensual and exciting of sciences.

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