CAGLIOSTRO, ALEXANDER, commonly called COUNT DE, one of the most impudent and successful impostors of modern times. His real name was Joseph Balsams), and he was born at Palermo on the 8th of June 1743. His friends designed him for the monastic profession, but during his noviciate he ran away from his convent, and thenceforward lived upon his wits and the credulity of mankind. The first exercise of his ingenuity, in a public way, was to forge tickets of admission to the theatres. He then proceeded to forge a will, and having robbed his uncle, and being accused of a murder besides, ho was thrown into prison. He was liberated, again im prisoned, and again sot free ; but was finally obliged to fly from Sicily for cheating a goldsmith of a large sum of money under pretence of showing him a hidden treasure. He went successively to Alexandria, Rhodes, Malta, Naples, Rome, and Venice, at one of which places he married a woman whose great beauty and profound immorality were very naeful to him.
Quitting Italy this couple visited Holstein, where Cagliostro pro fessed alchemy ; and thence they went to Russia, Poland, &c. lu 1780 they fixed themselves at Strasbourg, where the soi-disant count practised as a physician, and pretended to the art of making old women young. As his handsome wife, who was only twenty, vowed she was sixty, and had a son, a veteran captain in the Dutch service, they for a time obtained a good deal of practice among the old women of Strasbourg. Thence they went to Paris, where Cagliostro exercised
the profitable profession of Egyptian free-masonry (as he called it), and pretended to show people the ghost of any of their departed friends. In 1785 he was deeply implicated with the Cardinal Duke de Rohan in the notorious affair of tho diamond necklace in which tho name and fame of Marie Antoinette, the unfortunate queen of France, were committed. Cagliostro was, in consequence, shut up for nine months in the Bastille; and ou his expulsion from France, he proceeded to England, where, during a stay of two years, he found no lack of credulity. What took him again to Rome we know not, but in December 1789, be was arrested in that city, imprisoned in the castle of Sant' Angelo, and after a long trial condemned to death for being —a freemason. (See ' Process,' &c., published at Rome—a very curious document.) His severe sentence was commuted to perpetual imprisonment, and he was transferred to the fortress of San Leo, where he died in 1795. His wife was also arrested, and condemned to pass the remainder of her life in it convent : she survived her husband several years.