Author Description

It has been said that every book on Cagliostro must be a book against him. With this opinion I totally disagree. In choosing Cagliostro as the subject of an historical memoir I was guided at first, I admit, by the belief that he was the arch-impostor he is popularly supposed to be. With his mystery, magic, and highly sensational career he seemed just the sort of picturesque personality I was in search of. The moment, however, I began to make my researches 1 was astonished to find how little foundation there was in point on fact for the popular conception. The deeper I went into the subject — how deep this has been the reader may gather from the Bibliography, which contains but a portion of the material I have sifted — the more convinced I became of the fallacy of this conception.