Blavatsky H.P. - The Silent Brother: Difference between revisions

In those days, Cagliostro and his mysterious powers were on all tongues. Paris was in a state of high fever about him. At Court, in society, in the Parliament , in the Academy, they spoke but of Cagliostro. The most extraordinary stories were told of him, and the more they were extraordinary the more willingly people believed them. They said that Cagliostro had shown pictures of future events in his magic mirrors to some of the most illustrious statesmen of France, and that these events had all come to pass. The king and the royal family had been of the number of those who were allowed to peer into the unknown. The “magician" had evoked the shades of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, of Mohammed and Nero. Ghengis Khan and Charles the Fifth had held a conversazione with the minister of the police; and an outwardly pious, but secretly sceptical Christian Archbishop having shown a desire to have his doubts cleared, one of the gods was summoned—but did not come, for he had never existed in flesh. Marmontel having expressed the desire to meet Belisarius, he, upon seeing the great warrior emerging from the ground, fell senseless.<ref>{{HPB-CW-comment|[Reference is here to Jean Franvois Mannontel (1723.99), French writer, historiographer of France and secretary to the Academy. He published in 1767 a romance, ''Bélisaire'', which incurred the censure of the Sorbonne and the archbishop of Pads for a chapter on religious toleration.—''Compiler''.]}}</ref> Young, daring and passionate Glaüerbach, feeling that Cagliostro would never share with him more than a few crumbs of his great learning, turned in another direction, and at last found an unfrocked abbot, who for a consideration took upon himself {{Page aside|368}}to teach him all he knew. In a few months (?) he had learned the weird secrets of black and white magic, ''i.e''., the art of cleverly bamboozling fools. He also visited Mesmer and his clairvoyants, whose number had become very large at that period. The ill-fated French society of 1785 felt its doom approaching; it suffered from spleen and greedily seized upon anything that brought it a change in its killing satiety and lethargic monotony. It had become so sceptical that, at last, from believing in nothing, it ended by believing anything. Glaüerbach, under the experienced direction of his abbot, began practicing upon human credulity. But he had not been more than eight months at Paris, when the police paternally advised him to go abroad—for his health. There was no appeal from such advice. However convenient the capital of France for old hands at charlatanry, it is less so for beginners. He left Paris and went, via Marseilles, to Palermo.