David had only a rudimentary recollection of that episode, and the professor seemed only too happy to provide a synopsis. David had the impression that the professor, at first annoyed at the intrusion in his schedule, had warmed at the enthusiasm of the comely young Olivia and enjoyed regaling her with his stories.
“The official court jewelers, two partners named Boehmer and Bassenge, had assembled a fabulously expensive necklace, in the hopes that Mme. du Barry, and later Marie Antoinette, would buy it. But neither of them did. Instead, a confidence artist, an attractive young woman named Jeanne de Lamotte Valois, managed to perpetrate a very great swindle.”
“The greatest of its day,” Olivia added.
“She persuaded an eminent, but unscrupulous, Cardinal to pay for it. He thought he was simply buying it on behalf of the queen, who would secretly reimburse him, but the queen did not know anything about the transaction. Nor did she ever receive it. Instead, the necklace was stolen by Valois and her confederates, broken up into pieces, and sold. And despite the fact that Marie Antoinette had never owned the necklace—indeed, she had pointedly refused to buy it on several occasions—the people of France never believed her. The necklace was often cited as just one more example of her extravagance.”
“And Count Cagliostro was involved?” David asked, still feeling like the student who’d been left behind.
“Mme. Valois deliberately implicated him in the plot because she knew him to be a great favorite at court. The queen enjoyed his company, and had richly rewarded him with various tokens of her esteem. There was a trial, but after nine months in the Bastille, the count was finally acquitted. Still, he was smart enough to know that he had worn out his welcome in France and left Paris the next day.”
“And look at these, down here,” Olivia said, directing David to several amulets carved in the shape of scarabs and other foreign symbols. One was an amber gargoyle, grinning maliciously.
“Yes, those were the sorts of things the queen bestowed,” Vernet explained. “She knew he had a taste for anything of an exotic or occult nature and I think he was afraid to spirit some of them out of France.”
“Is it possible that La Medusa was one of the tokens of her esteem that he left behind?” Olivia speculated.
It certainly looked to David like the mirror might have been more to the count’s taste than hers. “And these are all of his things, in the cases here?” David asked the professor.
The professor shrugged and said, “All but some of his papers. They’re stored in the archives, next door.”
“May we see them?” Olivia asked, eagerly.
The professor, who looked as if he could refuse her nothing, brushed some dust from the front of his apron and said, “For such a lovely young visitor, I don’t see why not.”
David felt distinctly de trop, but didn’t care.
The professor led them out the other end of the gallery and down a long hall connected to an annex, talking all the way. “After leaving Paris, Cagliostro fled to Rome—unwisely, as it turns out—since the Pope found him guilty of blasphemy, burned his books, and imprisoned him in the Castel St. Angelo.”
“Cellini’s old home,” David observed.
“From there, he was moved to an even more remote prison—the Castel San Leo,” Vernet remarked, as they passed through the first of several security checkpoints, “where he survived for four years before being strangled by one of his jailers.”
The professor opened a sticky steel-plated door and led them down a metal spiral staircase. They must have gone down three or four levels before he stopped and turned on a row of overhead lights.
Endless shelves, stacked with boxes, stretched as far as David could see, but Vernet appeared to know exactly where he was going, burrowing down one row, then turning into another before stopping and pointing to a large brown box on a top shelf.
“Could I ask you to take that one down?” he said, and David gladly obliged. A film of dust rose like a cloud from its top.
“And bring it over here,” Vernet said, leading them to an equally dusty research table surrounded by some beat-up wooden chairs. David plopped the box down, and the professor said, “Every day that Cagliostro was imprisoned, he scrawled one sentence, with a sharpened rock, on the wall of his dungeon. Napoleon—who was also a great believer in the occult—later sent an aide to the cell where Cagliostro had died, with instructions to copy down all the words and images that remained.” Tapping the top of the box, the professor said, “I’m afraid there are no amulets in here, but perhaps the information will guide you in your quest?”
David doubted it, but for want of any other lead, he was certainly prepared to follow this one. And Olivia looked genuinely elated.
“Normally, you understand, you would not be allowed to work here unattended,” Vernet said, glancing at an old wall clock as it audibly clicked off another minute, “but I have some work to finish, and the archives are technically closed today.”