Pre-roll
You’re listening to Enchanted, a podcast on the history of magic, sorcery, and witchcraft. I’m Corinne Wieben.

Intro
On the morning of August 15th, 1785, the Feast of the Assumption, the royal court at Versailles prepared for high mass. Cardinals donned their scarlet robes, courtiers adjusted their powdered wigs, and the machinery of royal ceremony hummed along as it had for centuries. But that morning, in front of hundreds of shocked witnesses, the impossible happened: guards seized the Grand Almoner of France, Cardinal Louis de Rohan, still dressed in his sacred vestments, and dragged him away to imprisonment in the Bastille.

The charge? Conspiracy to defraud Queen Marie Antoinette of a diamond necklace worth nearly two million livres, a sum so staggering it could have purchased a fleet of warships. The scandal that unfolded would captivate all of Europe, destroy reputations, and help light the fuse of revolution. At its center stood three remarkable figures: an ambitious con artist who claimed royal blood, a desperate prince of the church, and a flamboyant mystic: the self-proclaimed Grand Cophta, master of Egyptian Freemasonry, healer of the sick, and confidant of spirits. In this episode, I bring you the story of Count Cagliostro and the Affair of the Diamond Necklace.

Making the Mystic
Count Cagliostro’s story begins not in the perfumed salons of Versailles, but in the narrow streets of Palermo, where a young forger named Giuseppe Balsamo was about to embark on one of history’s most audacious transformations. By the time he was born in early June 1743 in the Sicilian city of Palermo, his parents were desperately poor, and his father died bankrupt shortly after Giuseppe’s birth. From his godmother, Vincenza Cagliostro, the boy would eventually borrow the surname that would make him infamous across Europe.

Despite his family’s poverty, Giuseppe received some education, first at a seminary and later as a novice with the Brothers of Mercy. It was in the monastery’s pharmacy that he picked up a working knowledge of chemistry while assisting the brother apothecary. But monastic life didn’t suit his temperament. He was expelled after profanely substituting the names of saints with those of notorious local prostitutes during a reading in the refectory. Back in Palermo, the teenage Balsamo turned to crime, forging wills, papal documents, and theater tickets with impressive skill.

His career as a local swindler reached its apex with the con he pulled on Vincenzo Marano, a wealthy and avaricious goldsmith. Balsamo convinced Marano that a vast treasure lay buried on Mount Pellegrino, its location revealed to him through occult knowledge. To prove the treasure’s existence, Balsamo led Marano to the site at night and, having previously sprinkled a phosphorescent compound on the sand, pointed to the eerie glow as evidence of demonic guardians protecting the gold. The ruse worked. Marano paid him sixty ounces of gold for his magical services. But when Balsamo led the goldsmith to dig up the treasure, six accomplices disguised as demons attacked Marano viciously while Balsamo disappeared with the gold. This brazen crime made Sicily too dangerous for the young con artist, and so Giuseppe Balsamo fled his homeland, embarking on what would become a grand tour of European deception.

The years that followed were a blur of desperate schemes and narrow escapes. In Rome around 1768, Balsamo met and married the beautiful teenager Lorenza Seraphina Feliciani, whom he quickly trained as his accomplice. Together they traveled across Europe, surviving through a combination of Lorenza’s charms and Giuseppe’s increasingly sophisticated cons. They sold magical amulets, forged documents, and ran confidence schemes in Spain, Portugal, France, and England. In London in 1771, they were imprisoned for debt. In Paris, Lorenza’s affair with a lawyer led to their temporary separation. By 1775, Balsamo had reinvented himself as the “Marquis Pellegrini” for a disastrous return to Sicily, where he was recognized by the still-vengeful Marano and forced to flee once more.

But in 1776, something changed. Giuseppe Balsamo, petty criminal and wandering fraud, vanished. In his place emerged Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, a figure of mystery and mystical authority who would captivate the highest circles of European society. The transformation began in London, where Cagliostro became entangled in a lottery fraud that led to his arrest. The court proceedings publicly documented, for the first time, the connection between “Count Cagliostro” and the Sicilian criminal “Giuseppe Balsamo.” But if his identity was exposed, his ambitions were not diminished. In April 1777, he was initiated into the Espérance Masonic Lodge in London through a theatrical ceremony that involved being hoisted into the air blindfolded, swearing blind oaths of absolute obedience, and mock suicide with a pistol.

Freemasonry in the eighteenth century was more than a social club. It was a network of power, influence, and esoteric knowledge that attracted aristocrats, intellectuals, and seekers across Europe. But traditional Freemasonry wasn’t enough for Cagliostro’s grand vision. He invented his own “Egyptian Rite,” a co-Masonic order that admitted women alongside men, with his wife serving as Grand Mistress. Proclaiming himself the Grand Cophta—the supreme master of this ancient wisdom—he embarked on a tour across Germany and Russia, seeking aristocratic converts to his unique blend of Masonic ritual, alchemy, and mysticism.

Cagliostro understood the theatrical power of refusal. When he arrived in Strasbourg on September 19, 1780, his reputation had preceded him. Soon, he received a summons from Cardinal Prince Louis de Rohan, the Bishop of Strasbourg and one of the wealthiest men in France. In a calculated display of independence, Cagliostro sent back a defiant reply: “If Monseigneur the Cardinal is sick, let him come to me and I will cure him; if he is well, he has no need of me, and I none of him.”

This audacity fascinated the Cardinal. Here was a prince of the church, a member of one of France’s most powerful families, and yet he came in person to meet this mysterious occultist. Rohan was immediately captivated. The Cardinal became Cagliostro’s devoted patron and protector, showering him with wealth and providing him entry into the highest levels of French society. But this patronage would soon entangle both men in a scandal that would shake the French monarchy to its foundations.

Anatomy of a Scandal
To understand how the Affair of the Diamond Necklace became one of history’s most consequential scandals, you have to understand the powder keg of resentment and intrigue that was pre-revolutionary France. This wasn’t just a jewel heist. It was a spark that ignited decades of accumulated grievances against the crown.

By the 1780s, Queen Marie Antoinette’s reputation was already in tatters. As “l’Autrichienne”—the Austrian—she was perpetually viewed as a foreigner with divided loyalties. Her perceived extravagance made her an easy target for public hatred, and salacious pamphlets accused her of everything from adultery to financial corruption. Among those she kept at arm’s length was Cardinal de Rohan. The Queen’s own mother, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, had dismissed Rohan as “a dreadful type without morals,” a view Marie Antoinette shared. Her influence was the primary reason this ambitious prelate was denied access to the inner circle at Versailles. For a man whose family was “too rich for their own good” and who dreamed of becoming one of the king’s ministers, this public disgrace was unbearable.

At the center of the scandal was a piece of jewelry so extravagant it bordered on the obscene. Parisian jewelers Boehmer and Bassenge had assembled a necklace containing 647 brilliant diamonds weighing 2,800 carats, with a price tag of around two million livres. They had intended it for King Louis XV to give his mistress, Madame du Barry, but the king’s death left them with a monstrously expensive and seemingly unsellable product. They repeatedly tried to sell it to Marie Antoinette, but she steadfastly refused. Whether due to its association with the late king’s mistress or because she found it too decadent, the Queen was resolute. She famously told the jewelers that France had “more need for seventy-fours [naval warships] than necklaces.” For the Queen, the matter was closed. For the jewelers, it was a financial catastrophe. And for a woman named Jeanne de la Motte, this extravagant, unwanted jewel represented an unparalleled opportunity.

Jeanne de St. Rémy claimed descent from an illegitimate branch of the royal House of Valois and styled herself the “Countess de la Motte-Valois.” In reality, she was a grifter of considerable charm and ambition but little character, living on the fringes of court society. She possessed a keen eye for human weakness, and she quickly identified Cardinal de Rohan’s singular obsession with regaining the Queen’s favor. Though Jeanne had never met Marie Antoinette, she masterfully convinced the Cardinal that she was an intimate friend of the Queen, positioning herself as the indispensable key to his political resurrection.

The first great deception occurred on the night of August 10, 1784. Jeanne arranged a clandestine midnight meeting for Rohan in the Grove of Venus within the gardens of Versailles. The woman who appeared in the semi-darkness was Nicole d’Oliva, a Parisian prostitute who bore a striking resemblance to the Queen. Her face obscured by a headdress and wearing the white muslin dress Marie Antoinette favored, she handed Rohan a single rose and uttered the words that sealed his conviction: “You may now hope that the past will be forgotten.” For the Cardinal, this brief, thrilling encounter was proof of his impending restoration to royal favor.

Having secured Rohan’s trust and received significant sums of money from him for the Queen’s supposed charities, Jeanne moved to the next phase. She presented him with a forged letter, allegedly from Marie Antoinette, commissioning him to secretly purchase the diamond necklace on her behalf. The document was signed “Marie-Antoinette de France,” a critical error, as French royals signed only with their baptismal names. As a former ambassador, Rohan should have recognized this immediately, but ambition is a powerful blindfold.

And here is where Count Cagliostro enters the story. As Rohan’s trusted confidant, the Cardinal proudly showed him the purchase contract. Cagliostro’s sharp eye immediately detected the fraud. He pointed out the forged signature and warned the Cardinal repeatedly that he was being deceived. He urged the Cardinal to confess the entire affair to King Louis XVI before it was too late. But Rohan, desperate to believe in his redemption, ignored the warning.

On January 29, 1785, the magnificent necklace was delivered to Rohan’s estate. Shortly afterward, Jeanne’s accomplice, Rétaux de Villette, arrived posing as the Queen’s courier to collect it. The necklace never reached Versailles. Instead, it was immediately smashed apart, and Jeanne’s husband took the loose gems to London to sell them piecemeal to English jewelers. As the date for the first payment passed with no money forthcoming, the jeweler Boehmer grew frantic. On August 5th, he sought out the Queen’s lady’s maid, Madame Campan, and blurted out the whole story. The plot was exposed.

On August 15th—the Feast of the Assumption—Cardinal de Rohan was summoned before King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette. As he attempted to explain, citing the letters and his commission, the Cardinal finally realized he had been cheated. But his explanation only infuriated the King, who was fiercely defensive of his wife. That an experienced courtier could overlook such an obvious forgery seemed unthinkable. The King suspected Rohan himself was behind the fraud. In a fit of rage, Louis ordered the Cardinal’s immediate arrest in full view of the entire court. Rohan was taken to the Bastille, soon followed by Jeanne de la Motte and Count Cagliostro.

The ensuing trial became a public spectacle. In the months leading up to the proceedings, the tabloid press of Paris ran riot. Both Jeanne de la Motte and Cagliostro published their defenses in pamphlets that sold by the tens of thousands. Jeanne accused Cagliostro of being a sorcerer and an emissary of masonic revolutionaries who had engineered the whole affair to discredit the crown. Cagliostro, in turn, portrayed himself as an innocent victim who had tried to warn the Cardinal, a benevolent healer caught up in someone else’s web of lies.

In May 1786, the Parlement de Paris delivered its verdicts. To the shock of the royal court, Cardinal de Rohan and Count Cagliostro received unqualified acquittals, a result the public celebrated as a victory against royal tyranny. Only Jeanne de la Motte was convicted. Her sentence was brutal: public whipping, branding with a “V” for voleuse, meaning “thief,” and life imprisonment.

But the acquittals were a devastating political blow to the monarchy. They were widely interpreted as a public repudiation of the King and Queen’s authority, suggesting that a high-ranking courtier could insult the Queen with impunity. Although Marie Antoinette was entirely innocent, the scandal permanently ruined her reputation, cementing her public image as a promiscuous and spendthrift foreigner. Despite his legal vindication, King Louis XVI—likely pressured by the humiliated Queen—banished Cagliostro from France. To a suspicious public, it appeared that an innocent man was being exiled to protect a guilty Queen, feeding the narrative of corruption that would soon doom the French aristocracy.

A Tale of Two Charlatans
Count Alessandro di Cagliostro remains one of the most polarizing figures of the eighteenth century. History has struggled to reconcile the dual interpretations of his character. Was he a celebrated miracle worker and master of magic, or merely a common criminal in exotic dress?

After his expulsion from France, Cagliostro’s reputation was permanently stained. A muckraking journalist in London publicly exposed him as the swindler Giuseppe Balsamo, publishing the sordid details of his Sicilian youth. He wandered Europe for a few more years, his celebrity tarnished but not entirely extinguished. In 1789, the very year revolution erupted in France, he made a fatal miscalculation and returned to Rome, where his past and his occult activities finally caught up with him. The Roman Inquisition arrested him and, as Giuseppe Balsamo, sentenced him to death for the crimes of freemasonry, heresy, and magic. Though the Pope commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, Cagliostro’s fate was sealed. He died in 1795 in the desolate Fortress of San Leo, far from the glittering salons where he had once held court as the Grand Cophta.

Jeanne de la Motte’s story ended differently, though no less dramatically. Despite her brutal sentence—the whipping, the branding, the life imprisonment—she managed to escape from prison in 1787 and fled to London. There she spent her remaining years writing venomous pamphlets attacking Marie Antoinette, accusing the Queen of everything from adultery to lesbianism to complicity in the necklace fraud itself. These libels, distributed across Europe, further poisoned public opinion against the Queen. In August 1791, Jeanne de la Motte died after falling from a window in London, whether by accident, suicide, or murder, no one knows for certain. She was just thirty-five years old.

Cardinal de Rohan’s fate was somewhat kinder, though his humiliation was complete. After his acquittal, Louis XVI exiled him from court and sent him back to his diocese. He lived quietly through the early years of the Revolution, but when the revolutionary government began persecuting the clergy, Rohan fled France in 1792. He died in exile in Germany in 1803, his dreams of ministerial power long since turned to ash. The proud prince of the church who had once entertained Cagliostro in his palace ended his days as a refugee, another casualty of the scandal.

As for King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, the Affair of the Diamond Necklace proved to be the beginning of the end. The scandal had stripped away the mystique that had protected the monarchy for centuries, exposing the court as corrupt, the Queen as suspect, and royal authority as impotent. The King who had insisted on the Cardinal’s public arrest, hoping to vindicate his wife, had instead created a spectacle that suggested the crown could neither control its own nobles nor protect its own dignity.

When revolution came in 1789, the old accusations resurfaced with deadly force. The image of Marie Antoinette created by the necklace scandal—extravagant, sexually promiscuous, a foreigner bleeding France dry—became the revolutionary caricature of “Madame Deficit.” The libels that Jeanne de la Motte had helped to spread from her London exile were recycled and amplified by revolutionary pamphleteers. On October 16, 1793, Marie Antoinette was guillotined before a jeering crowd in the Place de la Révolution. Louis XVI had preceded her to the scaffold nine months earlier. The diamond necklace that had never adorned the Queen’s neck had nonetheless helped to seal her fate.

Conclusion
The Affair of the Diamond Necklace, while not the direct cause of the French Revolution, served as its prelude. It exposed the court as a hotbed of intrigue and moral decay, stripping away the last vestiges of awe and respect that had once protected the crown. By turning a criminal case into a test of royal authority—a test the monarchy spectacularly failed—the scandal left the Bourbon dynasty critically vulnerable to the revolutionary storm that would break just three years later.

Cagliostro and de la Motte, in their different ways, were symptoms of a dying regime. She was the pragmatic grifter, focused on immediate wealth. He was the mystical charlatan, building a personal brand of occult celebrity. Together, their intertwined stories reveal the ambition, credulity, and systemic corruption that defined pre-revolutionary France in its final, decadent years. They didn’t cause the revolution, but they helped create the fertile ground of mistrust and disillusionment from which it would violently spring.

Cagliostro’s legacy proved far more enduring than his life. He became a cultural icon, immortalized in the works of literary giants like Goethe and Alexandre Dumas, who made him the central figure in his novel Joseph Balsamo, the first in his celebrated Marie Antoinette series. To Victorian moralists like Thomas Carlyle, Cagliostro was the “Quack of Quacks,” an emblem of fraudulence and the dangers of superstition. To early twentieth-century occultists, he was a misunderstood “Master of Magic,” a genuine adept caught in political machinations beyond his control and a martyr to the Inquisition’s fear of esoteric knowledge.

In truth, Cagliostro was something more complex than either interpretation suggests. He was a brilliant opportunist who understood the central tension of the Enlightenment, an era caught between its devotion to empirical reason and its deep-seated fascination with mysticism and the supernatural. In the perfumed salons of pre-revolutionary Europe, where aristocrats played with Egyptian mysteries and Masonic symbols while the world they knew crumbled around them, Cagliostro sold them exactly what they craved: the promise of ancient wisdom, spiritual regeneration, and access to powers beyond the ordinary world. That so many believed him speaks not just to his skill as a performer, but to the desperate hunger of an age that sensed its own approaching end.

Outro
If you enjoyed this episode, you can subscribe to Enchanted wherever you listen. This episode was produced by me with original music by Purple Planet. You can find them at purple dash planet dot com. If you want to learn more be sure to check out the sources link in the show notes. Special thanks to Enchanted’s Patreon patrons for supporting the production of this and every episode. If you want to support Enchanted, please visit patreon dot com slash enchantedpodcast. If you’re looking for a way to support the show that won’t cost you anything, you can always give Enchanted: The History of Magic & Witchcraft a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, Audible, or wherever you listen and recommend it to your friends. You can get in touch with me via email at enchantedpodcast at gmail dot com or follow on Bluesky at enchantedpodcast. As always, for more information and special features, visit enchantedpodcast dot net. I’m Corinne Wieben. Thank you for listening and stay enchanted.