Note 37 — Chapter VII

Nearly all who have written on Cagliostro have erred in stating that the letter contained the “predictions that the Bastille would be destroyed, its site become a public promenade, and that a king would reign in France who would abolish lettres de cachet and convoke the States General”—all of which actually occurred three years later in 1789. The predictions are the invention of the Inquisition-biographer to whose short-comings, to put it mildly, attention has frequently been called. Cagliostro merely says that if in the future he was permitted to return to France he would only do so “provided the Bastille was destroyed and its site turned into a public promenade.” A copy of this letter, now become very rare, is to be seen in the French National Archives.