Cagliostro: The Splendour and Misery of a Master of Magic
book · 1910
LINK
SUMMARY
Early-twentieth-century biography of Cagliostro, digitized with clean OCR on archive.org. Read by hand on 2026-06-03 to ground (by paraphrase, not verbatim quotation): the 'Wine of Egypt' rejuvenation elixir Cagliostro sold (a vial of 'the precious liquid', two drops to be taken when the moon entered its last quarter, with the advertising anecdote of a maid 'rejuvenated thirty years'); the commercial remedies he marketed ('Wine of Egypt', 'Elixir Vitae', 'extract of Saturn', 'rejuvenating powders and elixir of life'); the imposture charge that he manufactured his remedies 'with the object of defrauding the public by attributing to them fabulous properties which he knew they did not possess'; and his birth as Giuseppe Balsamo in Palermo (Trowbridge gives '1743 or 1748'). Title, author, and 1910 date copied from the archive.org catalogue record.
NOTES
Trowbridge’s 1910 biography is the bundle’s extractable narrative source for Cagliostro’s rejuvenation trade. It documents the “Wine of Egypt” and allied elixirs of life he sold to wealthy clients, the legend of decades of restored youth attached to them, and the formal charge that he sold remedies he knew to be without the properties he advertised. It is a period secondary work, used for the rejuvenation-claim narrative and the imposture framing, with the biographical dates cross-checked against standard reference works.