Word: cagliostros
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Lover's Doubt. The land of Voltaire and Descartes, France has been equally hospitable to Nostradamus and Cagliostro. Ordinarily tightfisted Frenchmen pay more than a billion dollars annually-more than France spends on scientific research-to an odd-lot collection of soothsayers, seers, fortunetellers, clairvoyants, gypsies, faith healers and prophets. In Paris alone, there is one charlatan for every 120 Parisians, compared with one doctor for every 514 citizens and one priest for every...
...extraordinary people, it was the adventurer Casanova and the swindler Cagliostro who raised deception to a way of life and a high art; Machiavelli who made it a cardinal principle of statecraft; while Mussolini was by no means the first Italian leader to perish finally believing the deceptions he had himself created. At the start, Barzini thinks, Mussolini "watched him self playing the great role he was invent ing as gusto," he but went over the along, years he hamming at it began to with believe the stirring show and the lies and flattery, came to read his own news...
This gap between appearance and reality, pretension and performance plagued the Age of Reason (roughly 1657-1757) and made it an age of paradox. The age professed skepticism and credulously embraced charlatans like Count Cagliostro, who had a yellow pill that would keep one permanently young, à la Dorian Gray. The age prattled of liberty, but the man the intellectual French Encyclopedists hailed as a philosopher king, Frederick the Great, was described by one British observer as "the completest tyrant God ever made. I had rather be a post horse than his first Minister, or his brother, or his wife...
...opera with bogus lyrics but real swords. Filippo Marinetti, founder and chief exhibitionist of the crackpot futurist cult (he later proposed kidnaping Pope Benedict XV in an airplane and dropping him into the Adriatic), hailed D'Annunzio as "the prodigious seducer, the ineffable descendant of Casanova and Cagliostro...
...native intelligence has carried off careers as military surgeon, psychology professor, cancer researcher, dean of a school of philosophy, language teacher, law student, assistant prison warden, Trappist monk and the devil knows what else (TIME, Dec. 3, 1951; Feb. 25, 1957). Perhaps the most astonishing thing about this Cagliostro is his conscience; more often than not, he commits crimes of kindness and sins of social betterment...