Vulgar History - So This Asshole： Count Cagliostro： A Messy Diva Who Lived For Drama

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00:00:30.000 Hello, my name is Anne Foster, and you're listening to a very special episode of, well,

00:00:45.120 it's sort of like Vulgar History presents Poland. So, this asshole. And this is a sneak peek, 0.99

00:00:52.980 basically. It's the first episode of a Patreon-only spinoff podcast I'm going to be doing.

00:00:59.160 So Vulgar History Season 2 is coming soon, but as I'm researching these stories of interesting and scandalous women from history, sometimes I find a dude who's also interesting. Vulgar History is a story of women. There's been a lot of men's historians over and a lot of men's history, so I don't necessarily feel like those are as untold as the women's stories are. 1.00

00:01:20.680 But basically, this is the first episode of So This Asshole, which is sort of where when I find some sort of like grosso guy when I'm researching the story of a scandalous woman, and I think there's enough to say about him that it merits his own little podcast, those are going to go here on this little side podcast.

00:01:39.860 and because this is the first of these spin-off podcasts, I wanted everybody to be able to hear

00:01:45.300 it so you can decide for yourself if this is something you're interested in hearing more of.

00:01:48.740 And if you are, I'm on patreon.com slash Anne Foster Writer. But I'm so... I can't... The story

00:01:56.640 I have to tell you today is bananas. And I guess another difference between Vulgar History Presents,

00:02:03.800 colon so this asshole and the vulgar history mothership is that for the vulgar history episodes 0.91

00:02:10.940 I do I look at a bunch of different sources I try and which one generally has to do because 0.98

00:02:17.240 there's often not a lot of sources about the women who I'm researching for the men's history

00:02:22.340 so this asshole episodes there's it's more just like when I'm reading about a woman's story and 0.58

00:02:29.280 I find a man, I'll share his story, but I'm not going to like delve into it through multiple 0.99

00:02:34.920 sources. So that is why today is brought to you by basically a book called How to Ruin a Queen

00:02:41.500 by Jonathan Beckman, which I can't recommend enough. It's an amazing historical true crime

00:02:47.360 saga. And it's the basis, it's one of the research things that I looked at when I was preparing,

00:02:53.600 I think the third episode of Vulgar History, which was about Jean de Lamotte, the affair

00:02:59.220 of the diamond necklace, etc. If you don't remember what that was all about, you can

00:03:03.440 listen to that podcast first if you want, or maybe after once you get the context of

00:03:06.720 all of this. But I think even in that podcast, I was like, I mentioned this person. And I

00:03:12.480 think I said offhandedly, like, that's just like a whole other story. And today, right

00:03:17.500 here, I'm going to tell you that whole story. And this is based off of the research from

00:03:22.460 this book, How to Ruin a Queen by Jonathan Beckman, who just really, he did all the hard

00:03:26.380 work for me for this, really. He looked at a bunch of different sources to put together a profile of

00:03:31.800 a man who was known as Count Cagliostro, and that is who we're going to be talking about today.

00:03:39.960 And this is a wild ride, so just get ready for it. So our story begins in Palermo in Sicily

00:03:49.000 on June 2nd, 1743, when a little baby boy was born named Giuseppe Balsamo.

00:03:56.400 His father was a jeweler who died shortly after the birth. So Giuseppe was brought up by his

00:04:02.440 mother and an older sister. And he was basically the worst, like from infancy. When he was a child,

00:04:10.340 he, and this is again, I'm reading this from the book, which you should read as well.

00:04:14.740 But so he, quote, robbed his own uncle and terrorized the authorities and anyone else who unwisely strayed into his path. According to the word on the street, as this is like, again, he's still a child. Little Giuseppe had stabbed a priest to death, but no one was brave enough to testify against him. A child.

00:04:33.940 So he got a pretty good education. He was especially good at chemistry and art. He briefly was enrolled to become a friar slash monk. But then he was apparently expelled from monk school for chanting the names of local sex workers when he was in charge of leading the monk prayers.

00:04:59.460 So he's just like, he's a character.

00:05:03.280 He's at all ages, in all moments of his life, he just always chooses the wildest choices.

00:05:11.460 So he was very interested in art.

00:05:15.060 His own personal art was the art of counterfeiting and forging.

00:05:19.480 Again, the book says he forged everything from wills to theater tickets.

00:05:24.720 He also claimed to be able to commune with ghosts and with the dead.

00:05:28.760 He read widely about alchemy, astrology, all sort of like the new agey things of the 18th century.

00:05:38.740 Basically, when he was about 20 years old, what happened is he convinced a local guy that if you paid him 60 pieces of silver, Giuseppe would lead this other guy to a hidden cave of wonders, of treasures or something.

00:05:55.200 but he needed the silver to vanquish the evil spirits who were guarding the treasure.

00:05:59.280 Guess what? He left town with the silver pieces and off he went to live this bonkers life.

00:06:07.620 So from this point on, he had just sort of traveled around the continent.

00:06:12.360 He made basically different literal like snake oil type things,

00:06:16.480 like face creams that he said would like cure your diseases.

00:06:19.920 And like, he was really good at, so he's a con artist slash forger slash spiritualist. He married a teenage girl named Lorenza Feliciani. And so they, he married her, a 14 year old. He was, let me see, older than that by this point, 43, 20 something years old.

00:06:43.460 He married a 14-year-old named Lorenza. They lived with her parents, then he didn't like the parents. So then they basically ran away from home. They got a ride on a train from a guy who Giuseppe worked as his secretary, and then he also prostituted his teenage wife to this guy as a form of payment or something. This is something that's going to happen a lot to Lorenza.

00:07:06.220 and i don't think she was into it basically um the guy who was driving the train um then run

00:07:15.060 away with all of their money so then they had known up as beggars um giuseppe and lorenza they 0.94

00:07:22.040 ran into casanova who i assume is a person i might dedicate another episode of so this asshole to

00:07:28.740 at some point in the future they got along great i guess and then at around this point they decided 0.93

00:07:35.200 that they were going to pretend to be Italian nobles. Lorenza was renamed Serafina, and that's

00:07:42.900 the name that we're going to call her by for the rest of this, because that is what she went by.

00:07:47.100 And I think it's around this time that Giuseppe started calling himself the Count Cagliostro.

00:07:52.560 And so their scheme at this point is that Serafina would seduce somebody, and then Cagliostro would

00:08:01.520 be like, oh, you know, I understand you slept with my wife, and that's fine. But could you get me 0.75

00:08:06.100 some sort of like a job, maybe as a apothecary, or as an artist? And this is just, this worked

00:08:13.880 for them, I guess, because he was so charming or something, they just kind of like skipped from

00:08:17.160 town to town. As con artists, in 1771, they wound up in England, still pretending to be

00:08:27.080 Italian noblemen, they started blackmailing people. So the book describes this as blackmailing

00:08:34.500 people who inexplicably found themselves locked in a bedroom with a naked Serafina. 0.90

00:08:39.040 So she was her job, and she's still, when did they get married? She's at least 20 by now, 0.98

00:08:45.040 I think, but basically her job is to seduce people, be the whole honeypot situation, 1.00

00:08:50.820 to get the money. In the next year, 1772, Serafina left Giuseppe briefly for a man that she had been 0.96

00:09:00.660 sleeping with for some sort of blackmail situation, but then the two of them fell in love with each

00:09:04.040 other. Giuseppe then accuses this guy of trying to poison him with a poison glass of wine and a

00:09:10.900 rotten egg. Serafina is sent off to live in a convent where she stayed for four months. 1776, 0.82

00:09:18.300 Still in England, Giuseppe establishes an alchemical laboratory and runs a racket selling winning lottery numbers. I don't know how he would be doing that. I guess I didn't realize that there was the lottery in 1776.

00:09:35.300 And he becomes a Freemason, which is the famous secret society. So I'm not going to get into

00:09:44.740 everything vis-a-vis Freemasons. But what happens is, so remember, he liked to read about

00:09:52.380 alchemy and about spiritualism. So the Freemasons have a very, allegedly, I don't know,

00:09:59.380 don't come and get after me, the Freemasons. But there's a definitely like a spiritual

00:10:04.040 New Age-y side to all the stuff that they were doing, and he really was into that side of things.

00:10:09.460 So he developed a belief that Freemason had been founded in ancient Egypt by a person called the

00:10:18.620 Great Copte. And then I think he started saying that he himself was sent by the Great Copte,

00:10:27.380 and he was brought on earth to fight off the necromancers. Like everything is just getting,

00:10:34.760 he advised other people, if you want to live forever, what you need to do is you just spend

00:10:39.420 weeks on end in the forest, subsisting only on water and grass until your hair and teeth fall

00:10:44.600 out and your skin peeled away. He used child mediums to tell the future. We're just going to 0.77

00:10:52.860 skip ahead a little bit. But basically through Freemasonry, he found a willing audience to all

00:10:58.720 of his theatrics and con man stuff. And he made lots of money doing various things. So he and

00:11:06.460 Serafina, who tragically was back with him, they ended up in, where are they? Oh my goodness. So

00:11:13.260 they went to St. Petersburg, Russia. At this time, Catherine the Great was ruling there.

00:11:20.180 She was not into Freemasonry.

00:11:22.580 She thought it was a dangerous harbinger of democracy.

00:11:25.660 She wanted nothing to do with him.

00:11:26.820 And later on, while he was there, he was sort of like a faith healer at this point.

00:11:32.620 So he would find people, he was curing people and people were actually getting better.

00:11:37.000 He did exorcisms.

00:11:38.720 I'm just kind of skimming ahead because there's a lot of stuff we need to get to.

00:11:42.360 But I hope you're getting sort of a sense of this man's whole situation.

00:11:47.900 eventually he was kicked out of the freemasons for being too intense and he had decided that

00:11:54.360 he was not just someone who had been sent by the great copt who is the alleged ancient egyptian

00:11:59.860 inventor of freemasons but he himself was the great copt so he was basically saying that he was

00:12:05.100 an immortal who has thousands of year old and then he also offered free health care to the

00:12:12.460 poorest members of society so the doctors got mad at him and the whole thing about like

00:12:17.680 And again, like some of the people he was helping, in fact, got better. And the reason that that happened was because this is like, where are we, 1780 in St. Petersburg, but basically most parts of Europe in 1780, like doctors weren't helping people very much.

00:12:35.760 they were sort of, there's still a whole like the humors, like let's bleed people, etc. Not an

00:12:42.600 understanding about holistic medicine, you know, things like maybe if you eat better food,

00:12:49.120 your immune system will be better. So he opened like literal soup kitchens. So he was helping

00:12:55.020 people by really focusing on nutrition and what is called pastoral care. So he was like feeding

00:13:01.860 people. So people who were sick, partially because of being malnourished, like got better.

00:13:05.760 from his help, whereas doctors didn't think at that time that that was important. So he

00:13:13.760 was basically, literally saving people. And he also gave them his like crazy snake oil treatments

00:13:22.180 as well. And he was treating poor people for free. But he was making money because he got a lot of

00:13:28.280 people to like rich people saw what he was doing and wanted to like, be his patrons and sponsor

00:13:33.520 him. Anyway, all of this is happening. And then in September 1780, he was so famous that he caught

00:13:41.380 the attention of a person whose name you might remember if you've listened already to the Jean

00:13:45.260 de Lamont episode, which is the person named the Cardinal de Rohan. So Cardinal de Rohan is the guy

00:13:54.240 played in the movie, The Affair of the Diamond Necklace, starring Hilary Swank. Rohan is played

00:14:00.560 by Jonathan Price. So that's kind of who I always picture. But basically, he's the man who was a

00:14:04.800 grosso, who was obsessed with Marie Antoinette, wanted to be friends with her. And Jean de Lamont 0.76

00:14:10.480 took advantage of that to steal his money to buy the world's ugliest necklace, etc. Again,

00:14:16.440 that's like the third episode of Vulgar History. So Rohan, who had some health problems, invited

00:14:21.840 Cagliostor to come and stay with him in Saverne. And Cagliostor was like, no, thank you. And Rohan

00:14:29.020 was like, no, no, no, I really want you to treat my asthma. So then he went up to find

00:14:32.800 Keglerosto, wherever he was, I think in Switzerland. And the two of them just realized

00:14:37.160 that each other were just sort of guys who liked fancy outfits and being awful. And they

00:14:43.500 basically got along. And Rohan was also just really gullible. We saw that with the Jean

00:14:49.440 Delamotte situation as well. And so the two of them became friends. Keglerosto went to

00:14:55.720 Severn to hang out with Rohan, who is super rich. And that's the sort of person Kegleristo

00:15:00.400 liked to hang out with. I'm assuming Serafina was with him. She kept trying to leave him and

00:15:03.880 it never quite worked. So she's probably there as well. But eventually, well, basically the other

00:15:08.880 people in Severn were like, these people are obviously grifters. Kegleristo and Serafina

00:15:13.940 were forced out in 1783. And then if we sort of just like fast forward, so this is like Kegleristo

00:15:20.880 and Rohan know each other. They lived together for a while. In 1785, so two days before Rohan

00:15:29.420 was due to hand over the necklace to the queen as part of the whole Affair of the Diamond

00:15:32.780 Necklace, again, Vocal History Episode 3, Mr. and Mrs. Kegler-Rostow arrived in Paris.

00:15:38.780 And they were so famous. Everybody was really excited to see them, not because of their

00:15:44.200 being criminals, but because Kegler-Rostow was this sort of like legendarily immortal

00:15:49.980 person who could, like, cure everybody. And so they went to hang out with Rohan, who was now in

00:15:54.880 Paris. And this is where they met Jean de Lamotte. Oh, and I should mention as well, Caglioste had

00:16:01.940 this thing where he was very well read. He thought he could speak a lot of languages, but he couldn't

00:16:07.880 really. So he spoke in what is described here as a melange of Italian and mangled French

00:16:12.700 interspersed with declamations in Arabic that he refused to translate. So he was, I think,

00:16:19.980 making up words, but it was like literally an Emperor's New Clothes situation where everyone

00:16:24.420 was so impressed and his charisma was so amazing. They're just like assumed he was saying things

00:16:31.200 that made sense. Basically, he was there. Jean de la Watt was getting Rohan to help her with this

00:16:38.380 scheme to steal this diamond necklace. And at the same time, Marie Antoinette was in the last

00:16:45.740 stages of pregnancy. And Jean told Rohan that Marie Antoinette was terrified of dying and

00:16:52.020 childbirth. So Jean was like, can I have a seance with Cagliostro so I can just like see if,

00:17:00.880 you know, so I could reassure Marie Antoinette that everything's going to be okay.

00:17:03.820 I'm not sure why she did this. I think she's just a shit disturber in general, 1.00

00:17:07.700 Jean de Lamont. But basically, so there was a seance. A seance was held. Cagliostro said he 0.99

00:17:13.840 needed a young virginal girl. And so Jean brought over her niece, Marie de Latour, who had been 0.54

00:17:20.460 living with her for a while. Calgarista had expected to be a little girl, but in fact,

00:17:25.900 she was 15 years old. It was crucial for the seance that she'd be a virgin, basically. So he

00:17:31.020 did. The seance, the teenage niece said that she saw Marie Antoinette. She said that she saw

00:17:39.740 some angels she was able to tell what sort of stuff she was supposed to say and now we're just

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00:20:58.700 That she had seen.

00:21:00.280 And then later he told her that she would have a certain dream.

00:21:04.000 And when she didn't, he was like,

00:21:04.920 oh, that's because you're not a virgin.

00:21:06.660 All of which to say, basically, this is where

00:21:09.580 how Rohan, this seance becomes important later

00:21:12.540 when everybody is arrested.

00:21:14.380 Which is, if you find it hard to keep track

00:21:16.780 of where the story is going,

00:21:18.140 like, welcome to this story.

00:21:20.020 It's just like, I couldn't get into Cagliosto in the Vulgar History episode because it's just like, what is even happening? It is le wild. So there's this seance. And then what happened is then, so when things start to go sour vis-a-vis the whole, I mean, in brief, what happened is that Jean de Lamont got this super expensive necklace.

00:21:45.080 she got Rohan to pay for it. And she said Marie Antoinette would pay him back. But in fact,

00:21:48.700 Marie Antoinette didn't know about it. And Jean just took the necklace and then had her lover 0.88

00:21:54.220 sell the diamonds separately, like at the end of Ocean's Eight. So Rohan started to think like,

00:22:01.180 I feel like I might have been robbed. And so he had a letter that was actually written by

00:22:06.320 Jean de Lamont's lover, I think, Villette, who was a good forger. And so Rohan was like,

00:22:12.240 Cagliostro, does this look like a letter written by Rianjana and Cagliostro, who remember is like

00:22:17.020 super talented forger, is like, no, not at all. That's like not even a good forgery.

00:22:21.500 So Rohan was sort of a little concerned about what was happening. So Jean was trying to sort

00:22:26.880 of cover her track. She started spreading rumors that Rohan had been seen making large gifts of

00:22:31.320 diamonds to the Cagliostros. So she's maybe trying to say like, oh, maybe Rohan is the one

00:22:36.080 who stole the necklace because what happened is the jewelers are like, no one's paid us for

00:22:41.200 this necklace. Jean took the necklace and she was just sort of like running around.

00:22:47.760 Everybody else was idiots. She was the smartest person. So basically, Rohan, with help of Calgary 1.00

00:22:53.080 Osto, figures out that he has been conned in this whole thing. Calgary Osto advised him,

00:22:59.380 basically, you have to turn Jean de Lamont over to the police and confess everything you know

00:23:04.840 to the king. And that is basically what happened. Ultimately, everybody was arrested. It came out

00:23:14.540 in the, when they're all being interviewed, Jean did her best to throw Cagliostro under the bus

00:23:19.400 is sort of like saying like, there was this seance, like, I don't know what this guy was

00:23:22.360 doing. I, Jean, am innocent in it. Like, my niece was involved. Like, the seance was about like,

00:23:28.260 is Marie Antoinette gonna live or die, which is like, basically treason, etc. Everybody got

00:23:34.440 arrested and they were put in jail in the Bastille where Kegliostor was so upset he was actually put

00:23:42.060 on suicide watch and a trial happened everybody sort of tried to blame everybody Jean acted very 0.91

00:23:50.820 innocently I just love that how it all sort of Kegliostor was just sort of like running around 0.83

00:23:56.260 doing all these like defrauding people for literally decades being terrible to his wife 1.00

00:24:01.360 and then what happened is he got caught up in a scheme that he basically had nothing to do with

00:24:05.740 but it was all just such a weird tabloid thing at one point um during this whole situation

00:24:13.440 kagliostro threw jean under the bus she got so mad that she threw a candlestick at him

00:24:19.900 which ended up burning her own eyes so apparently it was a candlestick that was lit

00:24:26.520 at the time. Cagliosto eventually was released from prison, but he was, I think,

00:24:33.680 banished from Paris or something for just being tangentially involved in the whole thing.

00:24:39.140 He, of course, published his own memoirs. Of course he did. Part of it, he described himself

00:24:46.440 simply as a doctor, one who cared altruistically for all mankind, irrespective of status.

00:24:52.080 This is where a lot of his life story stuff comes in.

00:24:56.320 It's not he was born to a poor jeweler in the Jewish part of Sicily.

00:25:02.820 But he talks about, you know, going to Egypt and, you know, talking about like, am I maybe an immortal? 0.54

00:25:11.420 You know, maybe I am.

00:25:13.040 There were rumors that Caglius and his wife had escaped from their cell in the form of a dove and a wood pigeon.

00:25:18.480 Like people just literally thought he was this.

00:25:21.360 immortal being. And so his memoirs, of course, became like instant bestsellers of their time.

00:25:28.480 Oh, yeah. So Kegler Oster was, in fact, fully acquitted because he literally had nothing to

00:25:33.400 do with that crime. But the whole trial had just sort of increased his level of fame.

00:25:39.300 But then he was put back on trial or something. Oh, yeah. And then at this point, he was exiled

00:25:44.380 from Paris. The whole thing is just like as complicated as possible as suits his whole

00:25:50.760 wild situation. Ultimately, he ends up back in England. He claimed that the prison guards had

00:26:00.120 stolen a whole bunch of expensive things that belonged to him. And in exchange, he wanted a

00:26:03.520 whole bunch of money back, which, you know, maybe was true. But given his track record,

00:26:09.100 was it true he found and met some more wealthy people including a person named um samuel swinton

00:26:18.780 who i haven't verified this but i have to think is somehow related to tilda swinton and i picture

00:26:25.460 this person looking exactly like tilda swinton he went to live with a an englishman who named

00:26:32.520 lord george gordon who became sort of obsessed with cagliostro he aggressively interrogated

00:26:37.740 everyone who came to visit, assuming that maybe they were a French spy trying to get Cagliostro.

00:26:42.260 So it was Cagliostro sort of like, this is kind of like jail, but less fun. Meanwhile,

00:26:47.480 the whole French Revolution is like going to be happening soon. And he's basically just sort of

00:26:54.520 bouncing from place to place until they bring out everybody's best wishes. Everybody in Lenin 0.68

00:27:00.960 hated them for being, and by them, I mean Cagliostro and his poor, long-suffering wife 0.59

00:27:06.760 victim Serafina. They had just no one would have them anymore because they had just blackmailed

00:27:13.180 everybody too much. So he and Serafina went through Italy. Serafina really wanted to return

00:27:19.680 back to her family who she hadn't seen in at this point something like 20 years since she was 14 0.70

00:27:24.940 and her whole life derailed by marrying this horrible person. So they arrived in Rome in May

00:27:31.980 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, what happened is that Keglerister was arrested.

00:27:39.460 Somebody had betrayed him, and the person who betrayed him was, in fact, Serafina. So he had

00:27:44.820 been getting increasingly unhinged, which for him is like real unhinged, likely because he had

00:27:53.360 late-stage syphilis, which sort of like devours your brain. Serafina had been trying to kill him 0.84

00:28:00.320 for a while. For instance, on one occasion, she had soaped the stairs to their house in the hopes 0.85

00:28:05.280 that he would slip and fall and break his neck, but he didn't. So she basically turned him in for

00:28:11.000 everything that they had done. She called it impiety, which is basically forcing her into

00:28:15.220 prostitution, blackmailing people constantly, and literally everything that he'd been doing

00:28:20.140 this whole time. Just to briefly get through this. So other allegations that he was accused with

00:28:26.320 included exposing himself this is a i'm just reading this list from the book um how to ruin 0.99

00:28:31.680 a queen by jonathan beckman he demanded worship of his cock as a relic like a holy relic encouragement 0.99

00:28:39.320 to fornication prostitution of his wife failure to observe fast days disparaging jesus mary the 0.99

00:28:45.440 apostles saints cardinals and priests whom he called nancy boys and cook olds destroying holy 0.97

00:28:50.420 objects forbidding prayer denying christ's divinity god's omnipotence and the existence of purgatory 0.69

00:28:55.620 idolatry, heresy, fraud, fortitude, slander, incitement to rebellion, and rejoicing at news

00:29:00.920 of revolution in France. So he was put in jail for this. And even though Serafina was the one

00:29:07.120 who turned him in, he wept all the time because he missed her so much. While they were in jail,

00:29:13.880 the police went into their house and they uncovered a number of suspicious objects,

00:29:18.460 quote, including a doll in the shape of a flexible and yielding woman,

00:29:22.800 two crossed swords, several rings of fire, apparatus of fumigation, tripods, and many

00:29:28.720 instruments of lechery. It was a huge investigation over 15 months. People went across all over Europe

00:29:37.240 to try and find all the people who he had swindled. The Pope came to sit in on the

00:29:41.840 interrogations of some of the witnesses. And somehow Cagliosto was sort of tied up with

00:29:47.640 everyone's worried about what was happening in France vis-a-vis the revolution. So him being

00:29:53.280 in Italy, they feared that he was there to sort of encourage them, but he was trying to be like,

00:29:58.000 this isn't... So again, it's just sort of like he was caught for not what he did, but he did so much

00:30:03.580 stuff. It's kind of like mixed emotions about this. So he was sentenced to death, but as he

00:30:10.440 knelt with a black hood over his head, the punishment was mitigated. So it's like they're

00:30:15.240 about to chop off his head. He's like literally on the whatever, you know, platform. I would have

00:30:20.200 his head chopped off and they're like, you know what? Life in prison. He was not allowed. Again, 1.00

00:30:25.640 he was on sort of suicide watch. He couldn't have pen or paper because they were worried he'd write

00:30:28.860 more memoirs or like encourage people to rebellion in secret code or whatever. His shaving implements

00:30:34.740 are confiscated as well. So he wouldn't slash his own throat. Serafina, tragically, even though she

00:30:41.080 was the one who turned to men she had been so involved with his dealings for so long the court

00:30:48.640 wasn't willing to let her go free anymore so she was sent basically to live forever in a convent

00:30:55.360 which i hope she enjoyed because she had a real bad run of things there so he was then put in a

00:31:02.440 prison that's like do you remember in early on in game of thrones in like season two or something

00:31:07.900 when they're in the place where Catelyn's sister is

00:31:12.180 and it's like a castle on top of a really high mountain

00:31:15.080 and her sister's there 0.91

00:31:16.980 and she's like breastfeeding her like teenage son

00:31:19.300 and Tyrion is put in jail

00:31:21.660 that's like at the top of a cliff

00:31:22.960 and it's like there's no wall on one side

00:31:25.940 because you don't need a wall

00:31:27.240 because if you try to leave through that open side

00:31:30.160 you'll just fall down this like extremely high cliff

00:31:32.340 basically that's where Catelyn was put

00:31:34.040 so he's put in a prison

00:31:36.440 that's at the peak of a cliff 700 meters above a valley

00:31:39.800 with a sheer drop on all sides. 0.98

00:31:43.400 Machiavelli, another potential, so this asshole subject, 0.98

00:31:47.060 called it the strongest fortress in Europe. 0.97

00:31:49.520 They worried that Cagliosto might be liberated

00:31:51.860 by a squadron of hot air balloonists

00:31:54.000 because it's like around the time when that was a thing.

00:31:57.980 So they're like, we're going to put him in this really high up prison

00:32:00.120 so no one can, so he can never escape.

00:32:02.560 It's like, ooh, but what if hot air balloons?

00:32:04.660 So then they moved him to a lower down cell with less of a view, I guess.

00:32:11.520 So even though he didn't have writing implements, he fashioned a pen using straw from his mattress

00:32:17.740 and combined snuff like tobacco with urine and blood to make ink.

00:32:24.300 After he died, it was found that he wrote a little tiny book.

00:32:28.380 Well, not a little tiny book, but he found a little tiny piece of paper on which he'd

00:32:32.980 written using a pen made of straw and ink made of tobacco, blood, and urine. He wrote Pius VI,

00:32:40.220 which is the name of the Pope. So Pius VI, in order to comply with the desires of the Queen

00:32:44.620 has caused my sufferings, woe betide France, Rome, and her followers. Because of the likely syphilis 0.71

00:32:52.620 scenario, he was acting more and more sort of unpredictably. He was crying. He seemed to be

00:33:01.360 hallucinating things. He would starve himself, and then he would binge on food. He would

00:33:07.320 upend chamber pots over his captors, hiding fish in his cell to the point that the rotting stench

00:33:15.200 would choke the priests who came to get him to try and confess. They had to drill a peephole

00:33:20.280 in the door so he could be under 24-hour surveillance. So even though the cell kept

00:33:27.560 being searched, even though there was this peephole. Even after he'd been shackled to the

00:33:31.420 wall, it was found that he had stowed away, somehow sharpened screws and rods. How had he

00:33:37.300 sharpened screws? How had he done this? Well, shackled to the walls. They were there so he

00:33:42.660 could ambush the guards, potentially. And maybe he said that because maybe he was a thousands

00:33:47.160 of year old Egyptian Freemason god. Who knows? But basically, that's not true. Because on the

00:33:55.880 morning of august 26 1795 he had a stroke the book describes it as syphilis had etched itself

00:34:01.660 through his brain um he refused the last rites of christianity because he believed in not that

00:34:08.580 religion and had spent the last long time refusing to repent um he died at age 52 and although he

00:34:15.940 lived in like so much glamour and like the outfits and the jewels and everything he died

00:34:20.860 basically just this little wisp of a man with a long beard because he wasn't allowed to have

00:34:26.860 shaving tools. And that was the end of Cagliostro, which is just like, what the fuck 0.99

00:34:36.900 was that story? Jesus Christ. So for these episodes, I was thinking in vulgar history, 0.99

00:34:44.260 we score the women's stories on our scandaliciousness scale, not because we're 0.56

00:34:50.260 comparing people against other people but just we're kind of comparing the stories against each

00:34:54.240 other's stories and seeing sort of how they how they shape up and for these man stories i was

00:34:59.900 thinking well actually i was thinking and i'm gonna do it's gonna be like minus numbers to sort

00:35:06.900 of to show like we're not it's a whole different scale and this is kind of just like how much of 0.98

00:35:13.260 an asshole were you, but I'm going to use the same, the same judgments. So the first number 0.99

00:35:20.820 or the first category, there's four parts. The first category is scandaliciousness. And this

00:35:27.140 story, Hagliostro, I mean, just like, I want to make it very clear. He was a horrible person. 0.67

00:35:33.620 He, um, professionally blackmailed people. He seems to have potentially killed some people. 0.99

00:35:40.880 he just like annoyed everybody he ever met he ruthlessly abused his wife who he married

00:35:48.340 at age 14 like destroyed her life never took the blame for anything just awfulness and

00:35:56.120 completely scandalous this is like i can't imagine a scandalous thing this man did not

00:36:04.040 do i mean to the point that he's like in a jail cell on top of a cliff where they're like

00:36:09.480 there's the really the real threat that somebody might come and rescue him in hot air balloons in

00:36:15.260 like the 18th century because he claims that he's a thousands of year old ancient egyptian

00:36:22.440 god who invented freemasons it's just like i'm giving him 10 minus 10 for scandalousness because

00:36:31.740 i can't think of a scandalousness element not touched upon by this story the next category

00:36:37.720 is interesting because it's scheminess and i mean god knows there was schemes here there was like

00:36:43.400 literal schemes he like hatched and executed plans to like blackmail people and trick people and make

00:36:49.960 like fake medicine for people that wasn't real medicine but the thing is he kind of bought into

00:36:55.380 his own legend like at a certain point and i don't think it's just the um syphilis i think it's like

00:37:04.060 he started really buying into the fact that he thought he was this god at which point it stops

00:37:08.780 being schemey and it starts being sort of like sad and sort of weird and the fact that he was

00:37:14.840 arrested for twice but not for scheme he did if you know what i mean the scheminess i'm not sure

00:37:22.440 i'm gonna give him five minus five for scheminess for significance is an interesting one because

00:37:28.920 it's certainly a name I'd heard of. If you look up Cagliostro anywhere on the internet in an

00:37:36.480 image search, what you get a lot of is there's a movie called The Castle of Cagliostro, which is

00:37:41.660 not about this guy specifically, but it is about sort of a famous villainous thief type person.

00:37:48.780 Like the word and the name Cagliostro is still well known, but he himself isn't well known.

00:37:54.140 And in terms of significance, he didn't really, although he was like super famous at the time, he personally didn't really affect any major things to happen. He just sort of like fucked up a bunch of people's lives. So significance, because his name is like quasi still used, I'm going to say like two, two for significance. 0.56

00:38:18.420 and the final category is sexism so when we're looking at the women's story that's the sexism

00:38:22.820 bonus where we give them extra points if they just because of living in a misogynist society 1.00

00:38:28.860 they had like extra challenges i give them the bonus to make up for the fact that they 0.99

00:38:33.280 did the best they could in a shitty situation and he and i think the guys and so this asshole 0.95

00:38:38.380 episodes is going to get like a minus sexism minus where it's like how much of a misogynist 1.00

00:38:45.280 asshole was he? And I'm going to give him a 10 out of 10 for that because he was, 0.98

00:38:51.700 the treatment of his wife alone is horrifying. So that's a 10. Let me remember the numbers I

00:39:00.420 just said. So it's 25, 20, 27, minus 27 for Cagliostro, which is just like out of 40,

00:39:10.680 just kind of says his story was notable bonkers weird interesting what a horrible person and

00:39:21.320 that's the thing that's the thing like when i'm researching and in this case i was researching

00:39:24.900 the story of jean de lamont and just coming across the start of a calioster like i'm just 0.96

00:39:29.420 saying to myself out loud at points just like oh this asshole and that's where i just felt a need 0.86

00:39:35.960 to share this story with all of you so this is a special feature um so vulgar history presents 0.98

00:39:43.780 so this asshole the future episodes of this particular spin-off are going to be patreon

00:39:49.800 only so if you go to patreon.com and foster writer you can see the information there about 0.85

00:39:55.540 all the stuff you get by turning my patreon which is mostly just like helping me out financially

00:40:03.060 but I don't blackmail you to do it. So in that sense, you wouldn't be like the people helping

00:40:10.980 out Cagliostro because I'm not going to just run away with your money. I'm going to make more

00:40:15.240 podcast episodes, but also I'm going to be making the free Vulgar History podcast episodes forever

00:40:20.960 for the foreseeable future. And those are just going to be on the regular stream where you're

00:40:24.940 listening to this. Anyway, you can find more Vulgar History stuff at I'm on Instagram and I'm on

00:40:31.860 Twitter. And I have a website that's annfosterwriter.com. So you can see more stuff

00:40:36.960 about me there. And thank you for joining me on this wild journey. I know, I know I'm going to

00:40:45.360 remember who this man is for a very long time because the story is just like the most fucked 0.99

00:40:50.420 up. So my name is Ann Foster. Have a great one. Talk to you next time. 0.97

00:40:54.980 Vulgar History is hosted, written, and researched by Anne Foster

00:41:00.100 and edited by Christina Lumagi

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Vulgar History - February 05, 2020

So This Asshole： Count Cagliostro： A Messy Diva Who Lived For Drama

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