Translation by Robert Hutwohl^[1]

Cagliostro is not identical with Josef Balsamo. The “Occult Review” (London) recently published a detailed article about this. The deliberate mixing of Cagliostro with the vagabond Balsamo is the work of a notorious blackmailer of the time named Thevenau de Maraude [R.H.—Charles Théveneau de Morande], who invented his slanders on behalf of Cagliostro’s envious people and enemies. All that Cagliostro and Balsamo had in common was that each had a wife named Feliciani. Cagliostro’s wife’s first name was Seraphina and Balsamo’s wife was Lorenza. Cagliostro was (as Dr. Franz Hartmann also writes in his “Neue Lotusblüten”) undoubtedly the son of a high-ranking Knight of Malta; Balsamo was of low birth and a common scoundrel. Neither one nor the other is said to have had anything to do with the necklace story, and Cagliostro’s involvement consisted of nothing other than his being good friends with Cardinal Rohan. It is also unlikely that the highly educated, art-loving Cardinal Rohan would have felt so much sympathy and admiration for an uneducated charlatan — which is how Cagliostro has been portrayed up to now.

^[1] Georgievitz-Weitzer, D., Editor (1911). “Cagliostro Researchers” [Dr. Franz Hartmann mentioned] Hutwohl, Robert (Trans.) Zentralblatt für Okkultismus 5, no. 2  (August), 126. [R.H.—German text extracted directly from the Journal page.]