On the other hand, if one accepts the Caltagirone-Cagliostro identification (which I am loth to do), then it may contain some occult message which I have failed to decipher.

That is indeed a possibility, but if there be such a message, then it is likely to be understood only by the surviving lodges of Egyptian Freemasons which were founded by Cagliostro himself. There is one in Palermo, another in Naples itself, a third in St Petersburg (inactive, I am told) and a fourth, which is also the largest and most vocal, in Akron, Ohio. Yet even the Akron lodge has failed to respond to my appeals for help.

A week after Caltagirone pressed the manuscript upon me, his death was announced on the front page of Il Mattino, the principal Neapolitan daily. He was described in the frank manner of the Italian press as "a notorious swindler".

So I was left with the manuscript, and, intrigued, set to work on it.

Further discrepancies appeared, and it was soon clear to me that, whatever its provenance, whatever its element of authenticity, the memoirs had been the work of more than one hand, and at different periods. I became convinced that even the eighteenth-century paper was a blind or false trail or red herring. It seemed strange, for instance, that on page 187 of the manuscript Tiberius should be quoting Nietzsche. This, together with the tone of some passages, made me wonder whether a gloss had been put on the original (if it existed) by some resident of Capri in, perhaps, the first decade of this century. And this suspicion was intensified when my all-seeing agent, Giles Gordon, remarked that one incident seemed to be drawn from The Story of San Michele by Axel Munthe.