“This Great Lover Won Women by Magic Powers” (1931) by Tally Mason

In November 1930, Fawcett Publications released a new pulp: Mystic Magazine. This lavishly illustrated, large-size pulp covered all manner of mystical phenomena, from seances to mediumship, palmistry to graphology, astrology to vampirism. In content, Mystic Magazine was a mix of nonfiction articles and the occasional story, written in the confessional style of Ghost Stories. In tone, the pulp seemed to cater more toward women—there was a kind of spiritualist lonely hearts column, regular features about what numerology or astrology said about your husband or love prospects, and the stories tended to have a romantic bent.

The pulp ran for four issues. With the fifth issue, Fawcett changed the title and approach; it became True Mystic Crimes (April 1931), adding in sensationalist material about Chinese tongs in San Francisco, murders caused by cults or solved by dreams or clairvoyance, zombies in Haiti, and all that sort of thing. Complete as the change was, the pulp still failed to find an audience among the crowded newsstands. The pulp ended there, to be no more than a rare collectible for pulp aficionados.

August Derleth earned his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Wisconsin in 1930. Derleth’s earliest letters from Clark Ashton Smith, addressed to him in Milwaukee in November 1930, occasionally touch on Mystic Magazine. Despite not being listed on the masthead, Derleth was an associate editor for the magazine, and published at least three stories and articles in Mystic under the byline “Tally Mason.” Still, the writing for the pulp was on the wall:

Dear Smith. In view of the fact the Fawcetts have discontinued Mystic together with its editor, my address after 17 February will be Sauk City, Wisconsin.

As Always,
August

August Derleth to Clark Ashton Smith, 6 Feb 1931, Eccentric, Impractical Devils 37

Back in his native Sauk City, August Derleth would begin writing for a pulp magazine titled Weird Tales. The date of his departure suggests the Fawcetts might have let him go before the transition to True Mystic Crimes—but that issue still contained two pieces from “Tally Mason,” whose manuscripts still survive among Derleth’s papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Both pieces were nominally nonfiction articles; “Your Picture Can Be Your Death Warrant” was about how images could contain a mystical link to their original subject, citing The Portrait of Dorian Gray as one example; the second, “This Great Lover Won Women by Magic Powers” was about the 18th-century occultist Alessandro Cagliostro, whose reputation and infamy has, over the centuries, become the stuff of legend and a great deal of fiction.

Yet “This Great Lover Won Women by Magic Powers” is interesting because of one particular thread that Derleth wove into the mix of facts and fiction:

But Cagliostro’s coming to Paris had been heralded also by the quickening of many feminine hearts, for not only was he known as a seer, but also as one of the greatest of lovers.

First to fling herself at him was the young and beautiful Countess de Beauregard, who asked the seer to conduct a séance at her home. This he did. The countess, who did not really believe that Cagliostro could invoke the dead, began making overtures in the seer’s direction. Cagliostro discreetly edged toward a mirror, and suddenly the astounded Countess saw the reflection of the dead count, her husband, looking ruefully at her from the glass.

Certain that a trick had been played on her, the countess began to deride Cagliostro. Her sister, the countess Micheline D’erlette, fell in with her plan to trap the seer, but one day while visiting Cagliostro, herself fell in love with him.

This she could, of course, never tell her sister, and in consequence, she was put to the necessity of paying private visits to Cagliostro, ostensibly for psychic aid.

The Countess de Beauregard finally saw that her sister had no intention of helping her trap the seer, and in anger she went to the Count d’Erlette, whose jealousy was very easily aroused.

One night his sister-in-law sent a message to the Count saying that his wife was closeted with Cagliostro. As it happened, the Countess d’Erlette had gone to the seer, but it was solely to ascertain the whereabouts of an old lover, all traces of whom had been lost. This her husband could not know, and, suspecting her of a liason with the seer, he set out in anger for Cagliostro’s house.

Madame Cagliostro told him that she herself had seen her husband go toward the poorer districts with the Countess d’Erlette. Distraught, the Count followed.

After diligent search, he came upon Cagliostro walking with a woman in a street near to the house later identified as that of Dr. Guillotin, inventor of the instrument that bears his name. The woman certainly looked like his wife, and no sooner had Cagliostro seen his pursuer, however, than something happened to the nobleman.

“I was making great haste after him,” he told later, “when suddenly there came between us a black cloud, and I was forced to halt in my tracks, for fear of stumbling out into the roadway and being run over by passing vehicles.

“In a moment this cloud passed, and again I saw the seer before me. but this time, he had no woman with him. Instead, I saw by his side, a small black spaniel, whose eyes were fixed on me!

“Cagliostro had turned, the dog with him, and he now passed into an alley, the dog still following. I was astounded, for I thought I had seen my wife at his side. So certain was I of this, that I went to the alley and peered in, but there was no one in sight.

“Later, when I had convinced myself that this illusion had been brought on me by the seer’s mystic power, I went home, and there found my wife.

“To my surprise, she was waiting for me, told me of her encounter with Cagliostro, and of what she had learned regarding our future, every word of which came true.

“She then added gently that Cagliostro did not like interference of any kind when he was doing a lady a service. I did not know quite how this was meant, but I knew when I got back to my own room.

“For there on my bed lay a ring I had dropped in my excitement on seeing the black dog with Cagliostro, and could not find again, no matter how much I had sought after it.

“Then I remembered dimly that the dog had snapped at something as the seer passed me!”

The young Count d’Erlette subsequently confronted Cagliostro with this evidence, but the seer only shrugged his shoulders and said, “The ways of the powers are many, and it is not for such as you to question them!“

Tally Mason (August Derleth), True Mystic Crimes 56-57

A sequel to this episode quickly followed, on the occasion of Cagliostro giving a dinner-party after the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, just before leaving France for England. Once again, the Count d’Erlette featured prominently:

[Cagliostro] followed this prediction with that of the fall of the great French prison, the Bastille, and the creation of July 14 as National Day.

At this point, the Count d’Erlette asked rather scoffingly whether Cagliostro could see into his future and tell him what would become of the house of Erlette in the Revolution.

Cagliostro nodded and replied, “First, I see your father dead in this bed of heart failure at the same time that the mob is clamoring at the gates of your house in Paris.

“Then, I see the lovely Countess, your wife, killed by order of the provisionary government.”

“And me?” Asked the Count jovially. “What is to become of me?”

“You will flee with your son, Michel, but not before you have seen your younger brother, Auguste, killed by the mob. You will go to the German countries; I see you in Bavaria. Only for a short time will you be there. Your son will wed, and in turn have a son named Michel. Both you and your son will return to Paris during the time of Napoleon, but your grandson will remain in Bavaria.

“The House of Erlette will come to being once more during a decade many years from now, but the line that you represent will never again return to Paris. Your grandson, Michel, will go to America, and his sons will Iive there for all time. I see your grandson buried near the great American river called ‘Father of the Waters!'”

This Count d’Erlette ridiculed word for word, but every pronouncement came to pass, and even to this day the grave of Michel, the grandson, may be seen in a small town in southern Wisconsin.

Tally Mason (August Derleth), True Mystic Crimes 95

For readers familiar with Mythos fiction, the name “d’Erlette” might ring a bell.

Only a wizard would possess those mouldering, maggoty volumes of monstrous and fantastic lore; only a thaumaturgical adept would date the darker mysteries of the Necronomicon, Ludvig Prinn’s Mysteries of the Worm, the Black Rites of Luveh-Keraph, priest of Bast, or Comte d’Erlette’s ghastly Cultes des Goules.

Robert Bloch, “The Suicide in the Study,” Weird Tales June 1935

Lovecraft would shed some light on this little mystery in a letter:

Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules? An invention of Bloch’s. The name Comte d’Erlette, however, represents an actual (& harmless) ancestor of August W. Derleth’s, who was a royalist emigré from France in 1792 & became naturalized in Germany under the slightly Teutonised name of Derleth. His son, emigrating to Wisconsin in 1835, was the founder of the Derleth line in America.

H. P. Lovecraft to Willis Conover, Jr., 14 Aug 1936, Letters to Robert Bloch & Others 382

In other words, Derleth incorporated his own slightly-fictionalized family history to pad out his article on Cagliostro.

The letter in which August Derleth revealed this heritage to Lovecraft does not appear to survive, but in their correspondence, Lovecraft begins to refer to him as “Auguste-Guillaume, Comte d’Erlette” (ES 2.455) in February 1932, so the subject probably came up in early 1932 or late 1931. Lovecraft would refer to Derleth as the “Comte d’Erlette” in his letters occasionally from then on, and the Cultes des Goules was added to the shelf of eldritch tomes that appear in his stories, and that of their contemporaries and literary heirs, though Bloch’s choice of attributing the volume to d’Erlette sometimes led to some confusion as to who actually invented it.

Derleth himself never chose to expand on his fictional ancestor in any of his Mythos fiction, though in his Solar Pons story “The Adventure of the Six Silver Spiders” (1950), the premise of the story is a Mythos red herring involving the sale of the private library of Paul Guillaume, the Comte d’Erlette, which reads in part:

I glanced at several of the other titles listed—d’Erlette, Paul Henri, Comte de: Cultes des Goules, Rouen, 1737; Prinn, Ludvig: De Vermis Mysteriis, Prague, 1807; Liber Ivonis (Author Unknown), Rome, 1662;—all manifestly occult literature.

August Derleth, “The Adventure of the Six Silver Spiders,” The Solar Pons Omnibus 2.848

Solar Pons is quick to point out to his companion Parker that the whole catalogue is a hoax.

“But the Count d’Erlette?”

“Erlette is a provincial name in France. The family existed in some numbers before the Revolution, but the last member to carry a title died in 1919.[“]

August Derleth, “The Adventure of the Six Silver Spiders,” The Solar Pons Omnibus 2.849

Derleth was not the only one to have a bit of fun with his fictitious ancestor, as many subsequent writers did write about the author of Cultes des Goules and his family.

It is not too much to say that “Tally Mason’s” article on Cagliostro is part of the secret history of the Mythos—not a direct part of the web of interconnecting stories that Lovecraft & Co. wrote, but a precursor and bit of background. One has to wonder if Derleth ever showed the piece to Lovecraft.

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Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

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