Lascelles Wraxall, again, in _Remarkable Adventures_ (1863), says:
'Whatever truth there may be in Saint-Germain's travels in England and
the East Indies, it is indubitable that, for from 1745 to 1755, he was
a man of high position in Vienna,' while in Paris he does not appear,
according to Wraxall, till 1757, having been brought from Germany by
the Marechal de Belle-Isle, whose 'old boots,' says Macallester the
spy, Prince Charles freely damned, 'because they were always stuffed
with projects.' Now we hear of Saint-Germain, by that name, as
resident, not in Vienna, but in London, at the very moment when Prince
Charles, evading Cumberland, who lay with his army at Stone, in
Staffordshire, marched to Derby. Horace Walpole writes to Mann in
Florence (December 9, 1745):
'We begin to take up people ... the other day they seized an odd man
who goes by the name of Count Saint-Germain. He has been here these
two years, and will not tell who he is, or whence, but professes that
he does not go by his right name. He sings, plays on the violin
wonderfully, composes, is mad, and not very sensible. He is called an
Italian, a Spaniard, a Pole; a somebody that married a great fortune
in Mexico, and ran away with her jewels to Constantinople; a priest, a
fiddler, a vast nobleman. The Prince of Wales has had unsatiated
curiosity about him, but in vain. However, nothing has been made out
against him; he is released, and, what convinces me he is not a
gentleman, stays here, and talks of his being taken up for a spy.'
Here is our earliest authentic note on Saint-Germain; a note omitted
by his French students. He was in London from 1743 to 1745, under a
name not his own, but that which he later bore at the Court of France.
From the allusion to his jewels (those of a deserted Mexican bride?),
it appears that he was already as rich in these treasures as he was
afterwards, when his French acquaintances marvelled at them. As to his
being 'mad,' Walpole may refer to Saint-Germain's way of talking as if
he had lived in remote ages, and known famous people of the past.
Having caught this daylight glimpse of Saint-Germain in Walpole,
having learned that in December 1745 he was arrested and examined as a
possible Jacobite agent, we naturally expect to find contemporary
official documents about his examination by the Government. Scores of
such records exist, containing the questions put to, and the answers
given by, suspected persons. But we vainly hunt through the Newcastle
MSS. and the State Papers, Domestic, in the Record Office, for a trace
of the examination of Saint-Germain. I am not aware that he has
anywhere left his trail in official documents; he lives in more or
less legendary memoirs, alone.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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