The Lock and Key Library: The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations: Real Life
Science
The Lock and Key Library: The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations: Real Life
Detective and mystery stories; Fiction; Parapsychology
His name, we read, when announced after his death, will astonish
the world more than all the marvels of his life. He has been in
England already (1743-17--?); he is a great unknown. Nobody can
accuse him of anything dishonest or dishonorable. When he was here
before we were all mad about music, and so he enchanted us with his
violin. But Italy knows him as an expert in the plastic arts, and
Germany admires in him a master in chemical science. In France,
where he was supposed to possess the secret of the transmutation of
metals, the police for two years sought and failed to find any
normal source of his opulence. A lady of forty-five once swallowed
a whole bottle of his elixir. Nobody recognized her, for she had
become a girl of sixteen without observing the transformation!
Saint-Germain is said to have remained in London but for a short
period. Horace Walpole does not speak of him again, which is odd,
but probably the Count did not again go into society. Our
information, mainly from Von Gleichen, becomes very misty, a thing
of surmises, really worthless. The Count is credited with a great
part in the palace conspiracies of St. Petersburg; he lived at
Berlin, and, under the name of Tzarogy, at the Court of the
Margrave of Anspach. Then he went, they say, to Italy, and then
north to the Landgrave Charles of Hesse, who dabbled in alchemy.
Here he is said to have died about 1780-85, leaving his papers to
the Landgrave but all is very vague after he disappeared from Paris
in 1760. When next I meet Saint-Germain he is again at Paris,
again mysteriously rich, again he rather disappears than dies, he
calls himself Major Fraser, and the date is in the last years of
Louis Philippe. My authority may be caviled at; it is that of the
late ingenious Mr. Van Damme, who describes Major Fraser in a book
on the characters of the Second Empire. He does not seem to have
heard of Saint-Germain, whom he does not mention.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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