“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 marveled 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 our 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 was anywhere left his trail in official documents; he lives in more or less legendary memoirs, alone.

At what precise date Saint-Germain became an intimate of Louis XV., the Duc de Choiseul, Madame de Pompadour, and the Marechal de Belle-Isle, one cannot ascertain.  The writers of memoirs are the vaguest of mortals about dates; only one discerns that Saint-Germain was much about the French Court, and high in the favor of the King, having rooms at Chambord, during the Seven Years’ War, and just before the time of the peace negotiations of 1762-1763.  The art of compiling false or forged memoirs of that period was widely practiced; but the memoirs of Madame du Hausset, who speaks of Saint-Germain, are authentic.  She was the widow of a poor man of noble family, and was one of two femmes de chambre of Madame de Pompadour.  Her manuscript was written, she explains, by aid of a brief diary which she kept during her term of service.  One day M. Senac de Meilhan found Madame de Pompadour’s brother, M. de Marigny, about to burn a packet of papers.  “It is the journal,” he said, “of a femme de chambre of my sister, a good, kind woman.”  De Meilhan asked for the manuscript, which he later gave to Mr. Crawford, one of the Kilwinning family, in Ayrshire, who later helped in the escape of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette to Varennes, where they were captured.  With the journal of Madame du Hausset were several letters to Marigny on points of historical anecdote.[1]