Secret_History

46 The Secret History of the World
memoirs, Chroniques de l’oeil de boeuf, that, when she met the Count at a soiree
given by the aged Countess von Georgy, whose late husband had been
Ambassador to Venice in the 1670’s, that the old Countess remembered Saint-
Germain from those former times. So, the old girl asked the Count if his father
had been there at the time. He replied no, but HE had!
Well, the man that Countess von Georgy had known was at least 45 years old
then, at least 50 years previously, and the man standing before her could not be
any older than 45 now! The Count smiled and said: “I am very old”.
“But then you must be nearly 100 years old”, the Countess exclaimed.
“That is not impossible”, the Count replied. He then related some details that
convinced the old lady that it was really him she had met in Venice.
The Countess exclaimed: “I am already convinced. You are a most extraordinary
man, a devil!”
“For pity’s sake!”, cried Saint-Germain in a loud voice heard all around the
room. “No such names!” He began to tremble all over and left the room
immediately.
A pretty dramatic introduction to society, don’t you think? But, was it real, or
the ploy of a very clever con artist? Did he deliberately choose to adopt the name
of someone long dead, about whom he may have already known a great deal, and
then did he set out to deceive and con in a manner well known to us in the present
time as the modus operandi of the psychopath? Was he a snake oil salesman or a
true man of mystery?
In any event, that was the beginning of the “legend”, and many more stories of a
similar nature spread through society like wildfire. Saint-Germain apparently fed
the fires with hints that he had known the “Holy Family” intimately and had been
invited to the marriage feast at Cana where Jesus turned water into wine, and
dropped casually the remark that he “had always known that Christ would meet a
bad end”. According to him, he had been very fond of Anne, the mother of the
Virgin Mary, and had even proposed her canonization at the Council of Nicaea in
A.D. 325! What a guy! A line for every occasion!
Pretty soon the Count had Louis XV and his mistress, Madame de Pompadour,
eating out of his hand, and it certainly could be true that he was a French spy in
England when he was arrested there, because he later did handle some sticky
business for the credulous king of France.
In 1760, Louis sent Saint-Germain to the Hague as his personal representative to
arrange a loan with Austria that was supposed to help finance the SevenYears’ war
against England. But, while in Holland, the Count had a falling out with his friend
Casanova, who was also a diplomat at the Hague. Casanova tried hard to discredit
Saint-Germain in public, but without success. One has to wonder just what it was
that Casanova discovered or came to think about Saint-Germain at this time.
In any even, Saint-Germain was making other enemies. One of these enemies
was the Duc de Choiseul, King Louis’ Foreign Minister. The Duc discovered that
Saint-Germain had been scoping out the possibilities of arranging a peace between
England and France. Now, that doesn’t sound like a bad plan at all, but the Duc
managed to convince the King that this was a dire betrayal, and the Count had to
flee to England and then back to Holland.