dame de Gergy, at Venice, fifty years earlier, in 1710. We see
how pleasantly he left Madame de Pompadour in doubt on that point.

He pretended to have the secret of removing flaws from diamonds. The
King showed him a stone valued at 6,000 francs--without a flaw it
would have been worth 10,000. Saint-Germain said that he could remove
the flaw in a month, and in a month he brought back the
diamond--flawless. The King sent it, without any comment, to his
jeweller, who gave 9,600 francs for the stone, but the King returned
the money, and kept the gem as a curiosity. Probably it was not the
original stone, but another cut in the same fashion, Saint-Germain
sacrificing 3,000 or 4,000 francs to his practical joke. He also said
that he could increase the size of pearls, which he could have proved
very easily--in the same manner. He would not oblige Madame de
Pompadour by giving the King an elixir of life: 'I should be mad if I
gave the King a drug.' There seems to be a reference to this desire of
Madame de Pompadour in an unlikely place, a letter of Pickle the Spy
to Mr. Vaughn (1754)! This conversation Madame du Hausset wrote down
on the day of its occurrence.

Both Louis XV. and Madame de Pompadour treated Saint-Germain as a
person of consequence. 'He is a quack, for he says he has an elixir,'
said Dr. Quesnay, with medical scepticism. 'Moreover, our master, the
King, is obstinate; he sometimes speaks of Saint-Germain as a person
of illustrious birth.'

The age was sceptical, unscientific, and, by reaction, credulous. The
_philosophes_, Hume, Voltaire, and others, were exposing, like an
ingenious American gentleman, 'the mistakes of Moses.' The Earl
Marischal told Hume that life had been chemically produced in a
laboratory, so what becomes of Creation? Prince Charles, hidden in a
convent, was being tutored by Mlle. Luci in the sensational philosophy
of Locke, 'nothing in the intellect which does not come through the
senses'--a queer theme for a man of the sword to study. But, thirty
years earlier, the Regent d'Orleans had made crystal-gazing
fashionable, and stories of ghosts and second-sight in the highest
circles were popular. Mesmer had not yet appeared, to give a fresh
start to the old savage practice of hypnotism; Cagliostro was not yet
on the scene with his free-masonry of the ancient Egyptian school. But
people were already in extremes of doubt and of belief; there might be
something in the elixir of life and in th