endant of the captive Mary Stuart.
However, Saint-Germain is said, like Kaspar Hauser, to have murmured
of dim memories of his infancy, of diversions on magnificent
terraces, and of palaces glowing beneath an azure sky. This is
reported by Von Gleichen, who knew him very well, but thought him
rather a quack. Possibly he meant to convey the idea that he was
Moses, and that he had dwelt in the palaces of the Ramessids. The
grave of the prophet was never known, and Saint-Germain may have
insinuated that he began a new avatar in a cleft of Mount Pisgah; he
was capable of it.

However, a less wild surmise avers that, in 1763 the secrets of his
birth and the source of his opulence were known in Holland. The
authority is the 'Memoirs' of Grosley (1813). Grosley was an
archaeologist of Troyes; he had travelled in Italy, and written an
account of his travels; he also visited Holland and England,[46] and
later, from a Dutchman, he picked up his information about
Saint-Germain. Grosley was a Fellow of our Royal Society, and I
greatly revere the authority of a F.R.S. His later years were occupied
in the compilation of his Memoirs, including an account of what he did
and heard in Holland, and he died in 1785. According to Grosley's
account of what the Dutchman knew, Saint-Germain was the son of a
princess who fled (obviously from Spain) to Bayonne, and of a
Portuguese Jew dwelling in Bordeaux.

[Footnote 46: _Voyage en Angleterre_, 1770.]

What fairy and fugitive princess can this be, whom not in vain the
ardent Hebrew wooed? She was, she must have been, as Grosley saw, the
heroine of Victor Hugo's _Ruy Blas_. The unhappy Charles II. of Spain,
a kind of 'mammet' (as the English called the Richard II. who appeared
up in Islay, having escaped from Pomfret Castle), had for his first
wife a daughter of Henrietta, the favourite sister of our Charles II.
This childless bride, after some ghostly years of matrimony, after
being exorcised in disgusting circumstances, died in February 1689. In
May 1690 a new bride, Marie de Neubourg, was brought to the grisly
side of the crowned mammet of Spain. She, too, failed to prevent the
wars of the Spanish Succession by giving an heir to the Crown of
Spain. Scandalous chronicles aver that Marie was chosen as Queen of
Spain for the levity of her character, and that the Crown was
expected, as in the Pictish monarchy, to descend on the female side;
the father of the prince might be anybody. What was n