seul replied in a rage by the same courier.
Saint-Germain, he said, must be extradited, bound hand and foot, and
sent to the Bastille. Choiseul thought that he might practise his
regimen and drink his senna tea, to the advantage of public affairs,
within those venerable walls. Then the angry minister went to the
King, told him what orders he had given, and said that, of course, in
a case of this kind it was superfluous to inquire as to the royal
pleasure. Louis XV. was caught; so was the Marechal de Belle-Isle.
They blushed and were silent.

It must be remembered that this report of a private incident could
only come to the narrator, Von Gleichen, from de Choiseul, with whom
he professes to have been intimate. The King and the Marechal de
Belle-Isle would not tell the story of their own discomfiture. It is
not very likely that de Choiseul himself would blab. However, the
anecdote avers that the King and the Minister for War thought it best
to say nothing, and the demand for Saint-Germain's extradition was
presented at the Hague. But the Dutch were not fond of giving up
political offenders. They let Saint-Germain have a hint; he slipped
over to London, and a London paper published a kind of veiled
interview with him in June 1760.

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 dishonourable. 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
recognised 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