generously provided him with the means of escape.
After he had been nearly a year in prison he succeeded in getting free,
leaving the poor girl behind to learn that he was already married, and to
lament in solitude that she had given her heart to an ungrateful vagabond.

When he left Marseilles, he had not a shoe to his foot or a decent garment
to his back, but was provided with some money and clothes by his wife in a
neighbouring town. They then found their way to Brussels, and by dint of
excessive impudence, brought themselves into notice. He took a house,
fitted up a splendid laboratory, and gave out that he knew the secret of
transmutation. In vain did M. Percel, the brother-in-law of Lenglet du
Fresnoy, who resided in that city, expose his pretensions, and hold him up
to contempt as an ignorant impostor: the world believed him not. They took
the alchymist at his word, and besieged his doors to see and wonder at the
clever legerdemain by which he turned iron nails into gold and silver. A
rich _greffier_ paid him a large sum of money that he might be instructed
in the art, and Aluys gave him several lessons on the most common
principles of chemistry. The greffier studied hard for a twelvemonth, and
then discovered that his master was a quack. He demanded his money back
again; but Aluys was not inclined to give it him, and the affair was
brought before the civil tribunal of the province. In the mean time,
however, the greffier died suddenly; poisoned, according to the popular
rumour, by his debtor, to avoid repayment. So great an outcry arose in the
city, that Aluys, who may have been innocent of the crime, was
nevertheless afraid to remain and brave it. He withdrew secretly in the
night, and retired to Paris. Here all trace of him is lost. He was never
heard of again; but Lenglet du Fresnoy conjectures that he ended his days
in some obscure dungeon, into which he was cast for coining or other
malpractices.

THE COUNT DE ST. GERMAIN.

This adventurer was of a higher grade than the last, and played a
distinguished part at the court of Louis XV. He pretended to have
discovered the elixir of life, by means of which he could make any one
live for centuries; and allowed it to believed that his own age was
upwards of two thousand years. He entertained many of the opinions of the
Rosicrucians; boasted of his intercourse with sylphs and salamanders; and
of his power of drawing diamonds from the earth, and pearls from the s