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 jeweler, 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. Vaughan (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 skepticism.  “Moreover, our master, the King, is obstinate; he sometimes speaks of Saint-Germain as a person of illustrious birth.”

The age was skeptical, unscientific, and, by reaction, credulous.  The philosophes, Hume, Voltaire, and others, were exposing, like an ingenious American gentleman, “the mistakes of Moses.”  The Earl of 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 the philosopher’s stone; it might be possible to make precious stones chemically, and Saint-Germain, who seemed to be over a century old at least, might have all these secrets.

Whence came his wealth in precious stones, people asked, unless from some mysterious knowledge, or some equally mysterious and illustrious birth?