He showed Madame de Pompadour a little box full of rubies, topazes, and diamonds.  Madame de Pompadour called Madame du Hausset to look at them; she was dazzled, but skeptical, and made a sign to show that she thought them paste.  The Count then exhibited a superb ruby, tossing aside contemptuously a cross covered with gems.  “That is not so contemptible,” said Madame du Hausset, hanging it round her neck.  The Count begged her to keep the jewel; she refused, and Madame de Pompadour backed her refusal.  But Saint-Germain insisted, and Madame de Pompadour, thinking that the cross might be worth forty louis, made a sign to Madame du Hausset that she accept.  She did, and the jewel was valued at 1,500 francs—­ which hardly proves that the other large jewels were genuine, though Von Gleichen believed they were, and thought the Count’s cabinet of old masters very valuable.

The fingers, the watch, the snuffbox, the shoe-buckles, the garter studs, the solitaires of the Count, on high days, all burned with diamonds and rubies, which were estimated, one day, at 200,000 francs.  His wealth did not come from cards or swindling—­no such charges are ever hinted at; he did not sell elixirs, nor prophecies, nor initiations.  His habits do not seem to have been extravagant.  One might regard him as a clever eccentric person, the unacknowledged child, perhaps, of some noble, who had put his capital mainly into precious stones.  But Louis XV. treated him as a serious personage, and probably knew, or thought he knew, the secret of his birth.  People held that he was a bastard of a king of Portugal, says Madame du Hausset.  Perhaps the most ingenious and plausible theory of the birth of Saint-Germain makes him the natural son, not of a king of Portugal, but of a queen of Spain.  The evidence is not evidence, but a series of surmises.  Saint-Germain, on this theory, ‘wrop his buth up in a mistry’ (like that of Charles James Fitzjames de la Pluche), out of regard for the character of his royal mamma.  I believe this about as much as I believe that a certain Rev. Mr. Douglas, an obstreperous Covenanting minister, was a descendant 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.