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 traveled in Italy, and written an account of his travels; he also visited Holland and England, 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.

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 favorite 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 Neuborg, 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 needed was simply a son of the queen of Spain.  She had, while Queen, no son, as far as is ascertained, but she had a favorite, a Count Andanero, whom she made minister of finance.  “He was not a born Count,” he was a financier, this favorite of the Queen of Spain.  That lady did go to live in Bayonne in 1706, six years after the death of Charles ii., her husband.  The hypothesis is, then, that Saint-Germain was the son of this ex-Queen of Spain, and of the financial Count, Andanero, a man, “not born in the sphere of Counts,” and easily transformed by tradition into a Jewish banker of Bordeaux.  The Duc de Choiseul, who disliked the intimacy of Louis XV. and of the Court with Saint-Germain, said that the Count was “the son of a Portuguese Jew, who deceives the court.  It is strange that the King is so often allowed to be almost alone with this man, though, when he goes out, he is surrounded by guards, as if he feared assassins everywhere.”  This anecdote is from the Memoirs of Gleichen, who had seen a great deal of the world.  He died in 1807.

It seems a fair inference that the Duc de Choiseul knew what the Dutch bankers knew, the story of the Count’s being a child of a princess retired to Bayonne—­namely, the ex-Queen of Spain—­and of a Portuguese-Hebrew financier.  De Choiseul was ready to accept the Jewish father, but thought that, in the matter of the royal mother, Saint-Germain “deceived the Court.”