was going on behind his back—­found it out either because he was sharper than other ambassadors, or because a personage so extraordinary as Saint-Germain was certain to be very closely watched, or because the Dutch did not take to the Undying One, and told d’Affry what he was doing.  D’Affry wrote to de Choiseul.  An immortal but dubious personage, he said, was treating in the interests of France, for peace, which it was d’Affry’s business to do if the thing was to be done at all.  Choiseul 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 practice 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 dishonorable.  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 recognized 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