The next day, the Abbe wrote word that Madame Bontemps also said to him, “You came into the world almost black,” and that this was the fact.  This colour, which lasted for some time, was attributed to a picture which hung at the foot of his, mother’s bed, and which she often looked at.  It represented a Moor bringing to Cleopatra a basket of flowers, containing the asp by whose bite she destroyed herself.  He said that she also told him, “You have a great deal of money about you, but it does not belong to you;” and that he had actually in his pocket two hundred Louis for the Duc de La Valliere.  Lastly, he informed us that she said, looking in the cup, “I see one of your friends—­the best—­a distinguished lady, threatened with an accident;” that he confessed that, in spite of all his philosophy, he turned pale; that she remarked this, looked again into the cup, and continued, “Her head will be slightly in danger, but of this no appearance will remain half an hour afterwards.”  It was impossible to doubt the facts.  They appeared so surprising to the King, that he desired some inquiry to be made concerning the fortune-teller.  Madame, however, protected her from the pursuit of the Police.

A man, who was quite as astonishing as this fortune-teller, often visited Madame de Pompadour.  This was the Comte de St. Germain, who wished to have it believed that he had lived several centuries.

[St. Germain was an adept—­a worthy predecessor of Cagliostro, who expected to live five hundred years.  The Count de St. Germain pretended to have already lived two thousand, and, according to him, the account was still running.  He went so far as to claim the power of transmitting the gift of long life.  One day, calling upon his servant to, bear witness to a fact that went pretty far back, the man replied, “I have no recollection of it, sir; you forget that I have only had the honour of serving you for five hundred years.”

St. Germain, like all other charlatans of this sort, assumed a theatrical magnificence, and an air of science calculated to deceive the vulgar.  His best instrument of deception was the phantasmagoria; and as, by means of this abuse of the science of optics, he called up shades which were asked for, and almost always recognised, his correspondence with the other world was a thing proved by the concurrent testimony of numerous witnesses.

He played the same game in London, Venice, and Holland, but he constantly regretted Paris, where his miracles were never questioned.

St. Germain passed his latter days at the Court of the Prince of Hesse Cassel, and died at Plewig, in 1784, in the midst of his enthusiastic disciples, and to their infinite astonishment at his sharing the common destiny.]