on that point.

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