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."

A queen of Spain might have carried off any quantity of the
diamonds of Brazil. The presents of diamonds from her almost