idiotic lord must have been among the few comforts of her situation
in a Court overridden by etiquette. The reader of Madame
d'Aulnoy's contemporary account of the Court of Spain knows what a
dreadful dungeon it was. Again, if born at Bayonne about 1706, the
Count would naturally seem to be about fifty in 1760. The purity
with which he spoke German, and his familiarity with German
princely Courts--where I do not remember that Barry Lyndon ever met
him--are easily accounted for if he had a royal German to his
mother. But, alas! if he was the son of a Hebrew financier,
Portuguese or Alsatian (as some said), he was likely, whoever his
mother may have been, to know German, and to be fond of precious
stones. That Oriental taste notoriously abides in the hearts of
the Chosen People.[1]


[1] Voyage en Angleterre, 1770.


"Nay, nefer shague your gory locks at me,
Dou canst not say I did it,"


quotes Pinto, the hero of Thackeray's Notch on the Axe. "He
pronounced it, by the way, I DIT it, by which I KNOW that Pinto was
a German," says Thackeray. I make little doubt but that Saint-
Germain, too, was a German, whether by the mother's side, and of
princely blood, or quite the reverse.

Grosley mixes Saint-Germain up with a lady as mysterious as
himself, who also lived in Holland, on wealth of an unknown source,