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