SAINT-GERMAIN, COMTE DE (C. I 7 I 0-C. 178o) called der Wundermann, a celebrated adventurer. Of his parentage and place of birth nothing is definitely known; the common version is that he was a Portuguese Jew. He knew nearly all the European languages, and spoke German, English, Italian, French (with a Piedmontese accent), Portuguese and Spanish. Grimm affirms him to have been the man of the best parts he had ever known. He was a musical composer and a capable violinist. His knowl edge of history was comprehensive, and his accomplishments as a chemist, on which be based his reputation, were in many ways real and considerable. He pretended to have a secret for removing flaws from diamonds, and to be able to transmute metals. The most remarkable of his professed discoveries was of a liquid which could prolong life, and by which he asserted he had him self lived 2,000 years.
Saint-Germain is mentioned in a letter of Horace Walpole's as being in London about 1743, and as being arrested as a Jacobite spy and released. Walpole says : "He is called an Italian, a Spaniard, a Pole; a somebody that married a great fortune in Mexico and ran away with her jewels to Constantinople; a priest, a fiddler, a vast nobleman." At the French court, where he appeared about 1748, he exercised for a time extraordinary in fluence and was employed on secret missions by Louis XV. ; but, having interfered in the dispute between Austria and France, he was compelled in June 176o, on account of the hostility of the duke of Choiseul, to remove to England. He appears to have
resided in London for one or two years, but was at St. Petersburg in 1762, and is asserted to have played an important part in connexion with the conspiracy against the emperor Peter III. in July of that year, a plot which placed Catherine II. on the Russian throne. He then went to Germany, where, according to the Memoires authentiques of Cagliostro, he was the founder of freemasonry, and initiated Cagliostro into that rite. He was again in Paris from 177o to 1774, and after frequenting several of the German courts he took up his residence in Schleswig-Holstein, where he and the Landgrave Charles of Hesse pursued together the study of the "secret" sciences. He died at Schleswig in or about 1780-1785, although he is said to have been seen in Paris in 1789.