Count of St. Germain

Based on Wikipedia: Count of St. Germain

Imagine meeting someone at a dinner party who casually mentions having given advice to Jesus Christ. Or claims to be five hundred years old. Or refuses to eat anything while holding an entire room spellbound with conversation for hours on end. Now imagine that this person is not locked away somewhere, but is instead a guest of kings, a friend to philosophers, and a man whose name appears in diplomatic dispatches across Europe.

This was the Count of St. Germain.

He might have been the greatest con artist of the eighteenth century. He might have been a genuine polymath ahead of his time. He was almost certainly one of the most fascinating people who ever lived, and we still don't know who he actually was.

A Man of Many Names

The Count of St. Germain—if that was even close to his real name—appeared in European high society sometime in the early 1740s. Before that? A void. He materialized as if from nowhere, already wealthy, already educated, already possessed of talents that seemed almost impossible for one person to hold.

He could paint. He could compose music. He played the violin so beautifully that listeners wondered if he had sold his soul for the gift. He spoke at least a dozen languages with such fluency that native speakers couldn't agree on his nationality. The English thought he might be Spanish or Portuguese. The French weren't sure. Nobody was sure of anything about him, which seems to have been exactly how he liked it.

Throughout his life, he cycled through identities like costume changes: the Marquis of Montferrat, Count Bellamarre, Knight Schoening, Count Weldon, Count Soltikoff, Manuel Doria, Graf Tzarogy, Prince Ragoczy. Each name came with its own backstory, its own implications, its own air of mystery. He was a one-man witness protection program, except he was hiding from the truth rather than from danger.

The Origin Stories

Where did he come from? Take your pick.

Some said he was an Alsatian Jew named Simon Wolff, born in Strasbourg. Others insisted he was a Spanish Jesuit called Aymar. Still others claimed he was Portuguese nobility, the Marquis de Betmar. The most romantic theory held that he was the illegitimate son of an Italian princess, born in San Germano in Savoy around 1710, raised by a tax collector named Rotondo.

But the story he himself told—at least toward the end of his life—was stranger and grander than any of these. He claimed to be the son of Francis II Rákóczi, the Prince of Transylvania.

Now, Transylvania in this context is not the Gothic horror-movie landscape of vampire fiction. The Principality of Transylvania was a real political entity in what is now Romania, and Francis II Rákóczi was a real prince who led a major uprising against the Habsburg Empire in the early 1700s. He was eventually defeated and died in exile in the Ottoman Empire in 1735.

Francis II's will mentions a son named Leopold George, who was believed to have died at age four. But what if he didn't die? What if his death was faked to protect him from Habsburg persecution? The timing almost works. When St. Germain arrived in Schleswig in 1779, he told Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel that he was eighty-eight years old. That would put his birth at 1691, when Francis II was fifteen—young, but not impossibly so.

There's no hard evidence for any of this. But it would explain a great deal: the wealth, the education, the languages, the air of genuine aristocracy that even his harshest critics admitted he possessed.

The Wonderman

Voltaire, the great French philosopher who skewered frauds and fools with gleeful precision, should have been St. Germain's natural enemy. Instead, he seemed genuinely puzzled. He called St. Germain "the Wonderman," and wrote that "he is a man who does not die, and who knows everything."

Was Voltaire being sarcastic? Probably. But the fact that he bothered to comment at all tells you something about St. Germain's cultural impact.

The Count's claims were outrageous. He said he was three hundred years old. He claimed to possess the secret of the Universal Medicine—the alchemical elixir of life that could cure any disease and extend human lifespan indefinitely. He said he had mastered the secrets of nature itself. He boasted that he could take ten or twelve small diamonds and fuse them into one large perfect stone without losing any weight in the process.

These were not modest claims. These were the claims of either a madman or a showman of extraordinary audacity.

What He Could Actually Do

Here's the thing that makes St. Germain more than just another charlatan: he appears to have been genuinely talented at a remarkable number of things.

He composed music that was good enough to be performed at the Haymarket Theatre in London. His songs appeared in an opera called "L'incostanza delusa" in 1745. Jean Overton Fuller, a biographer who catalogued his musical works, lists six sonatas for two violins with harpsichord or cello accompaniment, seven solos for violin, several English songs, and over forty Italian arias. This is not the output of a dilettante. This is serious work.

He worked as a color specialist, helping establish a porcelain factory in Weesp in the Netherlands. Porcelain manufacturing was cutting-edge technology in the eighteenth century—the Europeans had only recently figured out how to make it at all, after centuries of importing it from China at enormous expense. The chemistry of glazes and pigments was genuine technical knowledge.

King Louis XV of France, who was notoriously difficult to impress, gave St. Germain a laboratory at the royal château of Chambord and one hundred thousand francs to develop new dyes for French textiles. The king himself worked in this laboratory, which suggests either that St. Germain's chemistry was genuinely interesting or that Louis XV was catastrophically bored. Probably both.

The Witnesses

We know about St. Germain largely through the people who met him and wrote about the experience. Their accounts are remarkably consistent in tone, even when they disagree about details.

Horace Walpole, the English writer and politician, encountered him in London in 1745, when St. Germain was briefly arrested on suspicion of being a Jacobite spy. Walpole's description is wonderfully confused:

He has been here these two years, and will not tell who he is, or whence, but professes that he does not go by his right name; and that he never had any dealings with any woman. He sings, plays on the violin wonderfully, composes, is mad, and not very sensible. He is called an Italian, a Spaniard, a Pole; somebody that married a great fortune in Mexico, and ran away with her jewels to Constantinople; a priest, a fiddler, a vast nobleman.

Note that even here, in a report that's trying to be dismissive, Walpole admits that St. Germain "plays on the violin wonderfully" and "composes." The man had real skills.

Walpole also noted that St. Germain spoke Italian and French with perfect facility, though neither seemed to be his native language. He understood Polish and quickly learned English. But "Spanish or Portuguese seemed his natural language." He was pale, with extremely black hair and a beard, dressed magnificently, wore several jewels, and clearly had access to substantial money, though no one could figure out where it came from.

Casanova's Assessment

Giacomo Casanova needs no introduction—he was the legendary lover whose memoirs remain a primary source for understanding eighteenth-century European society. He was also a sophisticated observer of human nature and not easily fooled.

Casanova met St. Germain multiple times, starting in Paris in 1757. His verdict? "The most enjoyable dinner I had was with Madame de Robert Gergi, who came with the famous adventurer, known by the name of the Count de St. Germain." He called St. Germain a "celebrated and learned impostor," but also admitted: "It may safely be said that as a conversationalist he was unequalled."

Here's the fascinating part. Casanova didn't eat during that dinner. Neither did St. Germain. Both men were too busy—Casanova listening, St. Germain talking. The Count held the entire table captive from the beginning of the meal to the end.

Casanova's assessment captures the contradiction at the heart of St. Germain:

He was a scholar, linguist, musician, and chemist, good-looking, and a perfect ladies' man. This extraordinary man, intended by nature to be the king of impostors and quacks, would say in an easy, assured manner that he was three hundred years old, that he knew the secret of the Universal Medicine. Notwithstanding his boastings, his bare-faced lies, and his manifold eccentricities, I cannot say I thought him offensive. In spite of my knowledge of what he was and in spite of my own feelings, I thought him an astonishing man as he was always astonishing me.

"The king of impostors" who was somehow not offensive. An obvious liar who was nonetheless "astonishing." Casanova, who had seen everything, couldn't quite dismiss him.

The Impersonator Problem

St. Germain's legend grew so large that it spawned imitators. A mime and comedian known as "Mi'Lord Gower" performed impersonations of the Count in Parisian salons. His version was even more outrageous than the original—he claimed, for instance, to have personally advised Jesus Christ.

The stories got mixed up. Hearsay about the impersonator became confused with accounts of the real man. This is probably the source of some of the most extreme claims attributed to St. Germain. When someone says St. Germain claimed to be two thousand years old or to have attended the wedding at Cana, they may actually be repeating jokes from Mi'Lord Gower's comedy routine.

This is an important reminder about historical sources. The further a story travels from its origin, the more distorted it becomes. St. Germain was strange enough on his own. He didn't need the embellishments.

The Diplomat

In 1749, Louis XV began using St. Germain for diplomatic missions. This is remarkable. Whatever you think of the Count's claims about alchemy and immortality, the King of France trusted him enough to represent French interests abroad.

The Seven Years' War, which lasted from 1756 to 1763, was a global conflict that some historians consider the true first world war. France was fighting Britain across multiple continents. In March 1760, at the height of this conflict, St. Germain traveled to The Hague and attempted to open secret peace negotiations between France and Britain.

This was not a trivial errand. He stayed with the banking firm of Adrian and Thomas Hope in Amsterdam—these were major European financiers. He claimed to be authorized to borrow money on behalf of Louis XV, using diamonds as collateral. British diplomats concluded that St. Germain had backing from the Duc de Belle-Isle and possibly from Madame de Pompadour herself, the king's powerful mistress.

The negotiations failed, but not because St. Germain was exposed as a fraud. They failed because of French internal politics. The Duc de Choiseul, the French Foreign Minister, was pro-Austrian and didn't want peace with Britain on terms that Belle-Isle and Pompadour might arrange. Choiseul convinced Louis XV to disavow St. Germain and demand his arrest.

What happened next shows how seriously St. Germain was taken by people in power. Count Bentinck de Rhoon, a Dutch diplomat, considered the arrest warrant to be internal French politicking and didn't want Holland involved. But refusing to extradite St. Germain would have been diplomatically awkward. So de Rhoon quietly arranged for St. Germain to receive a passport from the British Ambassador and slip away to England.

The passport was issued "in blank"—without a name—so St. Germain could travel under an assumed identity. This was, apparently, an accepted practice for important people who needed to disappear. He sailed from Hellevoetsluis to London in May 1760.

The Wanderer

After the failed peace mission, St. Germain spent the next two decades moving across Europe. St. Petersburg, Berlin, Vienna, Milan, Amsterdam, Venice, Livorno, Nuremberg, Mantua, The Hague—he left traces everywhere and roots nowhere.

Sometime in 1779, he arrived in Schleswig, in what is now northern Germany, and came under the protection of Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel. The Prince was a genuine occult enthusiast who took St. Germain's claims seriously. He called the Count "one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived."

St. Germain died on February 27, 1784, in Eckernförde, a town in Schleswig-Holstein. He was either ninety-three or seventy-two years old, depending on which birth date you believe. Or five hundred, if you believe what he said about himself.

What Was He, Really?

The question is almost impossible to answer because St. Germain seems to have been several things at once.

He was certainly a talented musician. The compositions survive. People who knew music acknowledged his skill.

He was probably a genuine chemist, at least by the standards of his time. His work with dyes and porcelain wasn't fakery—you can't fake a working glaze or a color that holds.

He was an extraordinary conversationalist and social performer. Even people who knew he was lying found him impossible to dismiss.

He was almost certainly not five hundred years old.

But beyond these certainties, everything is speculation. Was he nobility in hiding? A brilliant commoner who invented an aristocratic past? A genuine mystic who believed his own claims? A cynical operator who knew exactly what he was doing?

The lack of a definitive answer is, perhaps, the point. St. Germain understood that mystery itself has value. People paid attention to him precisely because they couldn't figure him out. Every unanswered question made him more interesting.

The Legacy of Uncertainty

Lady Jemima Yorke, who met St. Germain at a private musical performance in London in 1749, captured something essential about him:

He is an Odd Creature, and the more I see him the more curious I am to know something about him. He is everything with everybody: he talks Ingeniously with Mr Wray, Philosophy with Lord Willoughby, and is gallant with Miss Yorke, Miss Carpenter, and all the Young Ladies. But the Character of Philosopher is what he seems to pretend to, and to be a good deal conceited of... and I can't but fancy he is a great Pretender in All kinds of Science, as well as that he really has acquired an uncommon Share in some.

"A great Pretender" who "really has acquired an uncommon Share" of genuine knowledge. That's the paradox. He was simultaneously a fraud and the real thing. He made impossible claims that were definitely lies, and yet he could actually do remarkable things.

In our age of instant verification—when any claim can be checked in seconds and any identity can be traced—someone like St. Germain could never exist. He was a creature of candlelit salons and slow-moving information, of a world where a man could arrive in a new city and simply become whoever he said he was.

We have lost that possibility. Whether that's a gain or a loss depends on how you feel about mystery itself. The eighteenth century had room for wondermen. We do not.

But the questions he raised remain interesting: How much of identity is performance? How much of expertise is confidence? And why, exactly, are we still talking about a man who has been dead for nearly two hundred and fifty years, whose real name we still don't know?

Perhaps the greatest trick the Count of St. Germain ever pulled was ensuring that the mystery would outlast him forever.