It appears to me that the historic original of these romantic characters
is no other than the mysterious Comte de Saint-Germain--not, of course,
the contemporary and normal French soldier and minister, of 1707-1778,
who bore the same name. I have found the name, with dim allusions, in
the unpublished letters and MSS. of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, and
have not always been certain whether the reference was to the man of
action or to the man of mystery. On the secret of the latter, the
deathless one, I have no new light to throw, and only speak of him for
a single reason. Aristotle assures us, in his _Poetics_, that the
best known myths dramatised on the Athenian stage were known to very
few of the Athenian audience. It is not impossible that the story of
Saint-Germain, though it seems as familiar as the myth of Oedipus or
Thyestes, may, after all, not be vividly present to the memory of
every reader. The omniscient Larousse, of the _Dictionnaire Universel_,
certainly did not know one very accessible fact about Saint-Germain,
nor have I seen it mentioned in other versions of his legend. We read,
in Larousse, 'Saint-Germain is not heard of in France before 1750, when
he established himself in Paris.
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