Bonaventura had rented a little palace on the Île St Louis for the duration of his stay in Paris, and it was here that we dined.
When we had eaten, and he seemed in thoroughly good humour, I skilfully worked the conversation round to the ceremonies that had taken place that evening. I spoke admiringly about The Great Chosen One, and his solemn and dignified manner.
My host laughed, and told me the man was called, or rather gave his name as, the Comte de St Germain. He was altogether rather mysterious; nothing was known of his origins. Some claimed he was the son, by a Jewish banker, of the widowed Queen of Spain. But one thing was sure: he was held in high regard at the court of Louis XIV. He would be closeted for hours with the King, deep in alchemical studies. Bonaventura had little faith in their efficacy, or the French public finances would not have been in their current dire straits.
But what was certain, was that he was in possession of some secret whereby he could make diamonds soft. In that state they grew very much larger before he hardened them again, and they retained their enlarged size. The fact was beyond question. Bonaventura had personally seen such diamonds.
It was also clear that he commanded great wealth, because he readily showed his friends caskets of jewels which he always took about with him.
So, even if he was something of a fraud, my host went on, it was merely for his own amusement. There was no financial motive.
Astonished, I asked how he could possibly suggest that the Great Chosen One of the August Mother Lodge of Scotland might be a fraud. I was terrified that at any moment the walls would part and the gentlemanly swordsmen burst in and cut us to shreds.
But, smiling his habitual broad smile, Bonaventura explained that he was a man of advancing years who had sought the Mercur Philosophus since his tender youth, and had met so many infamous cheats who had trimmed his purse that if the Archangel Uriel himself were now to appear, with the written testimony of God himself, he would have difficulty crediting him. I listened to these blasphemous words in a state of shock.
Then, turning again to the subject of the Comte de St Germain, he told me the man never ate but survived on some beverage he had concocted. On the other hand, he was extremely fond of women. The strangest assertion of all was that he was over a thousand years old. A number of people had stated — most notably an elderly countess whose name escapes me at the moment — that they had known St Germain some fifty years earlier and that he still looked exactly the same. It seemed he really did possess an elixir that could restore and prolong youth.
There was also a story that he once gave a lady a vial whose contents would make her twenty-five years younger. But it was drunk instead by her greedy maid, a woman of thirty. When her mistress summoned her, a little girl of five appeared, in an adult-sized dress that dragged on the floor, sobbing bitterly. The poor creature was now a pupil of the Sisters of St Ursula.
The following day I paid a visit to the noble lady whose address Bonaventura had given me. I explained, very politely, what a profound conquest her daughter had made of his Lordship’s heart. At first she would hear none of it: she had the royal blood of Valois in her veins, and anyway the girl was too young.
(In du Fresnoy’s day a maiden was considered marriageable at thirteen, as is apparent in Casanova’s predilection for young ‘women’ of this age.)
However when I added that His Lordship was prepared to offer two thousand livres in gold, and moreover, that after a possible cessation of their friendship he would make a further present to the same value in precious stones, the warm heart of the mother could stand no longer in the way of the daughter’s happiness. We agreed that she and the girl would walk the following day in the courtyard of the Palais Royal, where the gentleman would begin his courtship with all the forms and graces of true decorum.
His Lordship thanked me for my trouble and presented me with an extremely valuable snuff-box bearing the enamelled representation of the Temple of Friendship. It was later stolen from me, along with a great many other jewels, by highwaymen near Lichfield.
But who could find words to express our astonishment the following day when we arrived at the courtyard of the Palais Royal to see the young lady offering her arm to the Comte de St Germain, stepping into his carriage and setting off with her mother, without even deigning to greet us?
Bonaventura cursed like an Englishman, and spoke scornfully of the inability of the French to keep their word. He determined to drive to the ladies’ residence to convey his opinion.
Outside the house we found St Germain’s carriage. His notorious manservant was standing guard, grave and motionless.
‘Now listen here,’ His Lordship began. ‘Your master is a fraud and a cheat. For a start, he claims he is several thousand years old.’
‘Don’t take his word for that, my good sir,’ replied the man. ‘My master is full of wiles. I’ve been in his service for a hundred years, and he was no more than three hundred when I joined him.’
Bonaventura began to hammer furiously on the door. It did not open. Instead, the mother appeared at the window above our heads and emptied the contents of a chamber pot over us, abusing us in the coarsest terms all the while. With more than justified indignation, His Lordship departed.
I was dining with him the following day when the butler announced the arrival of St Germain. He had come to apologise. He had not known, he said, that the young person had kindled the flames of passion in His Lordship, and he offered to vacate the field; he did this all the more readily as his attachment to the fair sex was purely Platonic, having had his fill of carnal pleasures in the first five hundred years of his life.
Bonaventura thanked him for his courtesy, but declared that after the insult he had endured he had no further wish to enter into an alliance with the said lady. Besides, his three current mistresses were making excessive demands on his rapidly failing masculinity. But he would ask St Germain to oblige him with one of his secret panaceas, lest he be put to shame before one of them in particular. The promise of assistance was given, and so began their friendship, which resulted in such remarkable adventures.
The Count presented His Lordship with an elixir which increased his manly potency to such a miraculous extent that when he left his mistress the next morning his amorous propensities were still unquenched, and he gathered up three drowsy ladies of the night, whisked them away and paid a generous tribute of love to each in turn.
From that point onwards, Bonaventura’s faith in St Germain was absolute. He confided to both him and me — I had by now become his permanent guest and companion — that, his huge estates across the Channel notwithstanding, his financial affairs were in such a dire state that his only hope lay in the alchemists’ secret, and he implored St Germain to tell him whether he actually knew it.
In the course of a lengthy evening’s discussion St Germain admitted that, while he knew a great many things that were hidden from ordinary mortals, the Magnum Mysterium,the secret of turning base metals into gold, was not among them. His view was that no one presently alive knew it; nor did the great artisans of earlier times; but the Rosicrucians of the previous century must have been very close to it. The finest scholars of that era, notably the renowned Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus of Hohenheim and his pupil Robert Fludd, were simply waiting for a moment, a moment of mystical revelation, which they described as the coming of Elias Artista, the great Artist-Prophet, for the mystery to be fully revealed. But the Prophet Elias had not come.