“My father was a gentleman, a soldier in the service of His Majesty King Christian VI of Denmark. He had played a distinguished rôle in the wars of the preceding reign; but his position was not brilliant at the court of this Prince, who was so wholly engrossed with the gentler arts of letters, science and society. All Europe, for that matter, was enjoying a period of quiet; and my father had to make the best of the situation, however hard it bore on him, a professional soldier. But the peace was of short duration, as the event proved; and I was just turning my seventh year when a new conflict broke out, with Austria, Prussia, and France leading scores of those little kingdoms which were forever fishing in the troubled waters of Continental politics. However, Denmark was one of the few small states to keep her weapons sheathed.
“Under this disappointment my father chafed—refused to put up with it, in fact. He decided to go abroad to live.
“We moved first to Paris, then to Versailles, where Louis XV welcomed us cordially. A brilliant career was opening before my father, whose bravery in action soon attracted royal attention, when, on the tenth of May, 1745, just as the famous battle of Fontenoy was developing into a French triumph, an English bullet laid him low. To the victory my parent’s gallantry had contributed not a little, and that, too, under the very eyes of the King himself. The latter, anxious that such distinguished service should not pass unrecognized, called me to his presence, and there, on the battle field, elevated me to the rank of royal page.
“This, Monsieur, was the beginning of my real life as a man—a life, I may add, that was for long carefree and joyous. I can still remember the placid delights of those years which all France enjoyed under the Treaty of 1747. At Court, especially, there was one round of festivals, revelries and intrigues of love, wherein I played my part as well as the next one; and I may even say that if today you see before you in my person a hermit, a man, at least, inclined to solitude, the fact must be attributed to the immense, the delicate felicity in which I passed my early days, a happiness whose sheer perfection has disgusted me forever with the banal pleasures which you people of this modern age could offer me if I cared for them. But why arouse in you the melancholy yearning for those golden days, which I feel? I will pass on, and pray forgive me if I have dwelt too much upon them as it is. I come, then, and tardily enough, to the main point.
“I said, Monsieur, that after 1745, from the date, that is, of my father’s death on the field of honor, I was a page at the Court of Louis XV. In that capacity I was still serving five years later, in the year 1750. Indeed, it was my honor and my pleasure as a royal page, to escort the Maréchal de Belle Isle one day into the presence of His Majesty; the marshall, in turn, leading by the hand a rather handsome gentleman whose name was quite unknown to me.
“‘Sire,’ the marshall began—(How his silky wig shone, as he made obeissance! And to me how glorious his purple coat seemed, thrown up in back by the studded scabbard of his sword!)—‘Sire, I have the honor to present to your Majesty, as your Majesty deigned to command, Monsieur le Comte de Saint Germain, who, beyond all dispute, is the most aged gentleman of your kingdom.’
“My eyes, I remember, turned upon the count in question. And, quite to the contrary of his introduction, he seemed to me a man in the flower of youth. If he were a day older than thirty, there was not the slightest reason in the world to suspect so.
“It is surely not my place, Monsieur le capitaine, to play the school-master for a man of your evident education. I am certain you are familiar with all that our historians have said about that extraordinary, that superhuman individual, known to successive generations, as the Count of Saint Germain, the Marquis of Monferrat, Count Bellamye, Signor Rotondo, Count Tzarogy, the Reverend Father Aymar, and so on. No, it was rather out of a sense of filial regard than out of any desire to enlighten you, that I forgot myself so far as to recount the detailed story of my first and fortunate encounter with this personage whom I was later to revere as father, mother, master and friend, all in one. To be sure, the intimacy between him and me was not the outcome of this first meeting only. In the ten years following, between 1750 and 1760, that is, the Count of Saint Germain was one of the most frequent guests at the Court of Versailles, and I continued as gentleman-in-waiting to the King.
“Thereafter intrigues and jealousies had their play, and the Count was no longer welcome. Unable by that time to live apart from the company of that distinguished genius, I determined to seek him out in his banishment. For long my search was vain. Free Masonry, of which he was the secret General and Grand Master, was keeping him in hiding—as I later learned, in Moscow, where he was plotting a sort of revolution. In despair at last of ever finding him, I abandoned my quest; and, since now the thought of life in France had become intolerable to me, I decided to return to my old Danish home, establish a peaceful hearthfire there, and cultivate the memory of the prodigious friend whom I had lost.
“This I did. I went back to Eckernfoerde, to my ancestral mansion which had not been occupied for fully twenty-four years.