Marie Touchet married Charles de Balzac, Marquis d’Entragues, the governor of Orleans, by whom she had two daughters. The most celebrated of these daughters, the half-sister of the Comte d’Auvergne, was the mistress of Henri IV., and it was she who endeavored, at the time of Biron’s conspiracy, to put her brother on the throne of France by driving out the Bourbons.
The Comte d’Auvergne, who became the Duc d’Angouleme, lived into the reign of Louis XIV. He coined money on his estates and altered the inscriptions; but Louis XIV. let him do as he pleased, out of respect for the blood of the Valois.
Cosmo Ruggiero lived till the middle of the reign of Louis XIII.; he witnessed the fall of the house of the Medici in France, also that of the Concini. History has taken pains to record that he died an atheist, that is, a materialist.
The Marquise d’Entragues was over eighty when she died.
The famous Comte de Saint-Germain, who made so much noise under Louis XIV., was a pupil of Lorenzo and Cosmo Ruggiero. This celebrated alchemist lived to be one hundred and thirty years old,—an age which some biographers give to Marion de Lorme. He must have heard from the Ruggieri the various incidents of the Saint-Bartholomew and of the reigns of the Valois kings, which he afterwards recounted in the first person singular, as though he had played a part in them. The Comte de Saint-Germain was the last of the alchemists who knew how to clearly explain their science; but he left no writings. The cabalistic doctrine presented in this Study is that taught by this mysterious personage.
And here, behold a strange thing! Three lives, that of the old man from whom I have obtained these facts, that of the Comte de Saint-Germain, and that of Cosmo Ruggiero, suffice to cover the whole of European history from Francois I. to Napoleon! Only fifty such lives are needed to reach back to the first known period of the world. “What are fifty generations for the study of the mysteries of life?” said the Comte de Saint-Germain.