One day being pressed by the Comtesse de Brienne to explain the origin of a life so surprising and mysterious, he replied, with a laugh, that “he was born in the Red Sea and brought up in the shadow of the Pyramids by a good old man who had taken care of him when he was abandoned by his parents, and from whom he had learnt all he knew.” But Mirabeau states that “M. de Nordberg, who had travelled much in the East, once addressed him some words in Arabic of which he did not understand one word.”
The mystery in which he purposely enveloped himself, and which became the deeper the more it was probed, coupled with the wonders he performed, recalled the famous Count de Saint-Germain, who had created a similar sensation some twenty years before. Of the life, family or country of this mysterious individual nothing was ever known. Of many suppositions the most popular was that he was the son of a royal femme galante—Marie de Neubourg, widow of the last King of Spain of the House of Austria—and a Jewish banker of Bordeaux. Louis XV, who had a particular predilection for men of his stamp and was probably perfectly acquainted with his history, employed him for a time on secret diplomatic missions and gave him apartments at Chambord. His fascinating manners, good looks, lavish expenditure and mysterious antecedents attracted attention wherever he went.
In London, where he lived for a couple of years, he excited great curiosity. “He was called,” says Walpole, “an Italian, a Spaniard, a Pole, a nobody that married a great fortune in Mexico and ran away with her jewels to Constantinople.”
These jewels were the admiration of all who beheld them. Madame de Hausset, the companion of Madame de Pompadour, to whom he showed them once, believed them to be false. Gleichen, however, who was a connoisseur of precious stones, “could discern no reason to doubt their genuineness.” Like Cagliostro, who gave a diamond valued at 20,000 livres to Cardinal de Rohan, Saint-Germain made a present of one to Louis XV worth 10,000 livres.
The secrecy he observed in regard to his origin appears in the beginning to have been due less to any intention to mystify the public than to a strong sense of humour. In an age when a supernatural significance was attached to anything that appeared mysterious, he was at once credited with occult powers which he never claimed to possess. Urged by a whim to see how far he could play upon the credulity of the public, he found the rôle of wonder-man so congenial that he never attempted to adopt another.
A particular talent for romancing, aided by a wonderful memory, enabled him to doctor up the marvellous to suit the taste of his hearers. He described people and places of the distant past with a minuteness of detail that produced the impression that he had been personally acquainted with them. As many were foolish enough to take him literally, all sorts of fabulous stories were circulated about him.
“I amuse myself,” he once confessed to Gleichen, who reproved him for encouraging the belief that he had lived from time immemorial, “not by making people believe what I wish, but by letting them believe what they wish. These fools of Parisians declare that I am five hundred, and I confirm them in the idea since it pleases them.”
The least credulous believed him to be at least a hundred. Madame de Pompadour said to him once that old Madame de Gergy remembered having met him fifty years before in Venice when he passed for a man of sixty.
“I never like to contradict a lady,” he replied, “but it is just possible that Madame de Gergy is in her dotage.”
Even his valet was supposed to have discovered the secret of immortality. This fellow, a veritable Scapin, assisted him admirably in mystifying the credulous.