king by arranging a laboratory where he occasionally tried to
amuse himself, though he knew little about chemistry, but the king was
the victim of an almost universal weariness. To enjoy a harem recruited
from amongst the most ravishing beauties, and often from the ranks of
neophytes, with whom pleasure had its difficulties, one would have needed
to be a god, and Louis XV. was only a man after all.

It was the famous marquise who had introduced the adept to the king in
the hope of his distracting the monarch's weariness, by giving him a
taste for chemistry. Indeed Madame de Pompadour was under the impression
that St. Germain had given her the water of perpetual youth, and
therefore felt obliged to make the chemist a good return. This wondrous
water, taken according to the charlatan's directions, could not indeed
make old age retire and give way to youth, but according to the marquise
it would preserve one in statu quo for several centuries.

As a matter of fact, the water, or the giver of it, had worked wonders,
if not on her body, at least on her mind; she assured the king that she
was not getting older. The king was as much deluded by this grand
impostor as she was, for one day he shewed the Duc des Deux-Ponts a
diamond of the first water, weighing twelve carats, which he fancied he
had made himself. "I melted down," said Louis XV., "small diamonds
weighing twenty-four carats, and obtained this one large one weighing
twelve." Thus it came to pass that the infatuated monarch gave the
impostor the suite formerly occupied by Marshal Saxe. The Duc des
Deux-Ponts told me this story with his own lips, one evening, when I was
supping with him and a Swede, the Comte de Levenhoop, at Metz.

Before I left Madame d'Urfe, I told her that the lad might be he who
should make her to be born again, but that she would spoil all if she did
not wait for him to attain the age of puberty. After what she had said
about his misbehavior, the reader will guess what made me say this. She
sent him to board with Viar, gave him masters on everything, and
disguised him under the name of the Comte d'Aranda, although he was born
at Bayreuth, and though his mother never had anything to do with a
Spaniard of that name. It was three or four months before I went to see
him, as I was afraid of being insulted on account of the name which the
visionary Madame d'Urfe had given him.

One day Tiretta came to see me in a fine coach. He told me that his
eld