Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [85]
“What was it Cardinal Lambertini once said to a lady wearing a splendid diamond cross on her decolletage? ‘What joy it would be to die on that Calvary!’ Well, how I would love to listen to those voices! But now it is I who must beg your forgiveness, both of you. I am from an age when one would have accepted damnation to pay homage to beauty. You two must want to be alone. Let’s keep in touch.”
“He’s old enough to be your father,” I said to Amparo as I dragged her through the stalls.
“Even my great-great-grandfather. He implied that he’s at least a thousand years old. Are you jealous of a pharaoh’s mummy?”
“I’m jealous of anyone who makes a light bulb flash on in your head.”
“How wonderful. That’s love.”
27
One day, saying that he had known Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem, he described minutely the governor’s house and listed the dishes served at supper. Cardinal de Rohan, believing these were fantasies, turned to the Comte de Saint-Germain’s valet, an old man with white hair and an honest expression. “My friend,” he said to the servant, “I find it hard to believe what your master is telling us. Granted that he may be a ventriloquist; and even that he can make gold. But that he is two thousand years old and saw Pontius Pilate? That is too much. Were you there?” “Oh, no, Monsignore,” the valet answered ingenuously, “I have been in M. le Comte’s service only four hundred years.”
—Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire infernal, Paris, Mellier, 1844, p. 434
In the days that followed, Salvador absorbed me completely. I spent little time in the hotel. But as I was leafing through the index of the book on the Rosicrucians, I came across a reference to the Comte de Saint-Germain. Well, well, I said to myself, tout se tient.
Voltaire wrote of him, “C’est un homme qui ne meurt jamais et qui sail tout,” but Frederick the Great wrote back, “C’est un comte pour rire.” Horace Walpole described him as an Italian or Spaniard or Pole who had made a fortune in Mexico and then fled to Constantinople with his wife’s jewels. The most reliable information about him comes from the memoirs of Madame du Hausset, la Pompadour’s femme de chambre (some authority, the intolerant Amparo said). He had gone by various names: Surmont in Brussels, Welldone in Leipzig, the Marquis of Ay-mar or Bedmar or Belmar, Count Soltikoff. In 1745 he was arrested in London, where he excelled as a musician, giving violin and harpsichord recitals in drawing rooms. Three years later he offered his services as an expert in dyeing to Louis XV in Paris, in exchange for a residence in the chateau of Chambord. The king sent him on diplomatic missions to Holland, where he got into some sort of trouble and fled to London again. In 1762 he turned up in Russia, then again in Belgium, where he encountered Casanova, who tells us how the count turned a coin into gold. In 1776 he appeared at the court of Frederick the Great, to whom he proposed various projects having to do with chemistry. Eight years later he died in Schleswig, at the court of the landgrave of Hesse, where he was putting the finishing touches on a manufactory for paints.
Nothing exceptional, the typical career of an eighteenth-century adventurer; not as many loves as Casanova and frauds less theatrical than Cagliostro’s. Apart from the odd incident here and there, he enjoyed some credibility with those in authority, to whom he promised the wonders of alchemy, though with an industrial slant. The only unusual feature was the rumor of his immortality, which he undoubtedly instigated himself. In drawing rooms he would casually mention remote events as if he had been an eyewitness, and he cultivated his legend gracefully, en sourdine.
The book also quoted a passage from Giovanni Papini’s Gog, describing a nighttime encounter with the Comte de Saint-Germain on the deck of an ocean liner. The count, oppressed by his millennial past and by the memories crowding his brain, spoke in despairing tones reminiscent of Funes, “el memo-rioso” of Borges, except that Papini’s story dates from 1930. “You must not imagine