The Figures

The Count of Saint-Germain

The Count of Saint-Germain was an eighteenth-century adventurer of unknown name and birth who made his way through London, Paris, The Hague and several German courts as a musician, dye chemist and self-styled adept, and who died at Eckernförde, in the Duchy of Schleswig, on 27 February 1784. He was real: he left letters, printed music, a diplomatic scandal, a failed factory and a burial entry. The immortal who dined with the Council of Trent, warned Marie Antoinette and was seen in Venice after his funeral is a legend that can be dated book by book. This page keeps three layers apart: what the documents of his lifetime say, what is still disputed, and what later readers made of him, from apocryphal memoirs to Theosophy and the “ascended master” of the 1930s.

What the documents of his lifetime show

Almost nothing about his origin is certain. The oldest dated item is a letter he wrote from The Hague on 22 November 1735 to the English scholar Sloane about an old printed Bible, signed P. M. de Saint-Germain and silent about himself; Gustav Berthold Volz, who edited the documents of his life in 1923, places the original in the British Museum (Volz 1923, pp. 11-12). Firm ground begins in London. In 1745 the opera L’incostanza delusa, a pasticcio staged in the Haymarket, used several new songs by him, which John Walsh printed. Charles Burney, who was at one of the rehearsals, remembered that one of them, Per pietà bell’idol mio, was encored every night, and thought the rest of his airs “only remarkable for insipidity” (Burney, 1789, vol. IV, p. 452; IMSLP; see also David Hunter, The Musical Times, 2003). On 9 December that year, during the Jacobite rising, Horace Walpole told Horace Mann that the authorities had seized “an odd man, who goes by the name of Count St. Germain”, and let him go because nothing could be proved against him:

“He has been here these two years, and will not tell who he is, or whence, but professes that he does not go by his right name. He sings, plays on the violin wonderfully, composes, is mad, and not very sensible. He is called an Italian, a Spaniard, a Pole; a somebody that married a great fortune in Mexico, and ran away with her jewels to Constantinople; a priest, a fiddler, a vast nobleman.” (Walpole to Mann, Arlington Street, 9 December 1745, ed. Yonge 1890)

The decade after London, Volz writes, is once more in the dark (p. 13). By 1757-1758 he was in Paris, at the height of his career. Casanova, who met him in the circle of the Marquise d’Urfé, calls him “scholar, linguist, musician, and chemist, good-looking, and a perfect ladies’ man”, and says Madame de Pompadour had spoken of him to Louis XV, for whom he set up a laboratory where the bored king made dyes (Casanova, tr. Arthur Machen, 1894). In September 1758 the director of royal buildings, the Marquis de Marigny, confirmed that the king had given him lodgings at the château of Chambord (Volz, pp. 141-142, from letters in the Bibliothèque nationale excerpted by Isabel Cooper-Oakley). The diplomat Baron Gleichen, who met him in 1759, saw “un homme de taille moyenne, très-robuste, vêtu avec une simplicité magnifique et recherchée” (a man of middle height, very sturdy, dressed with magnificent and studied simplicity), who spoke Spanish and Portuguese without the slightest accent but French with a Piedmontese one (Gleichen, Souvenirs, pp. 121, 128).

The Hague, 1760: peace talks that Versailles disowned

The best-documented episode of his life is a fiasco of the Seven Years’ War. In March 1760 he called on the French ambassador at The Hague, the Comte d’Affry, with a plan to rescue the kingdom’s finances and two letters from Marshal Belle-Isle, and talked peace with Count Willem Bentinck and the British envoy, Joseph Yorke. On 11 April the foreign minister, the Duc de Choiseul, replied that the king ordered him discredited throughout Holland and, if possible, arrested and taken to France. At five in the morning of 16 April, after a late visit from Bentinck, Saint-Germain drank his tea, climbed into a hired coach that one of Bentinck’s servants had brought to the door, and was gone, leaving his sword behind. On 30 April d’Affry formally asked the States General to extradite him as a swindler of obscure origin; the request was buried in committees (all in Volz 1923, pp. 144-182; the memorandum, pp. 160-161, as printed by C. A. van Sypesteyn, 1869). In England, Volz adds, he was at once taken into custody and soon sent away (pp. 18-19).

The line most quoted about him dates from the same week. On 15 April 1760, the eve of his flight, Voltaire wrote to Frederick II that the ministers’ secret about the coming peace talks was said to be known only to a M. de Saint-Germain “qui a soupé autrefois dans la ville de Trente avec les Pères du concile, et qui aura probablement l’honneur de voir Votre Majesté dans une cinquantaine d’années. C’est un homme qui ne meurt point, et qui sait tout” (“who once supped in the city of Trent with the Fathers of the Council, and who will probably have the honour of seeing Your Majesty in fifty years or so. He is a man who never dies, and who knows everything”; letter 4094, our translation). In context it mocks a self-appointed negotiator; it is not a witness statement about immortality.

Tournai, Leipzig, Berlin: secrets for sale

In 1762 he settled on a property at Ubbergen near Nijmegen and took the name Surmont (Volz, p. 21). Early in 1763 he persuaded Count Karl Cobenzl, the empress’s minister in Brussels, to back a works at Tournai for cheap dyes, leather, a gold-like metal, refined oils and hats, financed by the banking house of Madame Nettine. Experts consulted by the chancellor, Kaunitz, found the dyes inferior, and only the leather fared better; costs and the advances Saint-Germain drew against nearly worthless securities reached some 200,000 florins, Maria Theresa refused to take the business over, and Cobenzl dismissed him. Volz, who first published this correspondence from the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv in Vienna, calls the affair a swindle (pp. 23-27; letters, pp. 225-280).

At Tournai Casanova found him with a beard two inches long and “a score of retorts”, and watched him lay a twelve-sol silver piece with a small black grain on a burning coal. When it had cooled, he told Casanova to take it:

“I took up the piece of money and found it had become gold. I felt perfectly certain that he had smuggled my silver piece away, and had substituted a gold piece coated with silver for it.” (Casanova, tr. Machen 1894)

Casanova dates the visit to March 1764; Volz moves it to 1763 and agrees about the coin: sleight of hand (Volz, pp. 33, 284).

In the 1770s he plied the same trade on a smaller stage. After about two years with Margrave Alexander of Ansbach he arrived in Leipzig in October 1776, where Freemasons around Prince Friedrich August of Brunswick tried to make him out (Volz, pp. 29-30, 36). The Görlitz merchant and Rosicrucian Christian Emanuel Frölich, who had dined with him, wrote on 28 March 1777: “Dieser Sieur Welldone ist kein Maurer; er ist auch kein Magus, auch kein Theosoph” (“This Sieur Welldone is no Mason; nor is he a magus, nor a theosopher”; Volz, p. 328, our translation). In June 1777 he sent Frederick II a list of 29 processes signed “von Welldone”, from dyes and bleaching to liqueurs and purgatives (pp. 317-320). Number 25 reads, in the German of Volz’s edition, “Herstellung anderer nützlicher Dinge, über die ich schweige” (the making of other useful things, about which I keep silent; our translation). The king had him told that Berlin was very incredulous and believed only what could be tangibly proved (Volz, p. 321).

Eckernförde, 1784: a death on record

In August 1779 he met Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel, a Danish general and governor of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, at Altona, and followed him to Schleswig, where the prince became his pupil and thought him perhaps “un des plus grands philosophes qui aient existé” (one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived); Count Warnstedt, who spent two evenings with him that December, thought him an adventurer and charlatan in every respect (Charles of Hesse, Mémoires de mon temps, 1861, p. 135; Volz, p. 361). Charles bought the empty factory of the late Otte outside Eckernförde and set him up to dye silk and wool. Saint-Germain lodged there in a damp ground-floor room, developed severe rheumatism and never fully recovered (Mémoires, pp. 132-135). He died while Charles was away in Kassel. The register of St. Nicholas church in Eckernförde reads:

“Gestorben am 27. Februar 1784. Am 2. März der sich so nennende Graf von St. Germain und Welldone (weitere Nachrichten sind nicht bekannt worden) in hiesiger Kirche still beigesetzt.”

“Died 27 February 1784. On 2 March the self-styled Count of St. Germain and Welldone (no further information has become known) quietly buried in this church.” (Death register of St. Nicholas, Eckernförde, as transcribed by Volz 1923, p. 363, who also prints a facsimile; parentheses ours; Volz glosses “still” as without a funeral address by the clergyman; our translation)

The church accounts charge 10 Reichstaler for a place in grave no. 1 inside St. Nicholas for thirty years. On 3 April 1784, since no will had come to light, the mayor and council summoned the heirs and creditors of the man known “unter dem Namen Comte de Saint-Germain und Welldone” (under the name Comte de Saint-Germain and Welldone; Schleswig-Holsteinische Anzeigen, 1784). A Brunswick paper of 6 April announced the death of “der bekannte marktschreierische Herumstreicher”, the well-known quack and vagrant; its retraction of 12 April, printed at the request of Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick, praised his “tiefen Einsichten in die Geheimnisse der Natur” (deep insight into the secrets of nature), said he had borne a stroke with composure, and misdated the death to 24 February. All of this is transcribed by Volz (pp. 363-367). According to him, it could no longer be established where in the church Saint-Germain was buried (p. 30). Those who heard of the death at second hand got details wrong: Casanova put it only “six or seven years” after their meeting, Gleichen at Schleswig “en 1780, si je ne me trompe” (in 1780, if I am not mistaken; p. 127), Philipp Cobenzl in Hamburg (Volz, p. 284).

The witnesses, and where to read them

The main sources for his life and the two manuscripts that carry his name, with the archive or edition and the status of a free copy. “Public domain” refers to the text; where a scan states no licence, the table says so.

What is still disputed

Where he came from. Late in life he told Charles of Hesse that he was a son of Prince Rákóczi of Transylvania, had been raised under the protection of the last Medici and had named himself Sanctus Germanus, “the holy brother”; Charles added that he could not vouch for the birth (Mémoires, pp. 133-134). Volz took the story apart: the son Saint-Germain claimed to be, Leopold George, eldest son of Francis II Rákóczi, was born in 1696 and died in 1700. Other versions made him an illegitimate son of Maria Anna of Neuburg, widow of Charles II of Spain; the son of a Portuguese Jew, as Choiseul asserted at a dinner Gleichen attended, though Gleichen thought the minister did not really know; or the son of a tax collector named Rotondo from San Germano in Savoy, a guess Volz found hard to dismiss because it explains the name (Volz, pp. 7-10; Gleichen, pp. 128-130). Volz concluded that the riddle of his origin was not fully solved, but that there was not a trace of proof of princely birth.

How old he was. The birth years usually given, 1691 and 1712 (as in Wikipedia), go back to two statements: he told Charles of Hesse that he was 88 on arrival in 1779 (Mémoires, p. 133), and a London Chronicle report of 14 May 1760, relaying the Gazette de Bruxelles, said he had been born in Italy in 1712 (Volz, pp. 120-121). In December 1779 Count Warnstedt wrote of him: “He claims to be only 86” (p. 362, our translation). Looks settle nothing: in 1759 Gleichen thought him sixty, in 1763 Philipp Cobenzl guessed fifty (Gleichen, pp. 126-127; Volz, pp. 281-282).

When he reached France. Wikipedia puts him at the French court around 1748 and says that in 1749 Louis XV employed him on diplomatic missions, citing Cooper-Oakley. She in turn names the Souvenirs published in 1836 under the name of the Comtesse d’Adhémar as the earliest definite hint of his political work, and quotes from them that the king employed him on diplomatic missions from 1749 (Cooper-Oakley 1912, pp. 108-109). Volz found the date of his arrival in France unsettled: going by Casanova he was there by 1757 or 1758, he appears at Chambord in 1758, and the anonymous “Anecdotes” that Kaunitz sent to Cobenzl in 1763 bring him to France only in 1759 (Volz, pp. 13-14, 24). The earliest dated letter from France that Volz printed was written at Chambord on 10 May 1758 (p. 141).

Whether Louis XV sent him to talk peace. Gleichen and Charles of Hesse say yes: Gleichen writes that Belle-Isle drafted his instructions and the king handed them over himself with a cipher, and Charles that the king used him secretly to negotiate a peace with England and dropped him once he was found out (Gleichen, pp. 130-131; Mémoires, pp. 135-136). Volz, working from the diplomats’ letters, answers no as far as the peace overtures go: Madame de Pompadour herself passed his report from The Hague to Choiseul, and Belle-Isle wrote to reproach him, if gently. The court did send him to Holland, Volz holds, but on money business: in his view the letters he showed Yorke concerned a loan of 30 million that Saint-Germain was to arrange for the cash-strapped court and at its request (Volz, pp. 15, 19-20). The sum itself rests on rumour: in public Saint-Germain spoke of a loan for France, the Prussian envoy Hellen reported the figure as hearsay and suspected other errands, and Frederick II, who thought a loan negotiation possible, replied that thirty million seemed to him rather a lot (pp. 17, 182-183).

Was he an alchemist?

In his own century he was called one. Nicolas Thomas’s engraving of 1783, made from a portrait owned by the late Marquise d’Urfé, is captioned “Le comte de Saint-Germain, célèbre alchimiste”, with a quatrain ending “S’il n’est pas dieu lui-même, un dieu puissant l’inspire” (“if he is not a god himself, a mighty god inspires him”; Volz, pp. 343, 346). In January 1760 the Prussian envoy at The Hague, Hellen, reported that he also played the alchemist and had apparently led the king and Madame de Pompadour to expect the secret of the philosophers’ stone, the goal of the alchemists’ Great Work (Volz, pp. 139-140). Those believed to possess the stone, Volz explains, were called adepts (p. 6). Casanova heard him claim three hundred years and the secret of the Universal Medicine.

The documents show a chemist of colours selling processes. The 1777 list offers dyes, bleaching and metal processes, but no transmutation. Gleichen, who followed him for six months, credits him with chemical secrets “surtout pour faire des couleurs, des teintures” (above all for making colours and dyes), says he learned from him only “la marche et la singularité de la charlatanerie” (the workings and oddity of charlatanry) and never heard him speak of a universal medicine (pp. 123, 127). On precious stones the evidence is mixed: Volz found it hard to dismiss the report of Pictet, a Geneva merchant, that his father-in-law, a diamond cutter, set aside flawed diamonds for Saint-Germain, from which Pictet concluded that the count knew how to remove such flaws (pp. 32, 85-86), while the Margrave of Ansbach said his jeweller’s file had shown one of the count’s stones to be false (Gleichen, p. 133). At Tournai, Casanova was sure the coin had been swapped. And his last patron recorded a rule that the legend later turned upside down:

“Il parlait beaucoup de l’embellissement des couleurs, qui ne coûtaient presque rien, de l’amélioration des métaux, ajoutant qu’il ne fallait absolument point faire de l’or, si même on le savait, et resta absolument fidèle à ce principe.”

“He spoke a great deal about improving colours, which cost almost nothing, and about the improvement of metals, adding that one must on no account make gold, even if one knew how, and he remained absolutely faithful to that principle.” (Charles of Hesse, Mémoires de mon temps, 1861, p. 133; our translation)

Volz concludes that, whatever he boasted to Count Lamberg about the philosophers’ stone, he was no adept and did not possess the secret of making gold; his “elixir of life” was a tea based on senna leaves, a laxative (pp. 31-33). Gleichen confirms it: Saint-Germain purged himself with “follicules de séné” of his own preparation, and that was all he advised friends who asked how to live long (pp. 127-128).

Did he write anything? Two manuscripts with his name

Apart from music, no work of his is known to have been printed in his lifetime. What survives in his name are letters, many of them printed by Volz, the 1777 list and the music Walsh printed. Two manuscripts carry his name without proof that he wrote them.

La très-sainte Trinosophie is ms. 2400 of the Médiathèque Jacques-Chirac in Troyes, an eighteenth-century French text on 99 paper leaves with twelve painted figures. Its attribution rests on notes in the volume. A printed note pasted on the flyleaf calls it an “ouvrage théosophique, cabalistique et hermétique, du comte de Saint-Germain” (a theosophical, cabalistic and hermetic work by the Comte de Saint-Germain) and reports that a former owner, who wrote under the name Philotaume, had noted at its head that this was the only existing copy of the count’s work. A pencilled note adds that it was Cagliostro’s copy, found in Rome by Masséna at the Grand Inquisitor’s, and the library bought it at one of the sales held by the marshal’s son, Prince Masséna (catalogue of 1855, via CCFr). The cataloguer sent readers to the Mémoires authentiques of 1785, which Volz identifies as a satire (p. 35), and the manuscript appears neither in the documents Volz printed nor in Cooper-Oakley’s 1912 biography. Manly P. Hall published it with a parallel English translation in Los Angeles in 1933 (Phoenix Press; catalogue record).

The second is a “triangular book”, known in two copies dated about 1750 and about 1775 in the Manly P. Hall collection of alchemical manuscripts at the Getty Research Institute. Their title presents each as a gift “sapientissimi Comitis St. Germain”, of the most wise Count St. Germain, and the finding aid notes a “translation of Masonic symbols” (finding aid 950053, boxes 34-35). Such a title is a claim, not proof of authorship.

And Hermeticism? Only loosely. By the seventeenth century “hermetic” could simply mean alchemy, the art placed under the patronage of Hermes Trismegistus, as the title of the Musaeum Hermeticum shows, and Saint-Germain’s reputation belongs to that alchemical sense of the word. Neither Hermes nor any Hermetic text appears in the documents Volz printed or in the recollections of Casanova, Gleichen and Charles of Hesse, and the word “hermétique” reaches him only through the note pasted into the Troyes manuscript. Nothing shows that he read the Corpus Hermeticum; the Rosicrucian who dined with him in Leipzig saw no magus and no theosopher.

How the immortal was made

The legend has authors and dates, and the first author is Saint-Germain himself. Gleichen reports this remark:

“Ces bêtes de Parisiens, me dit-il un jour, croient que j’ai cinq cents ans, et je les confirme dans cette idée, puisque je vois que cela leur fait tant de plaisir; ce n’est pas que je ne sois infiniment plus vieux que je ne parais.”

“These Parisian fools, he told me one day, believe that I am five hundred years old, and I confirm them in that idea, since I see that it gives them so much pleasure; not that I am not infinitely older than I look.” (Gleichen, Souvenirs, 1868, p. 124; our translation)

Gleichen explains the last clause: Saint-Germain “souhaitait pourtant que je fusse sa dupe jusqu’à un certain point” (still wished me to be his dupe up to a point). Gleichen also traced the story that Saint-Germain had known Christ to an impersonator, “milord Gower”. He was a wag who owed that nickname to his superb mimicry of the English, and courtiers used him in Paris to play all sorts of characters in disguise and to hoax simple folk. Some practical jokers took him to the Marais as M. de Saint-Germain, and there, century by century, he took his stories back to Jesus Christ. That joke, Gleichen says, is what earned Saint-Germain his reputation for owning a medicine that restored youth and gave immortality. The same pages pass on hearsay that later writers treated as evidence: Rameau and an old relative of a French ambassador said they had known Saint-Germain in Venice in 1710, when he looked about fifty (pp. 124-126).

Books written after his death did the rest. The anonymous Mémoires authentiques pour servir à l’histoire du comte de Cagliostro (1785), an anti-Masonic satire by the Marquis de Luchet according to Volz, made him Cagliostro’s initiator, though Cagliostro probably never met him (Volz, pp. 35-36). Volz calls the Souvenirs de la marquise de Créquy (1834), which make him the son of a Jewish doctor named Wolf from Strasbourg, a forgery by Cousin de Courchamps (pp. 10, 91). Pushkin’s story The Queen of Spades, printed in 1834, made him the source of a winning secret at cards (Wikisource: Russian text, English translation). The Souvenirs sur Marie-Antoinette, published in Paris in 1836 under the name of the Comtesse d’Adhémar, supply the warnings to the queen and the meetings after 1784, such as the book’s story of an ambassador who, back from Venice in 1788, said he had spoken with Saint-Germain in St. Mark’s Square (Cooper-Oakley 1912, pp. 65-66, 153). The countess was real: Gabrielle-Pauline Bouthillier de Chavigny, comtesse d’Adhémar, was a lady of the palace (dame du palais) to Marie Antoinette from 1774 to 1789 (CRCV). What is doubtful is the book published under her name. Volz attributed it to the novelist Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon and went further, calling the countess “das reine Erzeugnis dichterischer Phantasie” (a pure product of poetic fancy; pp. 42-43, our translation). The Bibliothèque nationale de France notes that the memoirs are often attributed to Lamothe-Langon but that no serious study has shown whether they are hers, his or a joint work (BnF).

The Theosophist Isabel Cooper-Oakley built her book on this mixture (Milan, 1912), which Volz called unfinished and the only biography so far (p. 43): it sets archival extracts, which he used, beside a list of his names and titles covering “a period of time dating from 1710 to 1822”, from Gleichen’s hearsay to the 1836 memoirs. Of the Eckernförde register she wrote that “‘Church records’ are not always infallible” (pp. 17, 154). The table sets the best-known claims beside their earliest source.

From Blavatsky’s “adept” to Ballard’s “ascended master”

The decisive step came from the Theosophical Society. Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophical Glossary, published in 1892, the year after her death, and edited for the press by G.R.S. Mead, calls him “the greatest adept in transmuting metals, making gold and the most marvellous diamonds”, a man who “never received a sou from anyone”, and concludes: “Count St. Germain was certainly the greatest Oriental Adept Europe has seen during the last centuries” (Blavatsky 1892, pp. 308-309). The papers say otherwise: he borrowed 2,000 guilders against three opals at The Hague in 1760, left debts at Tournai and, by his last patron’s account, taught that gold should not be made (Volz, pp. 26-27, 159, 283; Mémoires, p. 133).

Later Theosophists gave him a rank and earlier lives. Alice Bailey’s Initiation, Human and Solar (New York, 1922) describes a Hungarian “Master Rakoczi” who had been “before the public eye” as the Comte de St. Germain and earlier as Roger Bacon and Francis Bacon (pp. 58-59); Charles Webster Leadbeater wrote that he had met him walking down the Corso in Rome (The Masters and the Path, Adyar, 1925, p. 11).

Saint Germain as an “ascended master” belongs to the 1930s and to America. In the chronology of Tim Rudbøg’s entry for the World Religions and Spirituality Project, Guy Ballard placed his reported first encounter with Saint Germain on Mount Shasta, California, in 1930, an account he published in 1934 in Unveiled Mysteries, under the pen name Godfré Ray King; the Saint Germain Foundation had been founded in 1932. Rudbøg describes the I AM Activity as close to modern Theosophy, with Saint Germain and Jesus as its most central “masters”, mentions a “Violet Flame” among its practices, and notes that Alice Bailey had already tied a violet light to a “seventh ray” in 1922, in Letters on Occult Meditation (WRSP, 2016). The “Violet Flame” is a twentieth-century teaching; in the eighteenth-century papers Volz printed, violet appears only as a colour for dyes and paints (pp. 257, 318-319).

The movement’s claims about him reached the United States Supreme Court. Members of the Ballard family were indicted for mail fraud over the promotion of the I AM movement, and one of the representations charged was that “the words of the alleged divine entity, Saint Germain, would be transmitted to mankind” through Guy Ballard. The trial judge had left the jury only the question of good faith, and in United States v. Ballard, 322 U.S. 78, decided on 24 April 1944, the Supreme Court held that the truth of such beliefs could not be put to a jury. Justice Douglas wrote: “Men may believe what they cannot prove. They may not be put to the proof of their religious doctrines or beliefs” (Legal Information Institute).

Three layers, one test

The fact: a man of unknown name who lived by selling processes to princes, made peace soundings at The Hague that Versailles disowned, failed at Tournai and died at Eckernförde in 1784. The dispute: his origin, his age, his mandate. The reception: the immortal of the satire and the apocryphal memoirs, Blavatsky’s adept, Ballard’s ascended master. All three are history; only the first is biography. One test sorts most claims about him: ask for a document from his lifetime or the account of someone who met him, and for the date it was written. The same method, for any esoteric claim, is set out in Is it really ancient?, and for quotations in Ask for the date.

Key facts

Name	Unknown; known as Count of Saint-Germain, in Brussels in 1763 as Count Surmont, from the 1770s as Welldone
Born	Unknown; in 1779 he gave his age as 88 (to Charles of Hesse) or 86 (according to Count Warnstedt)
Died	27 February 1784, Eckernförde, Duchy of Schleswig; buried 2 March in St. Nicholas church
First traces	Letter from The Hague, 22 November 1735; London 1745: songs in L’incostanza delusa, arrest reported by Walpole on 9 December
On record as	Musician and composer, chemist of dyes and colours, seller of industrial processes, unofficial negotiator at The Hague (1760)
Patrons	Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour; Count Karl Cobenzl (Brussels, 1763); Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel (Schleswig, 1779-1784)
Manuscripts with his name	La très-sainte Trinosophie (Troyes, ms. 2400); a “triangular book” (Getty Research Institute); authorship unproven
Main documentary source	G. B. Volz (ed.), Der Graf von Saint-Germain (Dresden, 1923)
Not to be confused with	Claude-Louis, comte de Saint-Germain (1707-1778), French secretary of state for war 1775-1777

Fair questions

When was the Count of Saint-Germain born?

Nobody knows; his origin was never established. The usual dates go back to two statements: in 1779 he told Prince Charles of Hesse he was 88, which points to about 1691, while a London Chronicle report of 14 May 1760, relaying the Gazette de Bruxelles, said he was born in Italy in 1712. In the same year, 1779, Count Warnstedt wrote that he claimed to be 86.

Did the Count of Saint-Germain really die in 1784?

Yes. The register of St. Nicholas church in Eckernförde, in the Duchy of Schleswig, records his death on 27 February 1784 and his burial inside the church on 2 March, and on 3 April the town council summoned his heirs and creditors. The register gives no cause: Charles of Hesse wrote that he never fully recovered from severe rheumatism caught in a damp room, and a Brunswick notice of April 1784 mentions a stroke. According to Gustav Volz (1923), it could no longer be established where in the church he was buried.

Was the Count of Saint-Germain immortal?

No. He died and was buried at Eckernförde in 1784; the idea began as talk in his lifetime, when Voltaire joked that he was “a man who never dies”, Casanova heard him claim three hundred years and Gleichen heard him say he let Parisians believe he was five hundred. The reported sightings after 1784 come from Theosophical writers and from the Souvenirs published in 1836 under the name of the Comtesse d’Adhémar, who really was a lady of the palace to Marie Antoinette; the book’s authorship is disputed, and Gustav Volz gave it to the novelist Lamothe-Langon.

Was the Count of Saint-Germain an alchemist?

He had the reputation of one, but nothing in the record shows that he could make gold. A 1783 engraving calls him a “célèbre alchimiste” (famous alchemist); the documents show a chemist of dyes and colours who sold industrial processes to princes, and Casanova, who watched him “turn” a silver coin into gold at Tournai, was sure the coin had been swapped. Charles of Hesse, his last patron, recorded that he taught that one must not make gold at all, even if one knew how.

Why is Saint Germain called an ascended master?

Because of a twentieth-century American religious movement, not because of any eighteenth-century source. Guy Ballard said he had first met Saint Germain, in the movement’s terms an “ascended master”, on Mount Shasta, California, in 1930, an account he published as Godfré Ray King in Unveiled Mysteries (1934); the Saint Germain Foundation had been founded in 1932. The movement stood close to Theosophy, whose Theosophical Glossary (1892) had already called the count “the greatest Oriental Adept Europe has seen during the last centuries”.

Did the Count of Saint-Germain write any books?

Apart from music, no work of his is known to have been printed in his lifetime; what survives are letters, a 1777 list of his processes and printed music such as the Musique raisonnée (London, John Walsh, about 1749). Two manuscripts carry his name without proof of authorship: La très-sainte Trinosophie (Troyes, ms. 2400), attributed by notes in the volume, and a “triangular book” at the Getty Research Institute. Books issued under his name in the twentieth century belong to his reception.

Sources & further reading

• Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, Arlington Street, 9 December 1745, in C. D. Yonge (ed.), Letters of Horace Walpole, vol. I (London: T. Fisher Unwin; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1890); Project Gutenberg #12073.
• Voltaire to Frederick II, 15 April 1760, letter 4094, Œuvres complètes de Voltaire (Paris: Garnier), vol. 40, pp. 352-353; Wikisource (consulted 30 October 2026).
• Giacomo Casanova, Histoire de ma vie, autograph manuscript, Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF 28604 (shelfmark in the BnF catalogue; digitised in Gallica); English: The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, tr. Arthur Machen (London, 1894), chapters “Paris and Holland” III, “Return to Paris” VI, “Holland and Germany” X and “Flight from London to Berlin” XVI in Project Gutenberg #2981.
• Charles-Henri, baron de Gleichen, Souvenirs, ed. Paul Grimblot (Paris: Léon Techener fils, 1868), ch. XI “Saint-Germain”, pp. 120-134; Project Gutenberg #37762, made from BnF Gallica images.
• Charles, landgrave of Hesse, Mémoires de mon temps (Copenhagen: J. H. Schultz, 1861), pp. 132-136; Internet Archive (University of Toronto copy).
• Gustav Berthold Volz (ed.), Der Graf von Saint-Germain. Das Leben eines Alchimisten. Nach großenteils unveröffentlichten Urkunden, German by Friedrich von Oppeln-Bronikowski (Dresden: Paul Aretz, 1923): introduction, pp. 5-43; documents on London (pp. 119-121), France (pp. 122-143), the Hague mission of 1760 (pp. 144-220), Tournai (pp. 225-287), Leipzig and Dresden (pp. 304-337), Berlin (pp. 338-349) and Schleswig (pp. 353-362); “Saint-Germains Tod in Eckernförde”, pp. 363-367; Project Gutenberg #68838, whose HTML edition marks the 1923 page numbers cited here.
• IMSLP: Musique raisonnée selon le bon sens aux dames angloises (London: John Walsh, about 1749) and The Favourite Songs in L’Inconstanza delusa (London: John Walsh), British Library scans (consulted 30 October 2026).
• Charles Burney, A General History of Music, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, vol. IV (London: printed for the author, 1789), p. 452; Internet Archive (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek copy, digitised by Google).
• David Hunter, “Monsieur le Comte de Saint-Germain: The Great Pretender”, The Musical Times 144, no. 1885 (2003), pp. 40 ff.; doi:10.2307/3650726 (JSTOR).
• Catalogue général des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques des départements, vol. II (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1855), Troyes, no. 2400, “La très-sainte Trinosophie”; CCFr (consulted 30 October 2026).
• Getty Research Institute, Finding aid for the Manly Palmer Hall collection of alchemical manuscripts, 1500-1825, no. 950053, boxes 34-35; PDF (consulted 30 October 2026).
• A Parallel French and English Text of the Most Holy Trinosophia of the Comte de St.-Germain, with introductory material and commentary by Manly Hall (Los Angeles: Phoenix Press, 1933); catalogue record from Harvard Library data, Open Library (consulted 30 October 2026).
• H. P. Blavatsky, The Theosophical Glossary, ed. G. R. S. Mead (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1892), pp. 308-309; Internet Archive (photographic reprint, Los Angeles: Theosophy Company, 1930).
• Isabel Cooper-Oakley, The Comte de St. Germain: the secret of kings (Milan: G. Sulli-Rao, 1912), pp. 17, 65-66, 108-109, 153-154; Internet Archive.
• Bibliothèque nationale de France, authority record “Adhémar, Gabrielle-Pauline d’ (1735?-18..)”, ark:/12148/cb10034931h; Centre de recherche du château de Versailles, “Dames du palais de Marie-Antoinette 1774-1789” (2012), charge no. 6, PDF (both consulted 30 October 2026).
• A. S. Pushkin, “Pikovaya dama” (The Queen of Spades), Biblioteka dlya chteniya, 1834, vol. II, pp. 109-140; Russian text on Wikisource; English: “The Queen of Spades”, tr. T. Keane, Wikisource (both consulted 30 October 2026).
• Alice A. Bailey, Initiation, Human and Solar (New York: Lucifer Publishing, 1922), pp. 58-59, Internet Archive; C. W. Leadbeater, The Masters and the Path (Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1925), p. 11, Internet Archive.
• Tim Rudbøg, “I AM Activity”, World Religions and Spirituality Project, 9 August 2016, chronology; wrldrels.org (consulted 30 October 2026).
• United States v. Ballard, 322 U.S. 78 (1944), opinion of Justice Douglas; Legal Information Institute (consulted 30 October 2026).
• Hanna Sonkajärvi, “Circulation of Military Knowledge: The French and Danish Military Reforms of Comte de Saint-Germain in the Late 18th Century”, Almanack, no. 38 (2024); doi:10.1590/2236-463338ea00324 (open access).
• Wikipedia, “Count of St. Germain”, revision of 9 October 2026, cited only for the dates it gives (consulted 30 October 2026).