The Man Who Left Nothing Behind

The Comte de Saint-Germain spoke six languages fluently, composed sonatas, improved diamonds for Louis XV, and moved through every royal court in eighteenth-century Europe with the ease of someone who had been doing it for centuries. He claimed he had.

Nobody could work out who he actually was.

He told the Countess de Gergy he had known her in Venice fifty years earlier, when she was a girl. She believed him. He told Casanova he was three hundred years old. His valet, asked to confirm, said he couldn’t be sure, as he had only been in the Count’s service for five hundred years. Voltaire called him “a man who never dies and who knows everything.” He never ate at dinner parties. The most sought-after guest in Europe sat through meal after elaborate meal, touching nothing, drinking nothing, talking brilliantly for hours. He appeared at courts dripping in diamonds. His shoe buckles alone were valued at two hundred thousand francs.

One does wonder where it all went.

He died on the 27th of February, 1784, in the small town of Eckernförde, in Danish Schleswig. His estate was inventoried. It contained eighty-two Reichsthalers, some razors, a few toothbrushes, a pair of sunglasses, and combs. Not a single diamond. Not one piece of gold. Not a single letter from anyone. The city buried him for free.