Usually, I dive into stories of forgotten women—voices drowned out by history’s louder voices. But as Halloween looms and my own spooky short story readies for release, I’ve fallen for a most unusual fellow.
Meet The Wonderman: the Comte de Saint Germain. Allegedly immortal, perpetually forty-five, and quite possibly the best dinner guest never to eat a bite. Fluent in seven languages (maybe more!), an accomplished composer, alchemist, and raconteur, the Comte floated through European courts dazzling (and unnerving) everyone he met.
Voltaire said he knew everything and never died. Marie Antoinette supposedly saw him turn metal into gold—and, bizarrely, he was said to attend her beheading years later. One countess swore she met him in 1710 and again in 1760—exact same face, exact same age.
Marie Antoinette Being Taken to Her Execution by William Hamilton, 1794
Saint Germain was the 18th century’s ultimate enigma: a polymath, charmer, and possible time traveler. Officially, he died in 1784. Unofficially, he never stopped showing up. There were sightings in 19th-century Paris, 20th-century New Orleans (as Jacques St. Germain), and even a self-proclaimed reincarnation in the 1970s into Richard Chanfrey, a British actor whose suspiciously missing body only fueled the myth.
Same guy? You be the judge
Maybe he was a con artist. Maybe a genius. Or maybe, as he’d like us to believe, an immortal watching history repeat itself.
Either way, the Comte de Saint Germain outlived his peers in the most efficient way possible, by becoming a legend.
-MH