Madame d'Urfe wore on her neck a large magnet. She said that it would one
day happen that this magnet would attract the lightning, and that she
would consequently soar into the sun. I longed to tell her that when, she
got there she could be no higher up than on the earth, but I restrained
myself; and the great charlatan hastened to say that there could be no
doubt about it, and that he, and he only, could increase the force of the
magnet a thousand times. I said, dryly, that I would wager twenty
thousand crowns he would not so much as double its force, but Madame
d'Urfe would not let us bet, and after dinner she told me in private that
I should have lost, as St. Germain was a magician. Of course I agreed
with her.

A few days later, the magician set out for Chambord, where the king had
given him a suite of rooms and a hundred thousand francs, that he might
be at liberty to work on the dyes which were to assure the superiority of
French materials over those of any other country. St. Germain had got
over the 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