THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES
that is little more than the prolongation of old age, and one
has the right to ask from the science which we profess other
privileges and other secrets.
To be a long time young, or even to become young again,
that is what would appear desirable and precious to the
majority of men. Is it possible? We shall examine the
question.
The famous Count of Saint-Germain is dead, we do not
doubt, but no one ever saw him grow old. He appeared
always of the age of forty years, and at the time of his greatest
celebrity, he pretended to be over eighty.
Ninon de !l’Enclos, in her very old age, was still a young,
beautiful and seductive woman. She died without having
grown old.
Desbarrolles, the celebrated palmist, has been for a long
while for everybody a man of thirty-five years. His birth
certificate would speak very differently if he dared to show it,
but no one would believe it.
Cagliostro always appeared the same age. He pretended
to possess not only an elixir which gave to the old, for an
instant, all the vigour of youth; but he also prided himself on
being able to operate physical regeneration by means which
we have detailed and analysed in our History of Magic.
Cagliostro and the Count of Saint-Germain attributed the
preservation of their youth to the existence and use of the
universal medicine, that medicament uselessly sought by so
many hermetists and alchemists.
An Initiate of the sixteenth century, the good and learned
William Postel, never pretended that he possessed the great
arcanum of the hermetic philosophy; and yet after having
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