into prominence. His statue of Admiral Farragut, Madison Square, New York, was commissioned in 1878, exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1880 and completed in 1881. It immediately brought the sculptor widespread fame, which was increased by his statue of Lincoln (unveiled 1887), for Lincoln Park, Chicago. In Springfield, Mass., is his “Deacon Chapin,” known as “The Puritan.” His figure of “Grief” (also known as “Death” and “The Peace of God”) for the Adams (Mrs Henry Adams) Memorial, in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C., has been described as “an idealization complete and absolute, the rendering of a simple, natural fact—a woman in grief—yet with such deep and embracing comprehension that the individual is magnified into a type.” His Shaw Memorial in Boston, a monument to Robert G. Shaw, colonel of a negro regiment in the Civil War, was undertaken in 1884 and completed in 1897; it is a relief in bronze, 11 ft. by 15, containing many figures of soldiers, led by their young officer on horseback, a female figure in the clouds pointing onward. In 1903 was unveiled his equestrian statue (begun in 1892) to General Sherman, at 59th street and Fifth avenue, New York; preceding the Union commander is a winged figure of “Victory.” This work, with others, formed a group at the Paris Exposition of 1900. A bronze copy of his “Amor Caritas” is in the Luxembourg, Paris. Among his other works are relief medallion portraits of Robert Louis Stevenson (in St Giles’s Cathedral, Edinburgh) and the French painter Jules Bastien-Lepage; Garfield Memorial, Fairmount Park, Philadelphia; General Logan, Chicago; the Peter Cooper Memorial; and Charles Stewart Parnell in Dublin. Saint-Gaudens was made an officer of the Legion of Honour and corresponding member of the Institute of France. He died at Cornish, N.H., on the 3rd of August 1907. His monument of Phillips Brooks for Boston was left practically completed. Saint-Gaudens is rightly regarded as the greatest sculptor produced by America, and his work had a most powerful influence on art in the United States. In 1877 he married Augusta F. Homer and left a son, Homer Saint-Gaudens. His brother Louis (b. 1854), also a sculptor, assisted Augustus Saint-Gaudens in some of his works.
See Royal Cortissoz, Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1907); Lorado Taft, History of American Sculpture (1903), containing two chapters devoted to Saint-Gaudens; Kenyon Cox, Old Masters and New (1905); C. Lewis Hind, Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1908).
ST GAUDENS, a town of south-western France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Haute-Garonne, 1 m. from the left bank of the Garonne, 57 m. S.S.W. of Toulouse, on the railway to Tarbes. Pop. (1906), town, 4535; commune, 7120. The church, once collegiate, dates chiefly from the 11th and 12th centuries, but the main entrance is in the flamboyant Gothic style. The town has sawing-, oil- and flour-mills, manufactures woollen goods, and is a market for horses, sheep and agricultural produce. St Gaudens derives its name from a martyr of the 5th century, at whose tomb a college of canons was afterwards established. It was important as capital of the Nébouzan, as the residence of the bishops of Comminges and for its cloth industry.
SAINT-GELAIS, MELIN DE (1487–1558), French poet, was born at Angoulême on the 3rd of November 1487. He was the natural son of Octavien de St Gelais (1466–1502), afterwards bishop of Angoulême, himself a poet who had translated the Aeneid into French. Melin, who had studied at Bologna and Padua, had the reputation of being doctor, astrologer and musician as well as poet. He returned to France in 1515, and soon gained favour at the court of Francis I. by his skill in light verse. He was made almoner to the Dauphin, abbot of Reclus in the diocese of Troyes and librarian to the king at Fontainebleau. He enjoyed immense popularity until the appearance of Du Bellay’s Deffense et illustration . . . in 1549, where St Gelais was not excepted from the scorn poured on contemporary poets. He attempted to ridicule the innovators by reading aloud the Odes of Ronsard with burlesque emphasis before Henry II., when the king’s sister, Margaret of Valois, seized the book and read them herself. Ronsard accepted Saint-Gelais’s apology for this incident, but Du Bellay satirized the offender in the Poète courtesan. In 1554 he collaborated, perhaps with François Habert (1520–1574?), in a translation of the Sophonisbe of Trissino which was represented (1554) before Catherine de Medicis at Blois. Saint-Gelais was the champion of the style marotique and the earliest of French sonneteers. He died in 1558.
His Œuvres were edited in 1873 (3 vols., Bibl. elzévirienne) by Prosper Blanchemain.
SAINT-GEORGES, GEORGES HENRI VERNOY DE (1799–1875), French dramatist, was born in Paris on the 7th of November 1799. Saint-Louis ou les deux dîners (1823), a vaudeville written in collaboration with Alexandre Tardif, was followed by a series of operas and ballets. In 1829 he became manager of the Opéra Comique. Among his more famous libretti are: Le Val d’Andorre (1848) for Halévy, and La Fille du régiment (1840) for Donizetti. He wrote some fifty pieces in collaboration with Eugène Scribe, Adolphe de Leuven, or Joseph Mazillier, and a great number in collaboration with other authors. Among his novels may be mentioned Un Mariage de prince. Saint-Georges died in Paris on the 23rd of December 1875.
SAINT-GERMAIN, Comte de (c. 1710–c. 1780) called der Wundermann, a celebrated adventurer who by the assertion of his discovery of some extraordinary secrets of nature exercised considerable influence at several European courts. Of his parentage and place of birth nothing is definitely known; the common version is that he was a Portuguese Jew, but various surmises have been made as to his being of royal birth. It was also stated that he obtained his money, of which he had abundance, from acting as spy to one of the European courts. But this is hard to maintain. He knew nearly all the European languages, and spoke German, English, Italian, French (with a Piedmontese accent), Portuguese and Spanish. Grimm affirms him to have been the man of the best parts he had ever known. He was a musical composer and a capable violinist. His knowledge of history was comprehensive, and his accomplishments as a chemist, on which be based his reputation, were in many ways real and considerable. He pretended to have a secret for removing flaws from diamonds, and to be able to transmute metals. The most remarkable of his professed discoveries was of a liquid which could prolong life, and by which he asserted he had himself lived 2000 years. After spending some time in Persia, Saint-Germain is mentioned in a letter of Horace Walpole’s as being in London about 1743, and as being arrested as a Jacobite spy and released. Walpole says: “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.” At the court of Louis XV., where he appeared about 1748, he exercised for a time extraordinary influence and was employed on secret missions by Louis XV.; but, having interfered in the dispute between Austria and France, he was compelled in June 1760, on account of the hostility of the duke of Choiseul, to remove to England. He appears to have resided in London for one or two years, but was at St Petersburg in 1762, and is asserted to have played an important part in connexion with the conspiracy against the emperor Peter III. in July of that year, a plot which placed Catherine II. on the Russian throne. He then went to Germany, where, according to the Mémoires authentiques of Cagliostro, he was the founder of freemasonry, and initiated Cagliostro into that rite. He was again in Paris from 1770 to 1774, and after frequenting several of the German courts he took up his residence in Schleswig-Holstein, where he and the Landgrave Charles of Hesse pursued together the study of the “secret” sciences. He died at Schleswig in or about 1780–1785, although he is said to have been seen in Paris in 1789.
Andrew Lang in his Historical Mysteries (1904) discusses the career of Saint-Germain, and cites the various authorities for it. Saint-Germain figures prominently in the correspondence of Grimm and of Voltaire. See also Oettinger, Graf Saint-German (1846); F. Bülau, Geheime Geschichten und räthselhafte Menschen, Band i. (1850–1860); Lascelles Wraxall, Remarkable Adventures (1863); and U. Birch in the Nineteenth Century (January 1908).
SAINT-GERMAIN, CLAUDE LOUIS, Comte de (1707–1778), French general, was born on the 15th of April 1707, at the Château of Vertamboz. Educated at Jesuit schools, he intended to enter the priesthood, but at the last minute obtained from
