Agli’s claimed immortality

Agli’s claimed immortality is never established as fact; it is a carefully sustained possibility that lets him move between skeptical amusement and supernatural authority. He distinguishes himself from the demonstrable impostor Cagliostro by invoking the Comte de Saint-Germain, then answers direct suspicion with a joke, a compliment, and a warning about the cost of believing him. The result is less a revelation than a performance whose uncertainty is its chief effect.

The Claim and Its Historical Alibi

Agli readily calls Cagliostro a humbug, a braggart whose origins and short life are common knowledge. That dismissal sharpens, rather than ends, the mystery: fraud in one case does not disprove the possibility that privileged people have lived many lives. Agli speculates that modern science understands too little about aging, and that mortality itself might arise from inadequate education. His claim is framed as conjecture, but its scale unsettles the ordinary boundary between nature and legend.

The Comte de Saint-Germain supplies the more persuasive example. Agli suggests that the count may not have been joking when he claimed to have learned chemical secrets from ancient Egyptians; perhaps, unable to persuade anyone, he pretended his knowledge was a joke to spare his listeners. This account turns disbelief into an explanation for why the supposed truth went unrecognized. Agli does not offer proof. He offers a story in which the absence of belief is itself predictable.

A historical anecdote gives the legend a comic, almost testimonial form. Saint-Germain describes having known Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem, including the governor’s house and supper dishes. Cardinal de Rohan doubts the account and asks the count’s elderly valet whether he was present. The servant answers that he has served his master for only four hundred years. The punch line makes extraordinary longevity sound casually verified, while its extravagance also invites the reader to laugh at the very evidence being presented.

Performance, Seduction, and Doubt

Amparo identifies the trick in Agli’s manner: he is pretending to joke in order to persuade his listeners that he is telling the truth. Agli praises her perceptiveness, then pleads with her not to believe him. If he appeared in the dusty splendor of his many centuries, he says, her beauty would wither, and he could never forgive himself. The claim of age becomes a flirtatious performance, and the refusal to confirm it gives the performance room to continue.

Amparo is won over, and Casaubon feels a twinge of jealousy before changing the subject. The scene therefore registers the immediate interpersonal consequence of Agli’s ambiguity: it attracts Amparo while making Casaubon newly conscious of his own position. Agli’s supposed age is not an abstract doctrine in the conversation; it is part of the charm he exercises in the present.

Later, when Amparo draws her hand across her throat and asks whether she has recognized him, Agli accepts the implication with theatrical ease. He takes out his snuffbox and strokes it, then answers through the imagined history of Saint-Germain, who has seen heads fall and be reattached across his centuries. The gesture and the allusion let him inhabit the identity without plainly asserting it. He redirects the exchange just as the claim seems closest to confirmation.

The Immortal’s Burden

A book on the Rosicrucians leads Casaubon back to Saint-Germain, and the accumulating references prompt the thought that everything holds together. The book also recounts Giovanni Papini’s fictional encounter with the count aboard an ocean liner. There, the supposed immortal describes existence not as triumph but as exhaustion: after centuries, ennui becomes incurable; the world grows monotonous, people learn nothing, and successive generations fall into similar errors and nightmares. The image complicates the glamour of Agli’s claim by giving immortality a cost: endless duration promises neither novelty nor insight.

Casaubon consequently interprets Agli as a gentleman growing old, somewhat dotty, with money, leisure for travel, and an interest in the supernatural—someone playing at impersonating Saint-Germain. Amparo offers a different judgment, describing him as a consistent reactionary with the courage to be decadent, and saying she prefers him to bourgeois democrats. Their disagreement keeps the count’s identity unresolved while showing how the same persona can be read as harmless eccentricity or as a compelling alternative to ordinary respectability.

The Hand and the Broken Life-Line

After they return home, Amparo recalls Agli’s hand. Instead of a single life-line, she saw a succession of broken lines, like a stream reaching a stone, dividing, then joining again a meter farther on. She reads the marks as the line of a man who must have died many times. The image gives bodily form to the tale of repeated lives, but it remains Amparo’s interpretation of a palm, not independent proof of Agli’s history.

Casaubon answers with a joke, calling Agli the world champion of the metempsychosis relay. Amparo laughs and says, “No pasaran.” Their exchange brings the claim back down to intimate, playful speech after its reach across ancient Egypt, Pontius Pilate, and centuries of history. The broken line can signify a life repeatedly interrupted and resumed, but the book preserves the gap between what the characters see and what they can know. Agli’s immortality remains an alleged condition: maintained by anecdotes, gestures, and suggestive marks, never resolved into certainty.