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Then there was a print of Breughel, engraved by Cock, "The wise and the foolish virgins": a little panel, cut in the middle by a corkscrew cloud which was flanked at each side by angels with their sleeves rolled up and their cheeks puffed out, sounding the trumpet, while in the middle of the cloud another angel, bizarre and sacerdotal, with his navel indicated beneath his languorously flowing robe, unrolled a banderole on which was written the verse of the Gospel, "Ecce sponsus venit, exite obviam ei."
Beneath the cloud, at one side, sat the wise virgins, good Flemings, with their lighted lamps, and sang canticles as they turned the spi
The blessed naïveté of the Primitives, the homely touches in the scenes of earth and of heaven! Durtal loved this old engraving. He saw in it a union of the art of an Ostade purified and that of a Thierry Bouts.
Waiting for his grate, in which the charcoal was crackling and peeling and ru
"Let's see," he said to himself, rolling a cigarette, "we had come to the time when that excellent Gilles de Rais begins the quest of the 'great work.' It is easy to figure what knowledge he possessed about the method of transmuting metals into gold.
"Alchemy was already highly developed a century before he was born. The writings of Albertus Magnus, Arnaud de Villeneuve, and Raymond Lully were in the hands of the hermetics. The manuscripts of Nicolas Flamel circulated, and there is no doubt that Gilles had acquired them, for he was an avid collector of the rare. Let us add that at that epoch the edict of Charles interdicting spagyric labours under pain of prison and hanging, and the bull, Spondent pariter quas non exhibent, which Pope John XXII fulminated against the alchemists, were still in vigour. These treatises were, then, forbidden, and in consequence desirable. It is certain that Gilles had long studied them, but from that to understanding them is a far cry.
"For they were written in an impossible jargon of allegories, twisted and obscure metaphors, incoherent symbols, ambiguous parables, enigmas, and ciphers. And here is an example." He took from one of the shelves of the library a manuscript which was none other than the Asch-Mezareph, the book of the Jew Abraham and of Nicolas Flamel, restored, translated, and a
"In this is what claims to be the recipe for the philosopher's stone, for the grand quintessential and tinctural essence. The figures are not precisely clear," he said to himself, as he ran his eye over the pen drawings, retouched in colour, representing, under the title of "The chemical coitus" various bottles and flasks each containing a liquid and imprisoning an allegorical creature. A green lion, with a crescent moon over him, hung head downward. Doves were trying to fly out through the neck of the bottle or to peck a way through the bottom. The liquid was black and undulated with waves of carmine and gold, or white and granulated with dots of ink, which sometimes took the shape of a frog or a star. Sometimes the liquid was milky and troubled, sometimes flames rose from it as if there were a film of alcohol over the surface.
Eliphas Levi explained the symbolism of these bottled volatiles as fully as he cared to, but abstained from giving the famous recipe for the grand magisterium. He was keeping up the pleasantry of his other books, in which, begi
"As a matter of fact, the 'great work' is simple," said Durtal to himself, folding up the manuscript of Nicolas Flamel. "The hermetic philosophers discovered-and modern science, after long evading the issue, no longer denies-that the metals are compounds, and that their components are identical. They vary from each other according to the different proportions of their elements. With the aid of an agent which will displace these proportions one may transmute mercury, for example, into silver, and lead into gold.
"And this agent is the philosopher's stone: mercury-not the vulgar mercury, which to the alchemists was but an aborted metallic sperm-but the philosophers' mercury, called also the green lion, the serpent, the milk of the Virgin, the pontic water.
"Only the recipe for this mercury, or stone of the sages, has ever been revealed-and it is this that the philosophers of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, all centuries, including our own, have sought so frantically.
"And in what has it not been sought?" said Durtal, thumbing his notes. "In arsenic, in ordinary mercury, tin, salts of vitriol, saltpetre and nitre; in the juices of spurge, poppy, and purslane; in the bellies of starved toads; in human urine, in the menstrual fluid and the milk of women."
Now Gilles de Rais must have been completely baffled. Alone at Tiffauges, without the aid of initiates, he was incapable of making fruitful experiments. At that time Paris was the centre of the hermetic science in France. The alchemists gathered under the vaults of Notre Dame and studied the hieroglyphics which Nicolas Flamel, before he died, had written on the walls of the charnal Des I
The Marshal could not go to Paris because the English soldiers barred the roads. There was only one thing to do. He wrote to the most celebrated of the southern transmuters, and had them brought to Tiffauges at great expense.
"From documents which we posses we can see his supervising the construction of the athanor, or alchemists' furnace, buying pelicans, crucibles, and retorts. He turned one of the wings of his château into a laboratory and shut himself up in it with Antonio di Palermo, François Lombard, and 'Jean Petit, goldsmith of Paris,' all of whom busied themselves night and day with the concoction of the 'great work.'"
They were completely unsuccessful. At the end of their resources, these hermetists disappeared, and there ensued at Tiffauges an incredible coming-and-going of adepts and their helpers. They arrived from all parts of Brittany, Poitou, and Maine, alone or escorted by promoters and sorcerers. Gilles de Sillé and Roger de Bricqueville, cousins and friends of the Marshal, scurried about the country, beating up the game and driving it in to Gilles de Rais, while a priest of his chapel, Eustache Blanchet, went to Italy where workers in metals were legion.
While waiting, Gilles de Rais, not to be discouraged, continued his experiments, all of which missed fire. He finally came to believe that the magicians were right after all, and that no discovery was possible without the aid of Satan.
And one night, with a sorcerer newly arrived from Poitiers, Jean de la Rivière, he betakes himself to a forest in the vicinity of the château de Tiffauges. With his servitors Henriet and Poitou, he remains on the verge of the wood into which the sorcerer penetrates. The night is heavy and there is no moon. Gilles becomes nervous, scrutinizing the shadows, listening to the muted sounds of the nocturnal landscape; his companions, terrified, huddle close together, trembling and whispering at the slightest stirring of the air. Suddenly a cry of anguish is raised. They hesitate, then they advance, groping in the darkness. In a sudden flare of light they perceive de la Rivière trembling and deathly pale, clutching the handle of his lantern convulsively. In a low voice he recounts how the Devil has risen in the form of a leopard and rushed past without looking at the evocator, without saying a word.