Angelique - Part 2. Marriage in Toulouse Chapter 9 - Read online

SOME DAYS LATER, Angelique was returning from a morning ride along the banks of the Garomie. She liked to spend a few hours on horseback just after sunrise, when it was still cool. Joffrey de Peyrac accompanied her infrequently. Unlike most noblemen, he had little taste for riding and hunting. One might have thought he feared violent exercise, if his fame as a swordsman had not been almost as great as his renown as a singer. The flying leaps he executed despite his crippled leg were said to be little short of miraculous. He practised every day in the palace armoury, but Angelique had never seen him fence. There wdre many tilings she still did not know about him, and sometimes, with sudden melancholy, she recalled the words the Archbishop had whispered to her on her wedding day: “Between you and me, you have chosen a rather odd husband.”
The Comte appeared again to have adopted towards her the respectful, but distant, attitude which he had displayed in the early days. She saw but little of him and then always in the presence of guests, and she wondered if the fiery Carmencita de Merecourt did not to some extent account for this new estrangement. The lady had, in fact, after a journey to Paris, returned to Toulouse, where her hysterics put everyone on edge. It was being seriously said that this time Monsieur de Merecourt would shut her up in a convent. If he had not yet carried out this threat, it was for diplomatic reasons. War with Spain still continued, but Monsieur de Mazarin, who had for some time been trying to negotiate a peace, recommended that nothing be done that might inflame Spanish susceptibilities. The beautiful Carmencita belonged to a great Madrid family. The ups and downs of her conjugal life were thus more important than the pitched battles in Flanders. Everything was reported to Madrid, for, despite the breaking of f of of ficial diplomatic relations, secret messengers were crossing the Pyrenees con¬stantly in a variety of disguises as monks, pedlars or merchants.
Carmencita de Merecourt flaunted her eccentric way of life, and this perturbed and of fended Angelique. Despite the worldly elegance she had acquired from contact with this brilliant society, she had at heart remained as simple as a flower of the field, rustic and over-sensitive. She did not feel strong enough to fight Carmencita, and she sometimes told herself, her heart gnawed by jealousy, that the flamboyant Spanish woman was better suited than herself to the Comte de Peyrac’s unusual character.
Only in the sphere of science was she sure of being the woman who came before all others in her husband’s eyes.
That morning, as she was riding back towards the palace with her escort of pages, gallant noblemen and some young girl friends she liked to have with her, she saw once again, in front of the gate, a carriage with the Archbishop’s crest. From it she saw alight a tall figure austerely dressed in homespun, followed by a beribboned nobleman, sword at his side, and loud-mouthed, for even at a distance she heard the echo of his voice shouting orders or abuse.
“Upon my word,” exclaimed Bernard d’Andijos, who continued to be one of her most faithful followers, “that looks like the Chevalier de Germontaz, Monseigneur’s nephew. Heaven preserve us! He is an oaf and the biggest fool I know. If you will take my advice, Madame, we will pass through the gardens to avoid meeting him.”
The small party veered to the left and, after dismounting at the stables, made for the orange grove, which was a very pleasant place surrounded by fountains.
But no sooner had they settled down to an assortment of fruit and iced drinks than Angelique was informed by a page that the Comte de Peyrac was asking for her. In the entrance hall Angelique found her husband in the company of the nobleman and the monk she had seen a moment earlier.
“This is the Abbe Becher, the distinguished scientist of whom Mon¬seigneur has told us,” said Joffrey. “And I also wish to present to you the Chevalier de Germontaz, His Excellency’s nephew.”
The monk was tall and lean. His prominent eyebrows concealed rather close-set, restless eyes, which glowed with a feverish, mystical light. A long scrawny neck with protruding sinews emerged from his homespun frock. His companion seemed to serve as a foil to his appearance. As boisterously bon-vivant as the other was consumed by self-mortification, the Chevalier de Germontaz had a ruddy complexion and, for his twenty- five years, an already estimable embonpoint. An opulent fair wig cascaded over his blue satin costume trimmed with flowing pink ribbons. His rhinegrave was so ample and his laces so plentiful that his nobleman’s sword seemed incongruous among such a surfeit of frippery. With the ostrich-feather of his wide felt hat he swept the ground before Angelique, then kissed her hand but, as he straightened up again, he gave her such a daring glance that she was outraged by it.
“Now that my wife has joined us, we can proceed to the laboratory,” said the Comte de Peyrac.
The friar gave a start and looked down on Angelique with surprise.
“Am I to understand that Madame will enter the sanctuary and be present at the discussions and experiments to which you are good enough to invite us?”
The Comte grimaced ironically and eyed his guest with insolence. He knew how impressive the expressions of his face were for those who saw him for the first time, and he relished the moment with malice.
“Father, in the letter I addressed to Monseigneur in which I consented to receive you in accordance with the desire he had frequently expressed, I told him that this would in a sense be a visit at which only persons of my choosing might be present. Now he has elected to have you accompanied by the Chevalier, in case your eyes might not see all that which is desirable
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to see.
“But, Comte, you as a scientist know that a woman’s presence is in complete contradiction with the hermetic tradition according to which no results can be obtained among contrary fluids. . . .”
“In my science, Father, results are invariably consistent and do not depend on the mood or quality of the persons present.”
“Personally I think that’s excellent!” cried the Chevalier, obviously delighted. “I won’t conceal that I fancy a pretty lady more than phials and old pots. My uncle insisted upon my accompanying Bechcr in order to instruct myself in the duties of my new of fice. Yes, my uncle is going to buy me the benefice of a grand vicar over three bishoprics; but he is a terrible man. He’ll grant it to me on the sole condition that I take Holy Orders. I confess I’d have been content with the benefices.”
While talking, the party had moved towards the library, which the Comte wished to show them first. The monk Bccher, for whom this visit was a long-hoped-for opportunity, asked a stream of questions, to which Joffrey de Peyrac answered with a resigned patience.
Angelique followed them, escorted by the Chevalier de Germontaz, who lost no opportunity to touch her in passing and cast provocative glances at her.
‘He really is an oaf,* she thought. ‘He looks like a fat sucking-pig garnished with flowers and laces for a New Year’s Eve banquet.*
“What I fail to understand,” she said out loud, “is in what way a visit to my husband’s laboratory has any connection with your new ecclesiastical of fice.”
“So do I, I confess, but my uncle explained it to me at length. It seems that the Church is less wealthy and less powerful than she appears to be and especially than she ought to be. My uncle also complains of the centralisation of royal power to the detriment of the rights of the states such as the Languedoc. It seems there is an attempt to whittle down more and more the prerogatives of Church assemblies and even of the local Parliament, of which, as you know, he is the president. They are to be replaced by the authority of the provincial Administrator and his hench¬men, the police, the financiers and the army. He would like to combat this growing invasion by irresponsible delegates of the King by an alliance of the great personages of the province. Yet he sees your husband amassing a colossal fortune with neither the city nor the Church getting anything out of it.”
“But, Monsieur le Chevalier, we give tp charity.”
“That’s not enough. What he would like is an alliance.”
‘For a pupil of the Grand Inquisitor, he is somewhat lacking in finesse/ thought Angelique, ‘unless this happens to be a well-learned lesson f “In brief,” she resumed, “Monseigneur considers that all the wealth of the province should be handed over to the Church?”
“The Church must be at its head.”
“With the Monseigneur at its head! You preach very well, you know. I am no longer surprised that you are destined for sacred eloquence. Convey my compliments to your uncle.”
“I shall not fail to do so, kind lady. Your smile is ravishing, but I believe your eyes lack tenderness for me. Do not forget that the Church still remains the foremost power, especially in our Languedoc.”
“What I see most of all is that you are a convinced vicar-to-be, despite your ribbons and your laces.”
“Wealth is a convincing means. My uncle has known how to make use of it in my case. I shall serve him to the best of my ability.”
Angelique shut her fan abrupdy. She no longer marvelled at the trust the Archbishop put in his fat nephew. Despite their different characters, they shared the same ambition. In the library, where screens maintained a semi-darkness, something moved and bowed at their approach.
“Why, what are you doing here, Master Clement?” asked the Comte with a hint of surprise in his voice. “Nobody comes in here without my permission. I do not think I gave you the key?”
“May your Lordship excuse me; I was tidying up this room myself, not wishing to entrust the care of these precious books to uncouth servants.” He zealously gathered up his duster, brush and step-ladder and retired, bowing deeply.
“I am beginning to understand,” sighed the monk, “that I shall see very strange things here: a woman in a laboratory, a valet in the library, touch¬ing with unclean hands the books that contain all of science! . . . How¬ever, I find that your reputation has not suffered thereby! Let’s see what you have here.”
He recognised the richly-bound classics of alchemy: The Principle of the Conservation of Bodies or Mummies, by Paracelsus; Alchemy, by Albertus Magnus; Hermetica, by Hermann Couringus; Explicatione 1572, by Thomas Erastus; and finally, what pleased him most, his own book, Of Trans¬mutation, by Conan Becher.
Thus greatly cheered and put at his ease, the monk followed his host. The Comte ushered his guests out of the palace and led them to the wing which housed his laboratory.
The visitors saw smoke rising from a huge chinmey on the roof, which looked like the beak of some apocalyptic bird. When they came quite close, the device, with a creaking noise in their direction, revealed a gaping black mouth from which sooty smoke was pouring.
The monk jumped back.
“It’s just a chimney-vane to make the wind activate the draught of the furnaces,” exclaimed the Comte.
“At my place, the draught is very poor on a windy day.”
“Here it is the other way round, for I use the lowering of pressure caused by the wind.”
“And the wind does your bidding?”
“Exactly. Just as it does for a windmill.”
“In a mill, Comte, the wind makes the mill-stones turn.”
“Here the furnaces don’t turn, but the air is sucked in.”
“You can’t suck air in, since it is a void.”
“Yet you’ll see that I get a devilish draught.”
The monk crossed himself three times before passing over the threshold behind Angdique and the Comte, while the negro Kouassi-Ba saluted them solemnly with his curved sabre and returned it to its sheath. At the far end of the vast room two furnaces were glowing. Still a third one remained dark. In front of the furnaces were strange machines made of leather and iron, as well as earthenware and copper pipes.
“These are the bellows for my forge. I use them when I need a very hot fire, as when I have to melt copper down, or gold or silver,” explained of frey de Peyrac.
Wooden shelves ran the length of the main room, packed with pots and phials bearing labels marked with cabbalistic signs and figures.
“I have a stock of various products here: sulphur, copper, tin, lead, borax, orpiment, realgar, cinnabar, mercury, lunar caustic, blue and green vitriol. Opposite, in those glass jars, I have oleum, aqua fords and spirit of salt. On the top shelf you can see tubes and receptacles of glass, iron, glazed stone, and, still farther on, retorts and alembics. In the small room at the back are rocks containing invisible gold, like this arsenical ore, and divers stones that produce silver by fusion. Here you have some cerargyrite, or horn silver, from Mexico, which I got from a Spanish nobleman who has been there.”
“The Comte wishes to mock my poor monkish learning by pretending that this waxen stuff is silver, when I can’t detect a trace of it.”
“I’ll show you presendy,” said the Comte.
He picked up a big chunk of charcoal from a pile beside the furnaces. He also took from ajar a tallow candle, lit it from the flame of the glowing embers, dug a little hole in the charcoal with an iron pin, inserted into it a blob of the ‘horn silver’, which actually was of a dirty yellow-grey in colour and semi-translucent, and added to it a little borax. Then he grasped a curved copper tube, brought it near the candle-flame and adroitly blew the latter against the little hole filled with the two saline substances. They melted, blistered, changed colour; there then appeared a series of metallic drops which the Comte, by blowing harder, merged into a single gleam¬ing globule.
He removed the flame and held up the small sparkling ingot on the tip of a knife.
“Here you have melted silver that I’ve extracted from this odd-looking rock.”
“Do you perform the transmutation of gold just as simply?”
“I perform no transmutation of any kind. I merely extract precious metals from ore that already contains them, but in a non-metallic state.”
The monk did not look very convinced. He cleared his throat and glanced around. He nodded and cautiously approached a roaring furnace in which several crucibles were simmering, some at red heat.
“This is certainly a very fine laboratory,” he said, “but I see nothing that in any way resembles the athanor’ or the famous ‘House of the Sage’s Chicken*.”
Peyrac laughed till he almost choked, and then, calming down, he apologised:
“Forgive me, Father, but my last collection of those venerable idiocies was destroyed when the explosive gold blew up the other day while Monseigneur was here.”
ВёсЬег assumed a deferential expression :
“Monseigneur did in fact mention it. So you manage to make an un¬stable gold which bursts?”
“I even manage to make fulminating quicksilver, to conceal nothing from you.”
“But the Philosopher’s Egg?”
“It’s inside my head!”
“That’s blasphemy!” cried the monk in great agitation.
“What’s all this about chickens and eggs?” exclaimed Angelique. “Nobody has ever told me about them.”
Becher gave her a scornful glance. But seeing that the Comte de Peyrac was suppressing a smile and that the Chevalier de Germontaz was yawning openly, he had to content himself with this modest audience for lack of a better one.
“It’s inside the Philosopher’s Egg that the Philosopher’s Stone comes into being,” he said, drilling his fiery gaze into the young woman’s candid eyes. “The firing of the Philosopher’s Stone is effected on purified gold, Sun, and fine silver, Moon, to which must be added quicksilver, Mercury. The alchemist subjects them inside the sealed matrass or philosophical egg to the increasing and decreasing ardours of a well-regulated fire, Vulcan. This helps to develop in the compost the seminal powers of Venus, the visible product of which is the Philosopher’s Stone, the regenerating substance. From this point on, the reactions will develop within the egg in a definite order: they make it possible to control the baking of the sub¬stance. It is especially important to watch for the three colours black, white and red, which indicate the putrefaction, ablation and rubefaction, respectively, of the Philosopher’s Stone. In short, the alternation of death and resurrection, through which all vegetating matter must pass, accord¬ing to ancient philosophy, in order to reproduce itself.
“The spirit of the world, the compulsory intermediary between the soul and the universal body, is the active cause of generations of all kinds and vitalises the four elements. This spirit is contained in gold, but, alas, it remains inactive and imprisoned there. It is left to the Sage to release it.”
“And how, Father, do you go about releasing this spirit which is at the basis of the world and yet a prisoner of gold?” Peyrac asked suavely.
But the alchemist remained insensitive to irony. His head thrown back, he pursued his old dream.
“To deliver it requires the Philosopher’s Stone. But even that is not enough. One must supply the initial impulse by means of a projecting powder, starting-point of the phenomenon which will transform every¬thing into pure gold."
He remained silent for a moment, deep in his thoughts.
“After years and years of research, I think I may say that I have arrived at certain results. Thus, joining the philosopher s quicksilver—the female principle—with gold—which is male—but carefully choosing pure gold- foil, I put the mixture into the ‘athanor or ‘House of the Sage’s Chicken’, which is the sanctuary, the tabernacle that every alchemist’s laboratory must possess. This egg, which is a retort of perfect oval shape and hermetically sealed so that none of its matter can exhale, is placed by me in a bowl filled with ashes and put into the oven. Thereupon, this mercury, whose heat and inner sulphur, excited by the fire, I keep constantly at the necessary degree .of heat and in the necessary proportions—this mercury succeeds in dissolving the gold without violence and reducing it to the state of atoms. At the end of six months I obtain a black powder which I call the Cimmerian Darkness. With this powder I am able to transform certain parts of objects of vile metal into pure gold, but unfortunately the vital germ of my purum aurum is not yet strong enough, for I have never been able to transform them completely.”
“But you certainly tried, Father, to fortify that moribund germ?” inquired Joffrey de Peyrac, an amused twinkle in his eyes.
“I did, and twice I think I was very dose to my goal. This is how I proceeded the first time: for twelve days I let the juice of garden mercury, purslane and fig-wort digest in manure. Then I distilled the product and obtained a red liquor. This I put back into the dung. From it were born worms that devoured one another, except for one that survived. I fed this single worm with the three preceding plants until it had fattened. Then I burned it, reduced it to ashes and mixed this powder with vitriol oil as well as with the powder of Cimmerian Darkness. But the latter was scarcely fortified by it.”
“Ugh!” said the Chevalier de Germontaz with disgust.
А^ё^ие cast a bewildered glance at her husband, but he remained expressionless.
“And the second time?” lie asked.
“The second time I had great hopes. That was when a traveller who had been shipwrecked on an unknown beach brought me back some virgin earth which had never been trodden on by man, or so he assured me. It is a fact that completely virgin earth contains the seed or germ of metals, that is to say the true Philosopher’s Stone. But probably this particle of earth was not absolutely virgin,” concluded the learned friar with a crest¬fallen air, “for I never obtained the hoped-for results.”
Now Angelique too felt a strong urge to laugh. To conceal her hilarity, she hastened to ask:
“But didn’t you tell me, Joffrey, that you yourself were shipwrecked on a desert island, that was fog- and ice-bound?”
The monk Becher started up and seized the Comte’s shoulders with shining eyes. ~
“You were shipwrecked on unknown soil? I knew it, I was sure of it. So you are the one of whom our hermetic writings speak, the one who comes back ‘from the posterior part of the world, where one hears the thunder growl, the wind whistle, hail and rain come down’. That’s the place where one will find the thing if one looks for it.”
“It was somewhat as you describe it,” the nobleman remarked care¬lessly. “I shall even add a mountain of fire amid ice that appeared to be eternal. Not a single inhabitant. It was somewhere near the Tierra del Fuego, the land of fire. I was rescued by a Portuguese sailing-boat.”
“I’d give my life and even my soul for a morsel of that virgin soil!” exclaimed Becher.
“Unfortunately, Father, I confess it never occurred to me to bring any back.”
The monk cast a gloomy and suspicious glance at him, and Angelique could well see that he did not believe her husband.
The young woman’s clear eyes gazed, in turn, at the three men who were standing before her in the weird setting of tubes and jars. Leaning against the brick-post of one of the furnaces, Joffrey de Pcyrac, the Great Lame Man of Languedoc, dropped a haughty, sarcastic glance on his inter¬locutors. He did not trouble to disguise the poor esteem in which he held their old Don Quixote of alchemy and his beribboned Sancho Panza. Opposite these two grotesque figures, Angelique saw him so tall, so free, so extraordinary, that an overwhelming feeling swelled her heart till it ached.
‘I love him,’ she suddenly thought. ‘I love him and I am afraid. Oh! if only they won’t harm him. Not before . . . Not before . . .’
She did not dare conclude her wish: ‘not before he has clasped me in his arms. . . .’