City of Wisdom and Blood

by Robert Merle

  Having said this, changing his pointer from his right to his left hand, he took from beneath his robe an enormous, shiny key and after giving each of us a very significant look, he inserted it with great pomp and ceremony into the lock of a great oaken door that seemed so ancient that I reckoned it would be extremely difficult to drive a nail into it and harder still to break it down with an axe, given that it was reinforced by three metal bars. Maître Sanche had, moreover, no easy task to turn this powerful key. That done, however, the heavy door pivoted noiselessly on its enormous, carefully adjusted and generously oiled hinges.

  We then had to go down a few stairs into a room with a vaulted ceiling, which seemed very dark after the well-lit office above, but which I gradually realized was sufficiently lit from a large vent at one end that was well fortified by strong bars.

  “In here I keep my treasures,” said our host with a sudden gleam in his eye. “Ali Baba’s cave never held greater riches that this. So I must defend them against the thieves and treasure seekers by means of the unbreakable door you’ve just passed through and by the iron bars that darken yonder vent, which looks over a walled-in courtyard, itself guarded day and night by two bulldogs, so ferocious and hungry that Balsa and I can scarcely approach them to feed them.”

  And indeed, as he spoke, the two mastiffs began snuffling and growling, their hair bristling, and pushed their snouts through the bars and bared teeth worthy of guarding the entrance to hell, as if access to that place needed defending…

  “This room,” Maître Sanche continued, “contains all the bodies and substances needed for the composition of my medicines, all of which, you should realize, my nephews, can be found in nature, since it is sure that Our Lord, in His infinite wisdom, took care to include in His world a cure for every evil therein.”

  I was very happy to hear this remark, and packed it safely away in my memory pouch so that I could take it out again to counter Fogacer, whose nearly sacrilegious thoughts about the world’s evils had so silenced and troubled me up on the terrace.

  “The substances from which I make my drugs are of three orders,” Maître Sanche announced, holding up three fingers of his left hand, “animal, vegetable and mineral.”

  Here he paused.

  “Those we get from the animal world are few,” he went on, after pulling a key from beneath his robe and opening a small cabinet, “though sometimes extremely dear, because they must be obtained from the East, and travel here by perilous roads. Of course, we don’t have to search so far away to find among the fields round Montpellier the honey that the bees suck from the sweet flowers and deposit in their combs, which furnish us with wax. Honey and wax, though they have medicinal applications, are also well known for their domestic uses. But here’s something you’ll find a bit more surprising: these are scarlet grains used in dyeing.”

  “Are these grains,” I queried, “of vegetable origin?”

  “Not at all, my nephew! They come to us from a cochineal, an insect that prospers at the expense of the trees you’ll see as you ride through the oak forests throughout Provence. You just pull them off the trees as if you were a bird.”

  Here Maître Sanche made a quick pause, to ensure that we were duly impressed, before continuing. “My nephews, this jar I’m opening now, but only a tiny bit in order not to intoxicate you, contains a very expensive substance, for it comes to us from an Asian stag, which carries it between its legs next to its pudendum. It’s called musk, and its odour is marvellously violent and powerful, but, in minute doses, can be used in the composition of perfumes and some drugs that I won’t mention.”

  “Do these medicines,” I asked, “stimulate our venal pleasures?”

  “Nay, nay,” replied Maître Sanche, his eyes gleaming, “but remember, my strapping young man, that at your age, blood is its own drug. Over here we have a very small amount of a very precious substance that is worth its weight in gold: ambergris. It can be found in the intestines of a sperm whale, a ferocious mammal that can swallow a man in one gulp.”

  “Is that the one in the Bible that swallowed Jonah?” Samson asked.

  “The same, and not his cousins the other whales, who would have had a lot of trouble swallowing our ancestor since their throats are so narrow.”

  Having closed the bottle of ambergris and locked the cabinet that contained all of these animal substances, Maître Sanche took us to another, much larger and wider cupboard, which he opened with a second key. “In here,” he explained, “we have beneficent vegetables which are used in my remedies; they grow in great profusion, thank God, and the simplest of them are so widespread in our region that it’s hardly worth bending over to pick them. Then there are the plants, grains, saps, juices, extracts and crystals that we have brought here from faraway places at great expense: sugar from Candia; pepper from Malabar; rose water from Damascus; indigo from Baghdad; saffron from Spain; henna from the Levant; henbane from Persia; opium from Thebes; ginger from India; cinnamon from Ceylon. As for senna, my nephew,” he continued, putting his hand on my shoulder, “whose purgative properties you are familiar with, you should know that in Paris and even in Montpellier there are certain penny-pinching and underhanded pharmacists who import it cheaply from Algeria, but I,” he announced, raising his voice, “consider this kind of senna vile, rough, full of mud and gravel and unworthy of being administered to an ass, and I prefer a thousand times over the senna from Alexandria, more costly to be sure, but clean, pure and healthy.”

  Maître Sanche seemed to get very aroused as he spoke these words and brandished his pointer—his large features even more scarlet than usual, his fingers vigorously raking his beard—and I was struck once again by the contrast between his abstinence at table at the cruel expense of his stomach (and ours) and the remarkable generosity of spirit and deed when it came to the composition of his drugs. I felt my admiration grow even greater for the high priority the master placed on his art and on his duties to the sick.

  “And finally,” said Maître Sanche, leading us over to a little walnut cabinet, attached firmly to the wall by four thick iron bands, “here are my most precious possessions, surpassing in value all the treasures of Araby: the minerals—few in number, to be sure, but some quite beautiful and others extremely effective in curing disease.”

  This said, he took from his robe two keys with very complicated patterns and, having inserted them in two keyholes, one at the top of the cabinet door, the other at the bottom, he handed me his pointer for the moment, and with his two hands turned them simultaneously. The door opened but revealed nothing more than a series of small drawers. Each of these bore a small opening in its centre, into which Maître Sanche, as he spoke, introduced a piece of metal that was squared at the end and, it seemed, had the effect of “open sesame”, for scarcely had he inserted it when the drawer immediately unlocked with a little click and slid open towards him.

  “Here we are!” exclaimed the very illustrious master. “Verdigris that the women of Montpellier prepare by using copper plates that they bathe in alcohol. Alum, bitumen, borax, cinnabar, arsenic, quicksilver, coral and, in this drawer,” he said, pulling the drawer all the way out and holding it close to his chest, “pearls, gems, gold and silver.”

  What fires, what dazzling brilliance, what scintillating colours this pile of beauties projected onto the velvet around them! This jumbled mass contained gems that any queen or king’s favourite would have proudly displayed on her breast, but instead these stones were destined for a darker and more interior use and would lose their splendid lustre when ground into a powder that would end up bran in some intestine. Scarcely had our eyes had time to take in these marvels before Maître Sanche, with the demeanour of a magician, had whisked them back into their drawer, slid it closed, locked the cabinet with his specially made keys and concealed these under his robe.

  “Can it really be,” asked Samson, “that such precious stones are used in the composition of medicines?”

  “Most assuredly so!” sai
d the master pharmacist as he reclaimed his pointer from my grasp. “You should know that at the very foundations of the innumerable drugs that the apothecary sciences create are four major and sovereign preparations—remember these names: theriac, mithridate, alkermes and hyacinth. Now hyacinth, which is itself a gem, is composed of twenty-nine ingredients which include gold, silver, sapphire, topaz, pearl and emerald.”

  “But only a king could afford such costly medicines!” cried Samson.

  “A king, a prince, a bishop, His Holiness the Pope or a rich financier,” said Maître Sanche with a subtle smile. “Jacques Coeur was said to be quite addicted to this drug.”

  “Very illustrious master,” I said, “you mentioned alum. My father used this same drug to stop stomach ulcers.”

  “Bene! Bene! Alum is an astringent. But,” he added, stroking his beard with a suggestive air, “there are other, more esoteric uses.” At this he gave me a half-serious, half-amused look. “And perhaps when you’ve become a doctor of medicine, you will prescribe this drug to some of your beautiful patients, my nephew. For it is claimed that alum does miracles in the secret parts of a woman, and that Cleopatra used it to strengthen and restrict the interior walls of her vagina, which gave Caesar each time the illusion of her renascent virginity.”

  I laughed out loud at this and looked at my host with a renewed appreciation, for beneath his haughty expression lay a very human and lewd humour, which pleased me no end. But to tell the truth, I should have noticed this earlier, having observed the fresh beauty of his wife. Meanwhile, Samson was nearly overcome with embarrassment and, blushing, quickly changed the subject:

  “Illustrious master, if we can return to the subject of hyacinth, how can one get a patient to swallow so many stones at once, no matter how precious they are?”

  “Haec est bona questio!”¶ cried the master, who clearly appreciated Samson’s genuine interest in his profession. Moreover, given his own ugliness, he may have felt a natural tenderness for someone so beautiful as Samson—whom he never encountered at the dinner table without murmuring to himself: “Ah! Que matador! Que matador!”—which Fogacer translated for me as: “Ah, how beautiful he is!”

  “You should know, my nephew,” said Maître Sanche, seizing Samson by the arm, “that we put these precious stones in a mortar according to the requirements of each drug. Then having ground them into a fine powder, they are mixed with an equal quantity of honey, working this mix into a sort of paste, which we call an electuary and which, given the worth of its contents, we present to the patient in a little ebony box.”

  “What riches are swallowed up!” cried my naive Samson.

  “Yes, of course,” replied Maître Sanche, dropping Samson’s arm and raising his pointer. “But the health of great men costs great sums!”

  “But,” I asked, “what ills does hyacinth cure?”

  “This is what your professors at the Royal College of Medicine are going to teach you,” said our host. “Non medicus sum,|| and, according to the rules of my profession, I cannot make any drug without a prescription signed by a doctor. To tell the truth,” he added with a smile in which mirth wrestled with feigned humility, “I have a few ideas about the ills that can be treated with hyacinth, but I must be careful not to voice them, my good nephew, out of respect for the territory of the royal professors.”

  And yet trespassing on these territories was exactly what he would do in our subsequent discussions, as I was to have ample opportunity to observe.

  “I will now introduce you into the secret laboratory where we make our drugs,” continued Maître Sanche as he headed towards another very low door, as well fortified by iron bars as the one that had afforded us entry into his office. He unlocked it and we followed him into a second vaulted room, much larger than the first and brighter, lit as it was by two vents at floor level, between the bars of which the two mastiffs immediately thrust their toothy snouts and recommenced their snarling. But, unlike the others, this room was not empty of any human presence, for two assistants were diligently at work, both wearing shirts without doublet or collar, for the heat emanating from several different hearths was intolerable.

  These two assistants were about twenty years old and dangerously thin, which was not astonishing given that they were doing work from dawn to dusk that robbed them of their substance and weight—not to mention that there was no way to regain what was lost once they sat down to Maître Sanche’s meagre suppers. Moreover, they were extremely pale, skin hanging loose and colourless on their bones, their moist hair flattened to their skulls, their eyes empty and lustreless, no doubt because they lived under lock and key in this cave, like prisoners in their jail; perhaps also because they breathed, day in, day out, the horrible fumes, vapours and odours that emanated from their preparations.

  “In here,” explained Maître Sanche, after a nod to his assistants to which they responded with deep bows, “we keep various very costly machines, all of which were invented by the Moors, who were our teachers, as you know, my nephews, in everything connected to alchemy—a word which comes to us from the Saracen, as do all the names of the machines you see here. This slow-combustion oven is called the ‘athanor’, deriving from al-tannur in the Arabic language. And this series of clay tubes, each connected to the next, which we use to sublimate solid bodies, is called the ‘aludel’—in Arabic, al-utal. Here is the alembic—in Arabic, al-anbiq—which is used, as you know, for distillation. In truth, everything in here is Saracen, from the pot and the casserole to the long funnel over there.”

  “But, illustrious master,” Samson said, his eyes shining with a degree of enthusiasm I’d never seen before, “what is sublimation? What’s it used for?”

  “Through sublimation,” replied the master, “we transform a solid body into vapour, a vapour that we then freeze so that it turns into crystals which are purer and lighter than the original solid. Thus, from mercury we can derive a corrosive sublimation which is used in the cure for syphilis.”

  This said, Maître Sanche turned towards me and, stroking his beard, gave me a very severe look. “My nephew,” he advised, “you must be very careful. Syphilis is all but unknown in the regions where you were born, but not so, alas! in a large city like Montpellier. Fogacer will confirm this. In the rue des Étuves, where the students usually go for their baths, there is a group of ladies of the night who swarm around the young men like flies to carrion and who keep rooms nearby to turn their tricks. Some of these wenches are young, pretty, firm of flesh and well endowed. But the young rogues like you, my handsome nephew, dreaming of amorous conquest, taste these fruits which are so luscious on the outside but so rotten within and wake up one morning with their nephliseth all withered and gangrened, and no matter how much this drug helps with their infection, their hair falls out and their teeth as well.”

  “Goodness!” I thought, shaking my head with compunction. “How many taboos I’m having to confront in this house! Typhème, since she’s betrothed to Dr Saporta; Fontanette, for reasons I don’t yet know! And now the pretty harlots in the rue des Étuves! Is there no wench in this town to whom a young man may entrust his poor neglected nephliseth without losing his hair and teeth? Am I going to be famished at table, unmanned in bed like a hermit, and obliged to sublimate my body by the bitter vapours of chastity? How will I last the year? If you close up the kettle on the aludel it will be so oppressed with the heat that in the end it will explode!”

  All the while, Maître Sanche continued to gaze at me with the same severe countenance, and, for his part, Samson appeared dumbstruck to see me thus counselled by our host. I tried to hide my embarrassment and, turning away, approached one of the assistants, who was dripping with sweat as he worked. “Friend,” I said, “what are you crushing with such energy in this mortar?”

  “He is not able to answer you,” Maître Sanche explained as he approached in turn. “He is, like his twin brother, quite backward in his speech. They emit sounds, of course, but I’m the only one who can und
erstand them, which is fine by me, since, in this way, they’re unable to reveal to a living soul the secrets of my formulas.”

  This was spoken in a half whisper, with a knowing smile. But having said this, Maître Sanche looked both of us in the eye (as much as his crossed eyes permitted) and said gravely, “My good nephews, what varies from pharmacist to pharmacist is not so much the composition of these drugs, which is grosso modo common knowledge in our profession, but the exact proportions of the various ingredients and the art of mixing them, whether it’s to be by decoction, sublimation or reduction. There are in these operations, crede mihi experto Roberto,** an infinity of occult recipes that many of my colleagues envy me and would gladly steal. And so I must be on my guard to prevent any such thievery of these secrets, which are worth more to me than the king’s treasure, since I learnt them from my father and he from my grandfather—to whose knowledge I have added considerably through the incomparable diligence and unceasing labour of my entire life. For this I am respected and held, omnium consensu, as the first among my peers by the pharmacists of this city, of the whole of Provence and of the entire kingdom.”

  All of the preceding was spoken with such bombast, our host waving his pointer with haughty pride and self-satisfaction, that Samson gazed in dove-like awe, whereas I felt secretly impatient and quite put off by such parading, though I was very careful to display a respectful and impressionable face.

  I was wrong to be impatient, however, for, despite his puffed-up and vainglorious airs, it’s true that Maître Sanche’s reputation extended as far as the king in his Louvre, as Fogacer explained later that same day. In 1564, two years before, Catherine de’ Medici and Charles IX had visited Montpellier during their tour of the kingdom and had insisted on visiting the famous apothecary and its curiosities, so great is men’s trust in and veneration of the medicines thanks to which they believe their ills are cured and they themselves are spared from death.