The Witch of Painted Sorrows

by Rose, M. J.

  “And are you also a student of occult disciplines? A believer?” he asked.

  Was my grandmother? Wasn’t that what he was implying? But my grandmother had never mentioned the occult to me.

  When I didn’t respond right away, he asked, “Or are you more like my friend Julien here, a skeptic to the core and just here to see his handiwork?”

  His gestures were exaggerated, almost as if he were on a stage, performing for us, but in a totally engaging way.

  “I did ask to see something he’d built, yes, but I also have some interest in esoteric knowledge, though I’m afraid I’m not the student my father was.”

  “Oh, was he? Did he favor one school of thought over another? Was he a Mason by chance?”

  “No. His focus was on the Kabala, but as fascinated as he was by secret societies and hidden knowledge, he was interested only as a scholar.”

  “I have quite a few ancient artifacts and rare books a Kabalistic scholar would find fascinating. Would you like me to show you around a bit?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Did Julien look dismayed? I couldn’t be sure.

  “Dujols is quite the spellbinder,” Julien said as if answering my unspoken question. “If you let him, he’ll keep you all day and we won’t make our prior commitment.”

  “Don’t worry, Julien. I have an appointment myself in a little while.” He smiled at me and then pulled out a heavy leather-bound book. “This is one of my prized possessions, an extremely rare fourteenth-century manuscript of a major work of Jewish mysticism called the Sepher Yetzirah. The Book of Formation. Do you know it?”

  “Yes, my father had a copy, but not nearly this old.” I bent over the tome, and when I looked up to ask Monsieur Dujols a question, I caught him staring at my neck with consternation.

  When he saw that I’d noticed, he glanced away. “Can I offer either of you coffee?”

  “Why were you looking at my necklace?” Even though such boldness wasn’t done, I wanted to know.

  “It’s most unusual,” he said. “I was just admiring it.”

  But he was lying. I could tell. Something about the ruby necklace disturbed the man. I looked at Julien, and his eyes told me he knew it, too.

  “What is it, Dujols? Why be coy? What is it about Mademoiselle Verlaine’s necklace?”

  “The rubies appear to be cinquefoils. Five-petal roses.”

  “Yes?” Julien asked.

  “You didn’t recognize the symbol?”

  “I’m a neophyte when it comes to all this—you know that. Knowledge doesn’t equal interest,” Julien said.

  “What is the significance of a five-petal rose?” I asked.

  “It’s an ancient Hermetic symbol that signifies closed lips, sexual secrets, and hidden messages. Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster used one on his seal. The cinquefoil’s association with the worship of the Great Goddess in ancient times spilled over to worship of Mary in Christianity. You can see it on many Gothic churches here and in England.”

  I fingered one of the flowers, feeling the petals on each of the round discs as he described them. I knew it was my fingers trembling, but it really felt as if the necklace itself was vibrating, almost humming against my skin.

  But he wasn’t finished. “And the clasp is a gold Ouroboros. The symbol of eternal return and rebirth. Of a life that exists with so much force and power that it cannot be extinguished.”

  Chills ran up my back. His words resonated within me. I knew these things but hadn’t been aware that I’d known them. How was it possible for them to be familiar to me but at the same time something I’d neither read nor heard before? Had my father told me about them when I’d only half been paying attention and I’d forgotten?

  “One of the things so fascinating about the Ouroboros is how many cultures used it in some form or another. From ancient Egyptians, to alchemists, to heretics. Where did you find such an unusual piece?” he asked.

  “It’s a family heirloom,” I told him.

  “Yes, yes, of course. It would have to be,” he said.

  The bell rang out as the front door opened, and two gentlemen entered before I could ask him what he meant.

  Dujols looked over, and they greeted him. “Are we early?” one asked.

  “No, no, not at all,” Dujols said to them.

  The two men walked to the back of the library and took a seat in one of the alcoves.

  “I’m sorry,” Dujols said to us. “My appointment.”

  “That’s quite all right, we did just drop by,” Julien said.

  Dujols ushered us to the door. “Please just drop by again whenever it suits you.” He bowed to me. “And if you have any more family treasures, Mademoiselle, please feel free to bring them with you. The original owner of that necklace probably possessed other pieces of Hermetic interest. There is, after all, the legend of the mystical treasure hidden in your grandmother’s house.”

  “What legend is that?” I asked.

  “You don’t know of it?”

  “Clearly she doesn’t, Dujols, or she wouldn’t have asked. Enough of your theatrics. What’s the legend?”

  Dujols glanced over at his visitors, who were examining the book I’d been looking at and seemed quite preoccupied.

  “All throughout recorded time there have been allusions to a special drink that imparted immortality. From ancient Greek references to ambrosia that only gods were allowed to imbibe, to Egyptian stories of Thoth and Hermes Trismegistus drinking liquid gold in order to live forever, to Sumerian and Hindu texts mentioning a similar elixir. Have you heard of the philosopher’s stone?”

  I nodded. “Of course, it was mentioned frequently in the books my father studied.”

  “It has always been said alchemists coveted it for its promise of turning metal to gold, but that wasn’t their true objective. No, it wasn’t riches they were after. The gold created from those metals was claimed to be the major component of the beverage that bestowed immortality to those who drank it. Some writings suggest the philosopher’s stone itself was the main ingredient of the drink. But a fifteenth-century master, Bernard Trevisan, claimed he knew the recipe for this miraculous liqueur and that submerging the stone in mercurial water was the key to what Cagliostro called the Elixir of Life.

  “The ancients claimed this rare fluid cured diseases, could repair skin and organs, and kept one looking young forever. If a dead body was embalmed with the ambrosia, it was said, it would remain uncorrupted forever. Even the Bible references the potion and warns against men partaking of it.”

  He paused, fascinated with his own tale.

  “And how does all this connect to my family?” I asked.

  “Have you really never heard of ‘The Witch of Rue Dragon’?” Dujols’s tone was incredulous.

  Shivers ran up my arms and down my back. I’d never consciously heard references to a witch, but at the same time I was not surprised. Had the phrase been whispered in the shadows when I was young and the adults thought I wasn’t listening? Or perhaps I’d been sleeping and they had spoken of her as they left my nursery, and the memory had left an impression on me like a footprint in the snow.

  “The witch, was she called La Lune?” I guessed.

  Dujols nodded. “Yes, yes, the sixteenth-century courtesan who learned alchemy in Prague and brought her secrets back to Paris with her. Brought them to her home, which sat on the property where your grandmother’s house now sits. It was said La Lune lived to be over one hundred and fifty years old but remained young and beautiful and as fresh as a rose because she had discovered what so many before her had been searching for.”

  “The elixir?” I asked.

  Dujols nodded.

  “What happened to the formula?” Julien asked.

  “We know part of it, but it means nothing to us. ‘Make of the blood, a stone. Make of a ston
e, a powder. Make of a powder, life everlasting.’ But how to use that? How to interpret it? Lost to us. Forever lost to us,” Dujols said.

  I was having a déjà vu. Or had I heard that phrase before? Make of the blood, a stone. Make of a stone, a powder. Make of a powder, life everlasting. But where? In what context?

  Dujols was still talking: “All we have is a legend that La Lune, fearing she would one day be struck by old age and become forgetful, hid the recipe somewhere safe. And when she did become old finally, and needed it, she couldn’t remember where she’d hid it.” He shook his head. “Perhaps, Mademoiselle Verlaine, you will be the one to unearth it somewhere in your grandmother’s fine house. If you do, I am at your service to aid you in creating La Lune’s magick.”

  After we left the shop, as we walked to the corner to search for a carriage, I asked Julien if he found the occult distasteful. I’d sensed his impatience when Dujols was talking about the Elixir of Life.

  “I don’t want to insult the memory of your father, but yes, a bit. I think it’s a waste of time,” Julien said.

  “Oh, he wouldn’t feel insulted. My father loved debate. Especially on topics that captivated him. And secret and forbidden knowledge did. The Kabala explains the relationship between the eternal and mysterious. At its heart is the human effort to define the nature of life and the universe. He wanted to understand that—the ‘un-understandable,’ he called it.”

  “It does sound a bit as if your father was a mystic, you know.”

  I laughed. “Are you picturing a man with a long beard, wearing robes and disappearing into trances? No, he was a banker and art collector who also happened to be interested in arcane knowledge.”

  Julien managed to hail a carriage, and our conversation halted while we climbed in and he gave the driver the address of the Crédit Municipal.

  “So was he a mystic?” Julien asked.

  I laughed again. “He was curious. And I with him. He hosted symposiums at our house attended by many of the leading thinkers, writers, mathematicians, art historians, and philosophers, even some who were zealots.”

  “All that searching for the un-understandable?”

  “I think at its heart was the recurring dream my father suffered. He’d always been curious as to its meaning, but after I began to have the same dream, he became determined to decipher it.”

  “You shared the same dream?”

  I nodded.

  “How curious. What was his dream, do you mind telling me?”

  “Not at all. It began with him sitting in a tree on some kind of a platform and looking down at the ground at a barren rosebush. As he watched, the bush blossomed, and in the center of each flower was a woman’s face—the same woman every time—but no one he’d ever met.

  “In the dream she spoke to him, giving him instructions, but he could never hear her from his perch. He’d climb down to try and catch her whisper, except the closer he got, the fainter her voice became. The woman, he told me, was very beautiful, with long reddish-brown hair and eyes almost the same fiery color. That she looked something like me did not escape him in the dream. When he was close enough that he could finally look into her eyes, he saw a reflection in her pupils. A full scene of that same woman drawing stars on the floor of a darkened dirty cell, weeping as she worked.

  “My father was never able to decipher what she said or understand what she was doing other than to know she was trying to pass on some secret information to him in that drawing. He knew some of the words, he said, but they made no sense.

  “The more he studied, he told me, the more he became convinced she was doing what he said the Kabalists called tikkun olam. I think he said it meant ‘repairing the world,’ and that Jews believed it was every human being’s duty.”

  “What an extraordinary dream,” Julien said. “No wonder it preoccupied him. And no wonder he told you about it.”

  “He didn’t. When I was about ten, I drew a picture of the bush, full of roses, each with a face in its center. When he asked me about it, I told him I’d seen it in my dream.”

  “How many times have you had the dream?”

  “About half a dozen. My father had it more often and was determined to understand what it meant, and although he never did, it led him into some very dark and dangerous places, as well as some exalted ones.”

  I looked out the window at the ordinary street scene. Talking about my father had made me sorrowful, and I was glad that we had reached our destination and that this conversation was at its close.

  “Could you hear what the woman in your dreams said?” Julien asked.

  “I don’t really know. When I try to remember, all that happens is that in my mind I see white light mixed with the colors of the rainbow.”

  “You try to remember words and see colors?”

  “Yes, I know it makes no sense.”

  “Dujols says there are so many mysteries that we have yet to explore. I suppose he’s right.”

  “Didn’t you think he was right before?”

  “In theory, yes, but it’s what I’ve seen since you came to the house. How did you open the door to the artist’s studio?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know.”

  “Are you familiar with Debussy, the musician?” Julien asked.

  I shook my head.

  “He and Erik Satie are creating music that fits the world you’re talking about. They believe that there are symbols in sounds as well. They are often at Dujols’s.”

  We had arrived at rue des Francs-Bourgeois. The carriage stopped in front of an imposing building where a long line suggested pawning was quite popular in Paris.

  “I’m not sure why, but I didn’t imagine there would be so many well-dressed people here,” I said to Julien as we got on the end of the line.

  “Pawning is practically a national pastime. Victor Hugo used to come here when he was short of cash. Auguste Rodin often had to hock his tools. Artists and musicians and writers are frequently in and out of trouble and visit their ‘aunt’ for help. There are stories of women who bring their mattresses in the morning, use the money to buy potatoes in bulk in the market, proceed to sell them for a profit, and come back at the end of the day to redeem their mattresses and start the whole process again the next week.”

  The line snaked from the street, through a large stone courtyard and into the building itself. Half of Paris must have been there that day. I saw women wearing large hats and elaborate costumes walk in with jewels and exit without them. A fancy gentleman carried a violin case. An old woman, an ornate and ugly painting. A couple struggled with an oversize garish gold clock. The courtyard teemed with activity as those on line talked to others behind and in front of them, and a street vendor hawked roasted chestnuts.

  The man behind us had a rococo chair that he kept picking up, moving, and then putting down again as the line progressed. Behind him, an elderly couple each lugged a sack of books. The man in front of us pulled a large Louis Vuitton trunk on a trolley. It was the same luggage my grandmother used, and I felt a pang of remorse that I was here without her knowledge. But my excitement was enough to dispel it. The whole of the Paris art world waited for me.

  Inside we finally sat down at a worn wooden desk opposite a dour-faced bureaucrat who eyed my offering, carefully examining the frog with a jeweler’s loupe.

  The sum he offered was adequate, but not what I’d hoped for.

  “Can you give us any more?” I asked.

  His eyes lighted on my necklace.

  “That should bring in quite a bit more. If those are real, they are very large rubies.”

  I put my hand up to my throat and touched the rosettes. Why not? I would be able to come back and retrieve all these things as soon as I figured out how to get some of my money from my father’s banker in New York.

  Reaching behind my neck, I tried to open the clasp to
the necklace, but the mechanism wouldn’t release. I tried again, but it didn’t budge. The stones felt warmer, almost as if they were heating up as I touched them. Almost as if I might get burned.

  “Julien? Can you help me?” I turned to him.

  “There seems to be something wrong with the clasp. I can’t get it open.”

  “What’s going on there? We are waiting—you can get undressed at home,” a man behind us shouted.

  Raucous laughter.

  “Is there a holdup? They’re closing soon, and we all want our money,” a woman said.

  “It’s all right,” I told Julien. “This will be enough for a while, and we can always come back.”

  As the bureaucrat wrote out the slip we were to take to the cashier, my fingers worked the clasp. I no longer was intent on pawning it, but it seemed odd that it was stuck.

  Back in a carriage on our way to a clothing store, my fingers crept to my neck again, and this time I unlocked the necklace without any trouble at all. My neck felt suddenly bare and exposed, and I reclasped it. But the mystery remained. Neither of us had been able to unlock it while we were inside the Crédit Municipal. And now it was incredibly easy. How was that possible?

  Chapter 11

  With the count being in town for an extended stay, my grandmother’s days and nights were busy and preoccupied. The next morning, when she invited me to her room for our usual pot of chocolate, I walked into a flurry of activity. As the maid did up Grand-mère’s hair, she gave the housekeeper instructions for that evening’s salon.

  “Caviar . . . there must be enough caviar. And oysters. The count loves oysters. Do we have enough champagne?”

  I had been concerned about what kind of excuse to make up for my going out without her that day, and had concocted a lie about a friend of mine from New York being in Paris. But before I had a chance to offer it up, my grandmother made her apologies for not being able to spend the day with me.

  “I need to visit the dressmaker and the hairdresser and then meet the count at Cartier.” She was looking at me in the mirror, not facing me directly. “He wants to buy me an anniversary gift.” She smiled, and her fire opal eyes lit up.