by Robb, Graham
The alchemists themselves could be found in poky ‘esoteric’ bookshops with names from Egyptian mythology and shy but hostile owners huddled over huge bronze ashtrays, and in university laboratories, where they worked as assistants or attended public seminars. Most of them were thin, bearded and anxious, and remarkably slow of speech. Old-fashioned alchemists still spent long evenings at the Bibliothèque Nationale or the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, deciphering unreliable editions of medieval texts with a pocket French–Latin dictionary. They had the doleful, watery eyes of the mad. Without the occasional gas explosion or spilling of toxic chemicals, they might have been described as ‘harmless’. One luckless adept, well known to his younger colleagues, had chanced upon a convincingly antiquated edition of a work attributed to Paracelsus, in which a mistranslated passage advised the student to refine his base metal in a small oven for forty years (instead of ‘days’). The next stage was to have been the distillation of the Universal Panacea or elixir of long life, but as he contemplated the charred nugget that had been the focus of his yearnings since adolescence, he saw with the bitter clarity of a true philosopher that the process of acquiring immortality was too lengthy to be contained within the span of a human life.
Such men were increasingly rare. Alchemy had entered a thrilling new age, and there was as much difference now between the old and new type of alchemist as there is between a shopkeeper totting up the day’s takings and a mathematician calculating the proof of a theorem. To anyone unfamiliar with the science, it might seem ironic that such a far-fetched discipline should have enjoyed a renaissance in the twentieth century, but to those who took a scholarly interest in the subject, alchemy’s achievements were evident and substantial. For centuries, alchemy had kept alive the spirit of experimentation, and it was only recently that it had been overtaken by chemistry. Alchemists had produced the first descriptions of several elements; they had established the existence of gases, and developed molecular theories of matter; they had discovered antimony, zinc, sulphuric acid, caustic soda, various compounds used in medicine, eau de vie and the secret of porcelain. And it was while searching for the philosopher’s stone in his urine that an alchemist discovered phosphorus, which means ‘bringer of light’. Many other discoveries had certainly been lost or had disappeared with the knowledge of the hieroglyphic languages in which they were recorded.
On the evening on which this story begins, an alchemist known only by a florid pseudonym, which was probably invented by his publisher, was deciphering one of those cryptic texts that are often misconstrued as primitive ornamentation. A tall, elderly man of aristocratic appearance, he stood in silent contemplation at the west front of Notre-Dame. From the three great portals, graven figures looked down on him with the mysterious serenity of their sightless eyes. Without his air of analytical inspection, he might have been mistaken for one of the old brotherhood of obsessed insomniacs. Throughout the Middle Ages, the alchemists of Paris had gathered every Saturn’s Day afternoon at the cathedral dedicated to Our Lady of Paris. The square on which they met had been sacred long before the cathedral was built. It was there, in 464, that Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon, had invoked the Virgin Mary, who offered him the protection of her ermine cloak, and thus enabled him to defeat the Roman tribune called Flollo. That was a relatively recent event in the history of the site. Archaeological excavations had uncovered pagan altars beneath the square, and the early Gallo-Roman temple on the island had certainly replaced an even earlier building sacred to gods whose very names had perished.
The crowd of tourists was growing thin, and the late sun etched deep shadows into the carvings of the west front. Details that were usually invisible were emblazoned with the sun’s dazzling gold, and it was possible to imagine the sight when the wooden scaffolding was first removed and the heavenly host shone forth in all the mesmerizing colours that medieval alchemists had purified in their crucibles.
The man who gazed on this glorious spectacle from another age was one of the very few who knew what they were seeing. He knew not only the harmonious confusion of antagonistic beliefs that had formed the great cathedral, but also its modern history, which lovers of the past thought too recent to be of interest. Ninety years before, the architect Viollet-le-Duc had immersed himself in the mysteries of early Gothic art. He had questioned archaeologists, and sent librarians deep into their archives in search of manuscripts that showed the cathedral in its original state. He had tracked down the statues that had been stolen in the Revolution or spirited away to Versailles. The Perpetual Secretary of the French Academy had mocked him for trying to revive an art that predated the Renaissance, but to Viollet-le-Duc, the thirteenth century was not an age of fumbling infants; it was a forgotten world whose peculiar wisdom had been lost.
He had noticed, for example, like the alchemist, that the towers and portals of the great cathedral were not symmetrical, and that its solid structure was a subtle configuration of forces and imbalances. Instead of seeing those anomalies as marks of barbarism, he realized that he was faced with something foreign and unexplained. He saw that Gothic architecture was a language with its own vocabulary and grammar. In an act of faith rarely found in conjunction with precise scholarship, he ‘humbly submitted’ to the incomprehensible beauty of the vanished age. And because he was inspired by love, the sneering of the Perpetual Secretary only spurred him on. He ridiculed the man’s ignorance with the cheerfulness of a true believer: ‘It is tempting to suppose’, he wrote in Du style gothique au XIXe siècle, ‘that the only stained-glass windows the Perpetual Secretary has seen are those that one finds in the kiosks and public toilets of Paris’.
As a connoisseur of Gothic arcana, Viollet-le-Duc refused to allow any genuine relics of the early cathedral to be ‘improved’: he preferred mutilated sculptures to ‘an appearance of restoration’. Though many of the riddles would remain unsolved, he would at least restore the pieces of the puzzle. The result of his labours was almost too strange and pristine in appearance to be appreciated by anyone who had known the cathedral in its muddled, palimpsestic state. Viollet-le-Duc had allowed Notre-Dame to find her way back to the thirteenth century, accompanied, it is true, by several of his own petrified fantasies. To the man who stood there that evening, reading the portals like the pages of a giant book, it was as though the architect had been tinkering with a machine abandoned to time by an earlier civilization, and, by accident or design, had supplied the missing parts that would bring it back to life.
IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND what set this man apart from other admirers of Notre-Dame, and why he himself was under observation, it is necessary to say something of the more common forms of esoteric curiosity inspired by the great cathedral. More than a decade after the Peace Conference, Paris was still the centre of the world’s attention. Every year, despite the Great Depression, more than one hundred thousand tourists came from the United States alone to feast their eyes on Paris and to wonder how such an obstreperous race could have created such a beautiful city. Almost all of them, if they only spent a day in Paris, went to gaze at Notre-Dame.
Many of those secular pilgrims were fans of Victor Hugo’s bestselling novel, Notre-Dame de Paris. Having enjoyed what they took to be the true adventures of Quasimodo the hunchback, Esmeralda the gypsy-girl and Frollo the mad archdeacon, they pored over the runic stones and looked for gnostic clues in the stained-glass windows. They discovered pagan riddles in Latin funerary inscriptions and pieces of ecclesiastical furniture that were not much older than themselves. When they climbed the towers, they saw with a thrill the enigmatic graffito, ANAGKH,* with which the novel begins, and noticed with disappointment that mischievous hands had scratched the same puzzling characters in every nook and cranny.
Some who had made a special study of the matter felt quietly superior to their fellow tourists who failed to realize that the nave and chevet of the cathedral formed the ancient Egyptian symbol of the Ankh. Since the demonic priest of Victor Hugo’s novel had–correctly, as i
t happened–identified Notre-Dame as ‘a summary of hermetic science’, they followed the priest’s example and searched for the crow on the left-hand portal of the west front, ‘in order to calculate the angle of vision of the crow, which looks at a mysterious point in the church where the philosopher’s stone is certainly hidden’.* The legend had been recorded in Gobineau de Montluisant’s work of 1640: Explication très-curieuse des énigmes et figures hiéroglyphiques au grand portail de l’église cathédrale et métropolitaine de Notre-Dame de Paris. If the tourist-pilgrims had pursued their studies a little further, they might have discovered that the alchemical crow symbolized putrefaction and the caput mortuum of the Magnum Opus–a stage in the purification of the metal and of the alchemist’s soul–and that the crow was in fact a death’s-head. (The location of the skull and the object of its gaze are best left to individual curiosity since the present occupants of the site in question would not welcome the attention, and because they have the means to make their displeasure lastingly apparent.)
Strange to say, apart from a few alchemists, no one seems to have pursued the most obvious clue of all. On the gallery of the south tower, two hundred feet above the square, a human figure stands among the gargoyles and chimaeras. It leans on the balustrade, gazing over the roof of the nave towards the Marais or–since the gaze of such figures is often oblique, like that of a bird–through the corner of its eye over some dog-ravaged flower-beds at a point of no apparent significance. The figure’s long hair and beard, its Phrygian cap, its long laboratory coat and above all its knitted brows, show this to be the Alchemist of Notre-Dame. The expression on the stone face is one of astonishment bordering on horror and dismay, as though he were about to be consumed by something emerging from his crucible.
The apparent aimlessness of the figure’s gaze is misleading. In 1831, just before the publication of Victor Hugo’s novel, the archbishop’s palace that used to stand between the cathedral and the river was destroyed in a riot. The much older medieval chapel around which the palace had been built, and which predated most of Notre-Dame, was also destroyed, and its treasures were thrown into the Seine. Later, the rubble was cleared away, leaving the space now occupied by flower-beds. If the ancient chapel once contained the philosopher’s stone, it must now lie somewhere under the Pont de l’Archevêché or, more likely, under some northern field or landfill site along the Seine. Meanwhile, the Alchemist of Notre-Dame still ponders with knitted brows the priceless, vanished treasure.
These things, and many more besides, were known to the mysterious viewer. He knew that the anonymous architect of Notre-Dame, and the craftsmen of the powerful Masonic guild that built the cathedral, had inscribed the procedures of the hermetic science where none would expect to find them–which is to say, in full view–and that, furthermore, they had encoded and engraved their knowledge in buildings that would outlive tapestries and manuscripts, and whose ecclesiastical owners would want to keep their pagan significance a secret. If a literal-minded scholar had objected that many of those stone figures had been placed there, or recarved, by Viollet-le-Duc, he would have retorted that no modern architect, consulting his imagination alone, could have produced that mysterious combination of scientific accuracy and simple faith.
Though there was no other sign of agitation in the elderly gentleman, anyone who happened to notice him as they left the cathedral might have seen an expression similar to that on the face of the stone Alchemist. But if they searched for the cause of his consternation, they would have seen nothing in particular, and might have assumed that he was one of those melancholy lost souls who haunt the religious sites of Paris. While the few tourists who remained on the square scanned the gallery of the Kings of Judah and Israel, and, guide book at the ready, identified the signs of the Zodiac and the labours of the months on the pillars of the left-hand portal, the gentleman stared almost straight ahead of him at a row of square medallions. The medallions were sheltered by little arches at the feet of the saints and angels. They depicted a series of rather murky scenes in low relief. Compared with the larger statues above them, they were unremarkable, and few people spared them a glance.
The sun was sinking behind the Préfecture de Police, and dark shadows moved across the cadaverous face of the cathedral. The gentleman turned away and walked slowly across the square. A bell in the north tower tolled the hour, and some pigeons clattered away from the black louvres that are like the lowered lashes of the cathedral’s eyes. Without looking back, he turned towards the river and disappeared in the direction of the Right Bank.
As he left the square, a man who had been waiting a short distance away came and occupied the spot where the gentleman had just been standing. The superior quality of his suitcase, his Kodak camera and his travelling cloak–and the interest he aroused in the beggars–marked him out as a wealthy tourist. He placed his suitcase on the ground and set his camera on a tripod. He adjusted the screw, raised the lens almost to the height of the medallions and proceeded to photograph each one in turn. A group of people stopped to watch, and, following the angle of the lens, were struck by all the unsuspected details that suddenly burst into blinding clarity as each flashbulb exploded.
The scenes had no apparent connection with the Bible. In one, a man armed with a shield and a lance was protecting a citadel from a savage-looking sheath of flames protruding from the top-left-hand corner of the frame. Next to it, a man in a long robe was rushing into a sanctuary that already contained a huddled form. On the other side of the central portal known as ‘The Judgment Portal’, a group of well-preserved figures appeared to sympathize in advance with the future effects of time and vandalism on a mournful seated figure with a mutilated, three-fingered hand and flaking flesh.
The medallion that seemed to have been a particular object of scrutiny was such a peculiar composition that it was hard to believe it belonged to the original cathedral; yet there was no sign of any modern restoration. On the far left of the doorway known as ‘The Virgin’s Portal’, it showed a winged figure with its right arm raised in a gesture of aggression. Most of the panel was filled with a cloud that rose from the earth in a funnel or from an oddly shaped gourd. A small creature with a human torso and a reptilian head–perhaps a salamander–was falling headlong out of the cloud. The cloud itself was filled with six-pointed stars as though it contained a universe, though no constellation was recognizable in the arrangement of stars.
After photographing the last of the scenes, the photographer dismantled his tripod and placed the camera in his suitcase. Then he walked across the square in the same direction as the elderly gentleman. The sun was now eclipsed by the buildings on the far side of the square. Its gorgeous radiance gave way to the wan glow of street-lights along the quai, and the details of the medallions shrank back into darkness. A few stars glimmered in the gas-lit skies above the Île de la Cité.
THE ORIGINS OF NOTRE-DAME might have been ‘lost in the night of ages’, as the tour guides liked to say, but most of its history is easier to trace than the comings and goings of certain individuals who lived in its shadow.
Paris was no longer the biggest city in continental Europe, and it was less than half the size of London. Its eighty quartiers–even Montparnasse, where almost every vacant building was being converted into an American bar–were like villages in which everyone knew everyone else’s business. There was a buoyant and extrovert bureaucracy that would have delighted Napoleon. Names were listed at the entrances of apartment blocks, and there were increasingly comprehensive telephone directories. Hundreds of thousands of fiches filled in by hotel guests were periodically scanned by the unhappy squad of policemen known as ‘les garnos’ (from hôtels garnis). Despite all this, a man who wished to remain anonymous could pass through that teeming mass of information like a ghost through a hail of bullets.
It has, not surprisingly, proved impossible to determine exactly when a foreign agent first picked up the trail of the gentleman who was observed at Notre-Dame. Nor is it kno
wn how long the search continued. By 1937, the Nazis’ secret intelligence agency, the Abwehr, was on the case, and the gentleman’s addresses and regular haunts–but not his identity–were certainly known. Later, the trail went cold, and spying operations became more difficult as the European powers prepared for war. It was several years later, when the German armies were in retreat, that urgent attempts were made by the American Office of Strategic Services to revive the search. At about the same time, Paris booksellers and auctioneers noticed a surge in the demand for alchemical manuscripts, which anonymous collectors were buying ‘á prix d’or’ in American dollars.
Given the fantastic nature of certain espionage operations undertaken by the Nazis, and in view of their farcical attempt in 1925 to fill the party coffers with alchemically-produced gold, the base of Paris operations for the Abwehr agent is likely to have been the Hôtel Helvétia at 51, Rue de Montmorency. It was recommended to German tourists, and it occupied the oldest stone building in Paris, which was known as ‘The House of Nicolas Flamel’. A wealthy dealer in manuscripts, Flamel had built the house in 1407 as a hostel for the poor. He himself never lived there, and, despite his later reputation, was never an alchemist. This had not prevented seekers of the philosopher’s stone from demolishing half the building in their futile search for gold. Blinded by greed, they ignored the most basic precept of alchemy–that the scientist himself must be pure of heart. Evidently, they also ignored the inscription on the wall that said,
Chacun soit content de ses biens,
Qui n’a souffisance il n’a riens…*
It was there, one might imagine, that the man with the camera pondered the scraps of information he had been able to obtain. What follows is not necessarily a complete list of these gleanings, but it gives a fair idea of his line of enquiry: