Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

by Robb, Graham

  –Some undeveloped rolls of film, including photographs of the west front of Notre-Dame.

  –A copy of a book on Gothic architecture called Le Mystère des Cathédrales, published in 1925, and a modern reprint of the Livre des figures hiéroglyphiques, misattributed to Nicolas Flamel.

  –An illustrated Pilgrims’ Guide to Notre-Dame, with a fold-out map of the cathedral.

  –A notebook containing some addresses, including those of an institution called the Sacré-Cœur (59, Rue Rochechouart), the offices of the Paris Gas Company (28, Place Saint-Georges) and various academic and pharmaceutical laboratories on both banks of the Seine.

  –Baedeker’s guide to south-western France, ‘from the Loire to the Spanish frontier’.

  There was also an old cutting, with underlinings in pencil, from a popular magazine called Je Sais Tout, bound sets of which could easily be found in book-boxes along the quais.

  The article, dated September 1905, was more intimately connected with the case than might appear, and it merits a careful reading. It was an interview with a Dr Alphonse Jobert, who claimed to be an alchemist. There was a picture of a late-middle-aged man sitting by a stove. The caption said, ‘Dr Jobert continually conducts new experiments in his alchemist’s laboratory’. Other pictures showed ‘the transmutation of metals performed under the supervision of a chemist’, and something that looked like a gigantic pile of guano threatening to engulf the Paris Stock Exchange: this was supposed to show the total volume of ‘all the gold currently in circulation throughout the world’. The doctor bore some resemblance to the gentleman at Notre-Dame, but since the picture was at least thirty-two years old in 1937, and the doctor was already getting on in years when it was taken in 1905, the resemblance was no doubt fortuitous.

  Dr Jobert had evidently enjoyed a healthy sense of humour, and one senses that the interviewer was less sceptical after the interview than before. (The foreign agent’s opinion can only be guessed, though the underlinings indicate his interest.) Much of the interview was devoted to one of the doctor’s friends, who, having produced a certain quantity of gold by the alchemical method, had taken it to the Paris Mint. (It was strongly suggested that the ‘friend’ was the doctor himself.)

  ‘At the Mint, they asked him how he had come into possession of such a quantity of gold, and he told them–in his naivety–that he’d made it himself…And do you know what they said?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They said–I’m quoting their actual words–“You ought not to know how to do that.”’

  It is worth pointing out that Dr Jobert was not the first alchemist to visit the imposing palazzo on the Quai de Conti with a sample of home-made gold. In 1854–seventy years before the first serious claim to have produced artificial gold in a laboratory*–a former laboratory assistant called Théodore Tiffereau persuaded M. Levol of the Paris Mint, who was responsible for assaying precious metals, to allow him to conduct some experiments on the premises. The first two experiments were inconclusive. Tiffereau believed, however, that when the aqua fortis or nitric acid had reached boiling-point, the gold must have spurted out onto the floor. The third experiment had to be left to simmer overnight, and when Tiffereau arrived at the Mint the next morning, he was told that the test-tube had cracked. Only a few tiny particles of gold were visible on the glass. M. Levol, obviously unimpressed by low-yield miracles, then said, ‘You can see that there really isn’t any appreciable quantity of gold.’

  Much later, the governors of the Mint seem to have taken a more enlightened view of the matter. In the early 1930s, recognizing the enormous changes that had taken place in chemistry, they appointed as their expert a noted French physicist called André Helbronner. This appointment, which seems to have escaped the attention of the Abwehr agent, was not without significance for the future of the civilized world.

  The rest of the 1905 article was devoted to the alarming implications of Dr Jobert’s alchemical activities. Spurned by the French authorities, he had apparently received offers from Spain, where the gold market was less strictly regulated. But the doctor’s main ambitions lay elsewhere. He pointed out that if the secret were revealed to all the world, and it became possible for anyone with a stove and a test-tube to transmute base metals into gold, this would have ‘a somewhat unsettling effect on our institutions, the social question would make a great leap forwards, and the old world would crumble and collapse’.

  This was enough to convince the interviewer that Dr Jobert was a dangerous socialist. His suspicions were confirmed by Jobert’s sympathy with Pierre Curie, who was known to hold subversive views and who, despite the Curies’ pioneering studies of magnetism and radioactivity, had never been accepted by the scientific establishment.

  None of this would have surprised a true alchemist. Like the elixir of long life, the production of gold was merely a stage in the Magnum Opus, and every alchemist knew that a man who was motivated by personal gain would never reach that stage in any case. The article’s interest to the foreign spy was presumably the evidence of alchemy’s recent modernization. One of Jobert’s colleagues, for instance, employed a chemical engineer in his laboratory and had published a book on ‘how to become an alchemist’ that might easily have served as a chemistry textbook.* In Jobert’s view, if alchemists were now the students of modern chemists, the scientists themselves had much to learn from their ancient predecessors. To prove his point, he quoted the fifteenth-century alchemist-monk Basilius Valentinus, implying that the monk’s description of the catalyst known as ‘universal mercury’ had something to say about the mysterious properties of the Curies’ discovery, radium. The foreign agent or his controller had marked this passage with thick pencil lines in the margin:

  Our mercury is luminous at night…It has such dissolvent properties that, in its ambiance, nothing can withstand it, for it destroys all organic matter. Universal Mercury has in addition the property of disintegrating all metals that have first been opened, and of bringing them to the point of maturation.

  In view of what is now common knowledge, it seems obvious that if these scraps of information had been properly analysed, they might have encouraged the Nazis to renew their search for the philosopher’s stone. But since, in their megalomaniac eyes, alchemy was nothing but an accelerated fund-raising device, they missed the golden opportunity that might have presented them with the most horrific and lasting revenge for the defeat of 1918.

  The fact that the meeting to be described in this story took place at the same time as the Abwehr investigation–the early summer of 1937–suggests that the elderly gentleman knew that he was under observation and that time was running out. He disappeared after the meeting, and the only plausible sighting of him was many years later, in Spain. This had led some to suppose that the elderly gentleman and Dr Jobert were one and the same, but until further evidence comes to light, this can only be a matter of speculation.

  THAT EVENING, Professor Helbronner left the Mint and headed for the Pont Neuf to return to his laboratory at 49, Rue Saint-Georges. As he passed in front of the magnificent view of medieval towers rising over the Île de la Cité, he could not have suspected that there was any meaningful connection between the Gothic cathedral, the alchemists he occasionally met at the Mint and his own work on nucleonics. It had occurred to him, however, that several amusing and, he might almost have said, intriguing parallels existed between the art of the alchemist and the latest discoveries in chemistry and physics.

  Some of those gold-seekers were clearly insane, and although they were surprisingly well informed about modern science, they were incapable of distinguishing experimental results from wild fantasy. Their methods appeared to involve very little trial and a great deal of error. The particles of gold, for instance, nearly always turned out to have been present in the base metal. They seemed particularly attached to the idea that certain molecular transformations produced in laboratories were somehow tied to the future of the human race, and that certain ill-advised experimen
ts had already altered the nature of reality itself. This was, to say the least, pushing the Theory of Relativity to the limits.

  What struck Helbronner was not so much the idea itself as the fact that it was shared by several individuals who knew nothing of the others’ work. A well-organized conspiracy of lunatics was obviously out of the question, and so he was forced to conclude that, however shaky its foundations, alchemy was still a living science.

  In fact, Helbronner had more sympathy with the inter-disciplinary delusion than a professor of the Collège de France could safely admit. He knew that the Curies had derived some sort of inspiration from alchemy, and that other colleagues had found it a fruitful source of analogies for their work on the atomic structure of matter. He might also have known–though there is no evidence that he did–that the Oxford chemist Frederick Soddy, having previously derided alchemy as ‘a mental aberration’, had more recently commended it in public as an untapped source of practical insights. Professor Soddy had made a special study of the notion of transmutation. From his careful reading of hermetic texts, he had come to suspect that, some time in the distant past, a vanished civilization had developed a technology based on some poorly understood and probably accidental molecular processes. This technology, in Soddy’s view, had left shadowy traces in alchemical allegories. Remarkably, it was only after his discovery of alchemy that Soddy and his collaborator, Ernest Rutherford, recognized, to their astonishment, that radioactive thorium was spontaneously converting itself into a different element. Soddy is said to have cried out, ‘Rutherford, this is transmutation!’ To which Rutherford replied, ‘For Mike’s sake, Soddy, don’t call it transmutation! They’ll have our heads off as alchemists!’

  When he reached his laboratory that evening, Professor Helbronner was told by the concierge that an elderly gentleman had called to see him. Finding the Professor out, the gentleman had left a message. Helbronner recognized the name as that of an alchemist who had previously introduced himself at the Mint, and who had shown a keen amateur interest in Helbronner’s work on polonium. In his message, the alchemist asked Helbronner to meet him in one of the testing laboratories of the Société du Gaz de Paris, which had its headquarters a few doors away in the Place Saint-Georges. Helbronner alerted his young associate, Jacques Bergier, and the two men set off for what they must have thought would be a curious diversion.

  Certain details are missing from the next part of the story, largely because, six years later, André Helbronner was arrested as a member of the Resistance and deported to Buchenwald concentration camp, where he died of pneumonia in March 1944. In the last months of his life, he applied his genius to writing cryptic messages on the printed postcards that prisoners were allowed to send to their families. The only echo of the meeting that comes from Helbronner himself consists of some experimental notes that were submitted in sealed envelopes to the Académie des Sciences in the spring of 1940, a few weeks before the Nazis entered Paris. The main source of information, therefore, is the account published by Helbronner’s associate in 1960.

  According to this account, the alchemist who asked to meet them that evening in June 1937 was the author of Le Mystère des Cathédrales et l’interprétation ésotérique des symboles hermétiques du Grand Œuvre. The book had been published in 1926 under the unlikely name ‘Fulcanelli’. Only five hundred copies were printed, and they are now almost worth their weight in gold. At the time, the book had sent ripples of excitement through the tremulous world of Parisian alchemy. It was an erudite but by no means flawless account of alchemical symbols in religious and domestic buildings of the Gothic period, with particular reference to Notre-Dame and to the writings of Basilius Valentinus, Gobineau de Montluisant and Victor Hugo. It owed its charm to its elegant prose, its careful description of the carvings of Notre-Dame, which the author had consulted for his own alchemical experiments, and to an unusual mixture of scepticism and faith. While insisting that certain pseudo-alchemists should be read ‘not just with a pinch of salt but with the entire salt-shaker’, Fulcanelli had also defended the scientific integrity of his discipline:

  Our science is as concrete, real and precise as optics, geometry and mechanics, its results as tangible as those of chemistry. Enthusiasm and faith are stimulants and precious auxiliaries, but they must be subordinate to logic and reasoning, and subjected to practical experiment.

  By the time Fulcanelli contacted Professor Helbronner, his book no longer represented his current thinking. In 1926, he had been too easily distracted by the esoteric ramblings of post-medieval alchemists. In 1937, he had returned to his original inspiration, and especially to what he had described in his book as ‘a truly curious little quadrangular bas-relief’ on the west front of Notre-Dame.

  The abiding interest of the book has proved to be the enigma of Fulcanelli’s identity, which has kept thousands of occultists and conspiracy theorists fruitlessly amused for the last eighty years.* A more useful question–one that Professor Helbronner must have asked himself–is this: what was an alchemist doing in a gasworks? To judge by the extensive travels mentioned in his book, Fulcanelli was not short of money and had no need of a job. But when Helbronner and his associate walked over to the quiet Place Saint-Georges and looked up at the amazing building that housed the Paris Gas Company, directly above the old entrance to the Nord-Sud Métro, they might have reflected that this was, after all, an appropriate setting for a practitioner of the hermetic science. The Hôtel Païva had been built in 1840 in what was then a quartier of expensive curiosity shops, self-employed courtesans and wealthy artistic types pretending to be recluses. A sculptor noted for his allegorical scenes of animals had covered the facade with wonderfully superfluous figures. One of the statues appeared to be Hermes, equipped with his masonic tools. Blackened by a hundred years of smoke, the building was an eerie sight at dusk, and the yellow gleam that came from some of the blinded windows suggested something more interesting than the production of domestic gas.

  In fact, Fulcanelli’s reasons for taking a job with the Gas Company were probably entirely practical. As the Office of Strategic Services discovered after the war, radioactive thorium was imported into France for use in cigarette lighters and gas mantles, and not, they concluded, to make thorium piles. A gasworks, in other words, was one of the few places where a man with no academic position could unobtrusively obtain some of that mysterious element whose transmutation Professors Soddy and Rutherford had observed.

  The meeting took place in one of the laboratories at the back of the building. The two scientists were dressed in everyday clothes; the alchemist wore a lab coat. He had a strange tale to tell–a tale that would have seemed utterly fantastic without his detailed knowledge of their work on nucleonics, and in particular their detection of radioactive emissions during the volatilization of bismuth in high-pressure liquid deuterium. It turned out that the alchemist had been a friend of Pierre Curie, and had a good grounding in the subject. He spoke in a clear, metallic tone, with the concision of a lecturer addressing intelligent students. There was a hint of impatience in his voice, which contrasted with the old-fashioned courtesy of his diction.

  ‘You are very close to succeeding in your experiments, as indeed are several of your contemporaries. Might I be allowed to utter a word of caution? The work on which you and your colleagues are embarked is fraught with terrible dangers. They threaten not only you but also the entire human race.’

  An ironic smile formed on Bergier’s face, which the alchemist either ignored or didn’t notice.

  ‘It is easier than you think to release the energy of the nucleus, and the artificial radioactivity that would be produced could poison the Earth’s atmosphere within a few years. It is, I might add, entirely possible, as alchemists have known for some time, to manufacture atomic explosives from a few grams of metal that could eradicate entire cities.’

  Bergier had been a student of Marie Curie and still had much to learn about the unpredictable world of nuclear physics, but pe
rhaps he felt that his days of being lectured were over. He was about to interrupt when the alchemist raised a magisterial finger:

  ‘I know what you are going to say, but it is of no interest. Alchemists knew nothing of atomic structure; they were ignorant of electricity, and they had no means of detecting radioactivity. But I must tell you, though I can offer no proof, that geometrical arrangements of extremely pure materials are capable of releasing atomic forces, without the need for electricity or the vacuum technique.’

  He paused, as though to allow the concept of a home-made reactor to sink in. There was a strangely indifferent or perhaps mildly psychotic expression on his face. Neither of the scientists said anything. Bergier looked at the charlatan in the lab coat and seemed to observe the beautiful, fleeting effects of some unrepeatable experiment. The man’s words had set off a chain reaction in his mind. Though it now seems barely credible, until Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann discovered nuclear fission in Berlin the following year, almost no one had considered the destructive potential of nuclear energy, and it was not until 1942, when Enrico Fermi’s atomic pile went critical under the football stadium of the University of Chicago, that anything remotely corresponding to the alchemist’s ‘geometrical’ bomb existed.

  Somewhere in the building, a door closed. Helbronner and Bergier exchanged a glance, as if to reassure themselves that objective reality was still the prevailing force and that nothing unaccounted for was interfering with their perceptions.

  ‘I would ask you to concede’, the alchemist went on, as though oblivious to the effect of his words, ‘that there might once have existed a civilization that knew about atomic energy and was destroyed by its misuse, and’–his eyes now seemed to sparkle–‘that a few partial techniques survived.’