THE NOTRE-DAME EQUATION
TO THE SMALL NUMBER of questing spirits whose daily perambulation in Paris was a divinatory walk through a sacred labyrinth, and whose indoor activities – despite fumes in the hallway and strange lights under the door – were a complete mystery to their neighbours, the change, which was both subtle and profound, appeared to have occurred at about the time of the First World War.
Their ancient science expressed only its most basic precepts in words, and so they would not have been able to offer much in the way of evidence. If they had been willing or able to convert their knowledge into the simple currency of fact, they might have adduced some apparently insignificant phenomena: an alteration of the light that fell on certain buildings at certain times of day, a modification in the nesting habits of birds or an imperceptible shift in the anatomical geometry of Parisians as they walked along a street or looked to the sky to see what the weather was going to do. They might have hinted at something more devastating than the annihilation of a million soldiers and civilians. But no one would have believed them anyway, and it was only when modern science had progressed to a point where the insights of the two disciplines became mutually comprehensible that one of those questing spirits (the subject of this story) tried to warn his contemporaries. By then, the world was once again on the brink of catastrophe, and although the ancient science proved its practical worth in unexpected ways, few people had any use for its wisdom.
As for the rest of the population, only those who had emerged alive from the horrific crucible of war had any inkling of the change. Paris had sat out the conflagration like a medieval citadel, suffering little more than a chipped turret and a dented portcullis. It was this near-total preservation of the city that alerted some people to the fact that the capital of France had disappeared, along with the old world, and been replaced by an almost perfect copy of itself.
If any single event had the power to reveal the change to ordinary eyes, it was the great Peace Conference, which, from January 1919 to January 1920, turned Paris into a gaudy bazaar of foreign dignitaries. Delegates came from east and west to redraw the map of the world and to share the spoils of war. Many saw their hopes squashed and smeared across marble floors by the patent-leather boot of international diplomacy. While Georges Clemenceau, Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George and Vittorio Orlando held stately discussions in sumptuous hotels, ‘flooded after sundown with dazzling light, and filled by day with the buzz of idle chatter, the shuffling of feet, the banging of doors, and the ringing of bells’,* other emissaries, from countries whose names were known only to scholars, envied the waiters and chambermaids who had access to the tables and beds of the mighty, and as they laid their glittering robes of state on the dusty coverlets of cheap hotels, felt themselves shrivel up into illegible footnotes in the history of Europe.
Little attempt was made to sustain the illusion of lasting peace. Recently installed dictators sought to confirm the advantages they had gained by the massacre of neighbouring populations. Others, whose star was in the descendant, blew vigorously on the embers of their ambitions, and quietly pondered future policies of assassination and deceit. Mortified to be assigned to the depressing Hôtel des Réservoirs and to be forced to carry their own luggage, the German mission observed how much influence attached to the House of Rothschild, and was struck by the bitter conviction that the war had been staged by Jews and Freemasons, and that the United States of America had intended all along to play the role of deus ex machina.
Though their fortunes varied enormously, victors and vanquished alike took part in the same unconscious conspiracy to revive the glories of the past, and to behave as though the capital of Europe had never seen her luxury grow dim. In the ballroom of the Hôtel Majestic, while the pavements outside were rutted with frozen snow as sharp as steel, the British delegation held an extravagant party at which ‘the latest forms of dancing were to be seen, including the jazz and the hesitation waltz’. At such events were policies discussed that would decide the destinies of millions. Men who were called upon to exercise the power of rational thought with purity and precision pored over dinner menus as long as treaties. They whirled their unidentified foreign partners across the floor and fell prey to the collective madness. Many of those who observed these spectacles of wild dissipation as they passed in the street, begging for relief from cold and hunger, gave voice to the sentiment expressed by Cicero: ‘Quam parva sapientia regitur mundus!’*
Yet even the conquerors were strangely muted in their exultations. As Dr E. J. Dillon, an eye-witness and participant, observed, ‘the smile of youth and beauty was cold like the sheen of winter ice. The shadow of death hung over the institutions and survivals of the various civilizations and epochs which were being dissolved in the common melting-pot.’ Less than two hours away by motor car, black hordes, whose limbs stuck out of shell-ploughed fields, were a ghastly scene from a medieval tarot, convincing those who made the journey from Paris out of curiosity that nothing would ever change, that dominions would continue to flourish and decay, and that the means would always be found, in spite of everything, to prevent any conspicuous diminution in the sum total of human misery.
WHEN THE DELEGATES of the Peace Conference had returned to their homelands and places of exile, they left behind them an atmosphere of half-reality in which preposterous things were strangely plausible. It rose like a miasma from the Seine, drifted past the fluted columns of the Assemblée Nationale, and crept along the corridors of power. Parliamentary debates went on as before, but now Truth wore a garb that made her fiendishly difficult to identify. Thus it was that a group of republican députés, moved by the pleas of the exploited people of Poldavia, took up their cause against the capitalist oppressor and were about to petition the Foreign Ministry when the true status of Poldavia was revealed, and the letters signed by Lineczi Stantoff and Lamidaëff of the Poldavian Defence Committee were found to have been written by a member of the extreme-right Action Française movement. Only then was the name Lamidaëff seen to be L’Ami d’A.F. and the exotic syllables of ‘Lineczi Stantoff’ to contain the words ‘l’inexistant’.
Radiant particles of wisdom were always surrounded by clouds of ignorance. A few men, such as the enigmatic figure whose intervention in the affairs of the world is the basis of this true story, realized that the Great War and its political consequences were a distraction. Or rather, he saw that the ruination of Europe, perpetrated in the name of a cause that remained obscure, was merely a side effect of the confusion that had entered men’s minds. The war to end all wars was just the most recent of the ‘violent storms and tempests that attend the collision of the volatile and the incombustible, the Universal Solvent and the lifeless body’, when, in layman’s terms, the material composition of reality itself evolves new configurations that elude the control of the civilized mind.
There was surely some cruel significance in the fact that the change had manifested itself in a city that had been the refuge of wisdom since the end of the Dark Ages. Even before the war, the humming hive of laboratories and lecture rooms had also been a magical place where people came in search of non-existent treasures. More than a century after its disappearance from the Sainte-Chapelle, when the sans-culottes had waged their mindless war on gullibility, there were sightings of the Holy Sponge of the Passion, which Louis IX had purchased for an exorbitant sum from Baudouin II, Emperor of Constantinople, in 1241. According to some lovers of the city who claimed to remember this as a golden age, Paris was a treasure house where manuscripts of unknown ancient texts, maps of vanished continents and authentic sacred relics could be bought at flea markets for next to nothing. They were remembering a time when everything had been at once believable and incredible. Every day at Les Invalides, veterans with wooden arms and legs persuaded visitors to wait, sometimes for hours, to see the invalid with the wooden head, who had been there just a moment before and had probably gone for his shave but would be back directly. At the Bibliothèque Nationale, librarians were often importuned by bogus readers poking about in the flower-beds, looking for Cleopatra’s mummy, which, having been deposited in the archives by Napoleon Bonaparte, was said to have been removed from the cellars when her fragrance began to spread through the stacks, and to have been buried in the inner courtyard one rainy evening in 1870.
Most troubling of all, the very embodiment of mortal beauty had been veiled with suspicion and was no longer the object of unquestioning devotion. In August 1911, Da Vinci’s masterpiece, La Joconde, disappeared from the Louvre. An exhaustive search turned up the frame but not the painting, which had gone home on the bus with the Italian carpenter who had made the glass case that was supposed to protect her from anarchists and vandals. She spent more than two years in a garret, smiling enigmatically at her abductor and sharing the warmth of his stove, and was only recovered when the carpenter tried to sell her to the Uffizi. But in the meantime, rumours had spread of an American collector who commissioned perfect copies of stolen paintings and then pretended to restore the originals to the grateful museums. The new science of fingerprinting proved its worth, and photographs were presented that showed every crack and wrinkle of the original painting, yet no one could quite summon up the conviction that the recovered Mona Lisa was the real one. The more means there were of determining authenticity, it seemed, the more doubt was cast on the artefact. And even if it was the original Mona Lisa, how was one to judge her timeless beauty, since even men with long experience of such things had recently admired, at the Salon des Indépendants, an Adriatic Sunset painted by Lolo the donkey from the Lapin Agile in Montmartre?
Reality itself fell into decay, and in that darkness, luminous spirits such as Marie Curie and Henri Poincaré, who alone appeared to understand the muddled workings of the universe, became the objects of religious veneration. Others, to whom mathematical equations were meaningless hieroglyphs, longed for the old-fashioned certainty of a sacred miracle. Every day, hundreds of pilgrims queued at the Chapelle de la Médaille Miraculeuse in the Rue du Bac, where the Virgin Mary had commanded a young novice to have a medallion struck – the medallion, bearing the Virgin’s image, to be reproduced as many times as required, and each one to be as genuine as the next. Unfortunately, the market in fake medallions flourished as never before, and even those glinting, tangible icons of cosmic truth were contaminated with doubt.
Sceptics might have sneered at what they called ‘superstition’, but how could anyone be expected to distinguish fantasy from reality when things that happened in broad daylight in front of large crowds were called into question? The Tour de France – the great sporting symbol of national unity that began and ended in Paris – should have been immune from the corrosive effects of incredulity. It seemed to represent a simple application of human will and elementary mechanics. Yet even those who witnessed it could not trust the evidence of their eyes. Some of the riders were known to have boarded trains and to have pedalled away from quiet stations in the night. Others were thought to have shared the impossible burden with identical twins. In 1904, the first four riders to finish – who ever after asserted their innocence – were disqualified for cheating, and the victory went to Henri Cornet, who was only twenty years old and who, for a reason that has been lost to history, was known as ‘Rigolo’ (‘the Joker’). Some of those who had actually seen the riders struggle into Paris on flat tyres or on foot, with a mangled bicycle frame around their neck, firmly believed that the Tour de France was a lucrative fiction, cooked up every July by the journalists of L’Auto, who had been seen drinking in the back room of a café at Montgeron, writing Homeric reports of fantastic exploits in the Alps.
IN THAT AGE OF rampant unreality, when the supposedly deranged Surrealists of Montmartre and Montparnasse were simply the faithful chroniclers of what remained of reality, it might be thought that the sleepless seekers after truth who studied the ancient science of Hermes were suffering a crisis of confidence. Yet even one of the more conservative estimates puts the number of practising alchemists in post-war Paris at about ten thousand. Since so much trade and manufacture had moved out to the suburbs, this would make alchemy one of the city’s leading industries between the wars.
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 it 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 flash-bulb 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 known 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 ‘à 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:
– 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 experiments 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 perhaps 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.’
By now, Bergier was intrigued. It was not impossible that someone whose mind appeared to function like an uncalibrated cyclotron might have stumbled on some interesting permutations of ideas. He asked politely, ‘You yourself, Monsieur…you have undertaken research in this domain?’
The alchemist smiled as though at a distant memory. ‘You are asking me to give you a potted history of four thousand years’ philosophy and a summary of my life’s work…And’, he added, as Bergier shrugged apologetically, ‘even if that were possible, you would be asking me to translate into words concepts that do not lend themselves to language.’
‘So’, said Bergier, ‘if I understand correctly, we are talking about the philosopher’s stone…’
‘And the production of gold?…Those are merely particular applications,’ said the alchemist with a wave of his hand. ‘The essential point is not the transmutation of metals but that of the experimenter himself.’ He directed his gaze at the younger of the two scientists. ‘There is something that I would ask you to consider: alchemists never dissociated moral and religious concerns from their research, whereas modern physicists such as yourselves are children of the eighteenth century, when science became the pastime of a few aristocrats and wealthy libertines.’
The conversation ended with this sobering homily. No doubt the alchemist felt that he had said enough, and that any attempt to explain how he had reached his conclusions would only baffle the two scientists or leave them completely incredulous. He conducted them to the laboratory door and left them to make their own way out.
When they looked back at the building, no light was shining from any of the windows, and they never saw the alchemist again.
No one, including the British and American agents who searched for ‘Fulcanelli’ after the Liberation, has ever been able to explain how a Parisian alchemist employed by a gas company, with a scholarly interest in Gothic architecture, managed to acquire a reasonably accurate understanding of nuclear physics at such an early date. It was not until the following August that Albert Einstein wrote his famous letter to President Roosevelt, warning him that the creation of a devastating bomb had become feasible ‘through the work of Joliot[-Curie] in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America’.
In 1937, the only other person to have warned of the dangers of atomic research was that self-taught student of alchemy, Frederick Soddy, who had spoken in public lectures of the possible future development of unimaginably powerful weapons. Fulcanelli lacked Professor Soddy’s resources and expertise, but he had the advantage of a lifetime’s alchemical experience. From his own experiments and observations, he understood the process of ‘projection’, the role of what medieval alchemists called eau pesante or ‘heavy water’, and the difference between the ‘humid way’ and the ‘dry way’, which took days instead of years. Unlike Professor Soddy, he knew that alchemy’s secrets could no more be explained in words than mathematical equations could be translated into Romantic prose.
So many obscure and symbolic disasters had been depicted in the superstitious past – plagues, massacres and divine conflagrations – that it had been no simple matter to relate the experimental evidence to the visible record. It had taken time to see that some of the most puzzling allegories were those that displayed the literal truth. The sequence of carvings had survived for seven centuries on the west front of Notre-Dame where thousands of people could (and still can) see it for themselves, but until the threat had become a reality once again, it was just another historical curio that served as a background to countless tourists’ snapshots.
DESPITE THE INCREASING polarization of rich and poor in purpose-built suburbs, much of the population of Paris was still arranged vertically by wealth. A seamstress, a poet, a bank manager, a fortune-teller and a nuclear physicist might tread the same stair carpet every day of their lives and sometimes even exchange a few words on the subject of the unseasonable weather, the pigeons in the courtyard or the latest inexplicable rumblings of the plumbing. The apartment blocks of Paris were a gigantic university of trades and disciplines. Remarkable encounters, such as this meeting of two sciences separated by thousands of years, were not uncommon, and there is nothing odd in the fact that the meeting has never before been mentioned in any history of Paris.
Bergier and Helbronner may or may not have heeded the alchemist’s strictures on the amorality of modern science, but they certainly pondered his technical hints. The notes that the two scientists submitted to the Académie des Sciences in sealed envelopes in 1940 were opened in 1948 and proved to contain calculations of self-sustaining chain reactions in deuterium and uranium-238.* These notes do not, as some have claimed, show that the laboratory in the Rue Saint-Georges was on the brink of assembling the world’s first hydrogen bomb, but they do demonstrate the surprisingly advanced state of French nuclear research.
This only makes Fulcanelli’s actions all the more puzzling. He warned of catastrophic forces soon to be unleashed upon the world, and yet, by describing what was in effect an atomic pile, he set Bergier and Helbronner on the shortest path to nuclear fission.
The Paris Peace Conference had shown that morality was a spent force in international politics. It was hard now to imagine that a chemist had once demonstrated to Louis XV ‘an inextinguishable fire’ that could destroy a city, and been paid out of the royal purse to eradicate all traces of his horrible invention, or that an engineer had once presented Louis XVI with a crank-action machine-gun that could kill an entire regiment, and been angrily dismissed as ‘an enemy of humanity’.
The agents of the OSS who arrived in Europe in the wake of the Allied armies rushed about the Continent like bargain hunters. The official story was that they were looking for missing American soldiers. Their real aim was to track down atomic scientists and to prevent whatever fissionable material the Nazis had produced from falling into the hands of the Soviets. Some of the agents set off for German cities that were about to come under French jurisdiction. Others searched for Fulcanelli and one of Helbronner’s former associates, an Indian called Eric Edward Dutt who had dabbled in alchemy and particle accelerators. But Fulcanelli had vanished without trace, and Dutt had been shot by French counter-espionage agents in North Africa.
In Paris, the operation’s main focus was the Collège de France and the laboratory of Frédéric Joliot-Curie. The Curies’ son-in-law was known to be an ardent communist. He had thrown petrol bombs at German tanks in the battle for the liberation of Paris. He was believed to have obtained several tons of uranium during the war, and there was some surprise and alarm that French scientists working in such primitive conditions had made such spectacular progress. A recently declassified report on ‘Atomic Experiments in France’ mentioned Joliot-Curie as a possible threat to security:
A reliable source reports that there has been a rumor circulating to the effect that French scientists have the formula and techniques concerning atomic explosives, and that they are now willing to sell this information. They allegedly do not wish to sell to the Allies or to their own government for political reasons…They are supposed to be desirous to sell the discovery to one of the smaller nations.*
It would be interesting to know whether or not Joliot-Curie ever discussed the matter with the alchemist who had been a friend of his father-in-law. Perhaps Fulcanelli, like Joliot-Curie and other French scientists, realizing that the secret would soon be known to several powerful nations, thought it better to spread the knowledge as widely as possible. By then, of course, the alchemist, wherever he was, would have seen the astonishing images of what might have been a mythical catastrophe from a medieval depiction of Hell. He would have seen, this time in black and white, the shattered sanctuaries, the fleshless faces that resembled badly eroded bas-reliefs and the towering cloud that contained a million suns. Even he might have found it all very hard to believe.