CHAPTER I
Dom Claude’s renown had spread far and wide. It procured him, at about the period when he refused to see Madame de Beaujeu, the honor of a visit which he long remembered.
It was on a certain evening. He had just retired after divine service to his canonic cell in the convent of Notre-Dame. This apartment, aside from a few glass phials banished to a corner, and full of somewhat suspicious powder, which looked vastly like gunpowder, contained nothing strange or mysterious. There were inscriptions here and there upon the walls, but they were merely scientific statements, or pious extracts from well-known authors. The archdeacon had just seated himself, by the light of a three-beaked copper lamp, before a huge chest covered with manuscripts. His elbow rested on a wide-open book by Honorius d‘Autun,
“De Prædestinatione et libero arbitrio,”br and he was very meditatively turning the leaves of a printed folio which he had brought upstairs with him,—the only product of the press which his cell contained. In the midst of his reverie there was a knock at the door. “Who is there?” cried the sage in the gracious tone of a hungry dog disturbed while eating his bone.
A voice answered from without: “Your friend, Jacques Coictier.” He at once opened the door.
It was indeed the king’s physician,—a person of some fifty years of age, whose harsh expression was only corrected by a crafty look. Another man was with him. Both wore long slate-colored robes furred with minever, belted and clasped, with caps of the same stuff and color. Their hands were hidden in their sleeves, their feet under their gowns, their eyes beneath their bonnets.
“God help me, gentlemen!” said the archdeacon, showing them in; “I did not expect so honorable a visit at such an hour.” And while speaking in this courteous fashion, he cast an anxious and searching glance from the physician to his companion.
“It is never too late to visit so distinguished a scholar as Dom Claude Frollo de Tirechappe,” replied Doctor Coictier, who being a native of Franche-Comté, drawled all his sentences until they dragged as majestically as the long train of a lady’s dress.
Then began between the doctor and the archdeacon one of those congratulatory prefaces with which it was at this period customary to precede every conversation between learned men, and which did not hinder them from hating each other most cordially. However, it is just so today: the lips of every learned man who compliments another scholar are like a cup of honeyed poison.
Claude Frollo’s congratulations to Jacques Coictier dwelt particularly on the numerous worldly advantages which that worthy physician in the course of his much-envied career had contrived to extract from every royal malady,—the result of a better and surer alchemy than the search for the philosopher’s stone.
“Truly, Doctor Coictier, I was delighted to hear of the promotion of your nephew, my reverend lord Pierre Versé. Has he not been made Bishop of Amiens?”
“Yes, archdeacon; by the favor and mercy of God.”
“Do you know that you cut a very fine figure on Christmas Day, at the head of your associates of the Court of Exchequer, Mr. President?”
“Vice-president, Dom Claude. Nothing more, alas!”
“How is your superb house in the Rue Saint-André des Arcs getting on? It’s another Louvre. I particularly admire the apricot-tree carved over the door, and the pleasing pun in the motto,
‘A L’Abri Cotier.”‘bs“Alas! Master Claude, all that stone-work costs me dear. I am being ruined as fast as the house grows.”
“Pooh! Haven’t you your revenues from the jail and the palace bailiwick, and the rent of all the houses, butchers’ stalls, booths, and shops within the boundary wall? That’s a fine milch-cow for you.”
“My Poissy castellany brought me in nothing this year.”
“But your toll-gates at Triel, Saint-James, and Saint-Germain-en-Laye are still good.”
“A hundred and twenty pounds, and not even Paris pounds at that.”
“But you have your place as Councillor to the King. That’s a permanent thing.”
“Yes, Brother Claude; but that confounded manor of Poligny, which people make such a talk about, doesn’t bring me in sixty crowns, take it one year with another.”
In the compliments paid to Jacques Coictier by Dom Claude there was the sarcastic, sour, slightly mocking tone, the cruel, acid smile of an unfortunate and superior person sporting for a moment, by way of amusement, with the fat prosperity of a vulgar fellow. The other did not observe this.
“By my soul,” said Claude at last, pressing his hand, “I am glad to see you in such robust health!”
“Thank you, Master Claude.”
“By the way,” cried Dom Claude, “how goes it with your royal patient?”
“He does not pay his doctor enough,” answered the physician, casting a side glance at his comrade.
“Do you think so, friend Coictier?” said his comrade.
These words, uttered in tones of surprise and reproach, drew the archdeacon’s attention to the stranger, although, to tell the truth, he had not been wholly unobservant of him for a single instant since he had crossed his threshold. Had there not been a thousand reasons for his conciliating Doctor Jacques Coictier, the all-powerful physician of King Louis XI, he would never have admitted him in such company. Therefore his expression was anything but cordial when Jacques Coictier said,—
“By the way, Dom Claude, I bring you a brother worker, who was anxious to see you, being familiar with your fame.”
“A gentleman of science?” inquired the archdeacon, fixing his piercing eye upon Coictier’s companion. The stranger returned his gaze with an equally searching and defiant look.
As well as the feeble light of the lamp allowed one to judge, he was an elderly man of some sixty years, and of medium height, apparently quite ill and broken. His profile, although not at all aristocratic, was still strong and severe; his eye flashed from beneath a very prominent brow, like a light from the depths of a cave; and under the flat cap which drooped over his face, the broad forehead of a man of genius was visible.
He took upon himself to answer the archdeacon’s question.
“Reverend sir,” he said in grave tones, “your renown has reached me, and I desired to consult you. I am only a poor country gentleman, who takes off his shoes before venturing into the presence of learned men. You must know my name. I am Compere
bt Tourangeau.”
“An odd name for a gentleman!” thought the archdeacon. Still, he felt that he had before him a strong and serious character. The instinct of his lofty intellect led him to guess that a spirit no less lofty lurked beneath the furred cap of Compere Tourangeau; and as he studied his grave face, the ironical smile which the presence of Jacques Coictier had forced to his sullen lips faded slowly, as twilight fades from the sky at night. He reseated himself silently and moodily in his great arm-chair, his elbow resumed its wonted place upon the table, and his head on his hand. After a few moments of meditation he signed to the two visitors to be seated, and addressed Compere Tourangeau:—
“You came to consult me, sir; and upon what branch of science?”
“Your reverence,” replied Tourangeau, “I am ill; very ill. You are said to be a great doctor, and I come to you for medical advice.”
“Medical advice!” said the archdeacon, shaking his head. He seemed communing with himself an instant, then added: “Compere Tourangeau, if that be your name, turn your head. You will find my answer ready written on the wall.”
Tourangeau obeyed, and read this inscription on the wall above his head: “Medicine is the daughter of dreams.—JAMBLIQUE.”
But Doctor Jacques Coictier listened to his comrade’s question with a displeasure only increased by Dom Claude’s answer. He bent to Tourangeau’s ear and said, low enough not to be overheard by the archdeacon, “I told you he was a madman; but you insisted on seeing him!”
“Because this madman may well be right, Doctor Jacques!” replied the stranger, in the same tone, and with a bitter smile.
“As you please,” answered Coictier, dryly. Then turning to the archdeacon: “You are an apt workman, Dom Claude, and you handle Hippocrates as deftly as a monkey does a nut. Medicine a dream, indeed! I doubt me the druggists and the old masters would stone you well, were they here. Then you deny the influence of philters on the blood, of ointments on the flesh! You deny that everlasting pharmacy of flowers and metals which we call the world, made expressly for that eternal sufferer whom we call man!”
“I deny,” said Dom Claude, coldly, “neither drugs nor disease. I deny the physician.”
“Then it is false,” continued Coictier, with warmth, “that gout is an inward eruption, that a cannon-wound may be cured by the application of a roasted mouse, that young blood properly infused restores youth to old veins; it is false to say that two and two make four, and that emprostathonos follows opistathonos.”
The archdeacon quietly replied, “There are certain things which I regard in a certain way.”
Coictier turned red with rage.
“There, there, my good Coictier, don’t be angry!” said Tourangeau. “The archdeacon is our friend.”
Coictier calmed himself, muttering,—
“After all, he’s a madman!”
“Odzooks, Master Claude!” continued Tourangeau, after a pause, “you embarrass me mightily. I had two pieces of advice to ask of you,—one concerning my health, the other concerning my star.”
“Sir,” responded the archdeacon, “if that be your object, you would have done as well not to waste your breath in climbing my stairs. I am no believer in medicine: I am no believer in astrology.”
“Indeed!” said the stranger with surprise.
Coictier laughed a forced laugh.
“You see now that he’s mad,” he whispered to Compere Tourangeau. “He doesn’t believe in astrology.”
“How can any one imagine,” continued Dom Claude, “that every star-ray is a thread which leads to some man’s head!”
“Pray, in what do you believe, then?” exclaimed Tourangeau.
The archdeacon for an instant seemed uncertain, then with a gloomy smile, which seemed to belie his answer, said: “credo in Deum.”
“Dominum nostrum,” added Tourangeau, making the sign of the cross.
“Amen,” said Coictier.
“Reverend sir,” resumed the stranger, “I am delighted to find you so good a Christian. But, great scholar that you are, have you reached such a point that you no longer believe in science?”
“No,” said the archdeacon, seizing Tourangeau by the arm, while a lightning flash of enthusiasm kindled his dull eye,—“no, I do not deny science. I have not crawled flat on my face all these years, digging the earth with my nails, amid the countless mazes of the cavern, without seeing far before me, at the end of the dark tunnel, a light, a flame, something, doubtless the reflection of the dazzling central laboratory where sages and patient souls have taken God by surprise.”
“Come, then,” interrupted Tourangeau, “what do you consider true and certain?”
“Alchemy.”
Coictier cried out: “Good God, Dom Claude! alchemy has its good points, no doubt; but why should you blaspheme against medicine and astrology?”
“Your science of mankind is naught; your science of heaven naught!” said the archdeacon, authoritatively.
“You treat Epidaurus and Chaldea very cavalierly,” replied the doctor with a sneer.
“Hear me, Master Jacques. I speak in good faith. I am not the king’s physician, and his Majesty did not give me the Dædalus garden as a convenient spot whence I might study the constellations. Don’t be angry, and listen to me. What new truth did you ever derive,—I don’t say from medicine, which is far too foolish a matter, but from astrology? Tell me the virtues of the vertical boustrophedon,
bu the discoveries of the number Ziruph and the number Zephirod.”
“Would you deny,” said Coictier, “the sympathetic power of the clavicle, and that the Cabala is derived from it?”
“An error, Master Jacques! None of your formulæ lead to reality; while alchemy has its indubitable discoveries. Can you contest such results as these,—ice buried beneath the ground for a thousand years is transformed to rock crystal; lead is the progenitor of all the metals,—for gold is not a metal, gold is light; lead requires but four periods of two hundred years each to pass successively from the state of lead to the state of red arsenic, from red arsenic to tin, from tin to silver? Are these facts or are they not? But to believe in clavicles, planets, and stars is as absurd as to believe with the natives of far Cathay that the golden oriole turns into a mole, and grains of wheat into mollusks of the genus Cypræa!”
“I have studied hermetics,” cried Coictier, “and I affirm—” The fiery archdeacon did not permit him to finish his speech. “And I have studied medicine, astrology, and hermetics. Here alone is truth [as he spoke he took from the press a phial filled with the powder of which we spoke some pages back], here alone is light! Hippocrates is a dream; Urania is a dream; Hermes is a mere idea. Gold is the sun; to make gold, is to become God. This is the only wisdom. I have sounded the depths of medicine and astrology, I tell you. They are naught, naught! The human body is a mere shadow; the stars are shadows!”
And he fell back upon his seat in a striking and imposing attitude. Tourangeau watched him in silence. Coictier forced himself to sneer, shrugged his shoulders slightly, and repeated in a low voice,—
“A madman!”
“And,” said Tourangeau suddenly, “the splendid goal,—have you attained that? Have you made gold?”
“Had I made it,” replied the archdeacon, pronouncing his words slowly, like a man who is reflecting, “the King of France would be called Claude, and not Louis.”
The stranger frowned.
“What do I say?” added Dom Claude with a scornful smile. “What would the throne of France avail me when I could reconstruct the Empire of the East?”
“Well, well,” said the stranger.
“Oh, poor fool!” muttered Coictier.
The archdeacon went on, apparently replying to his own thoughts only:—
“But no, I still crawl; I bruise my face and knees on the sharp stones of the subterranean way. I see dimly; I do not behold the full splendor! I do not read; I spell!”
“And when you can read,” asked the stranger, “shall you make gold?”
“Who can doubt it?” said the archdeacon.
“In that case, Notre-Dame knows that I am in great need of money, and I would fain learn to read your books. Tell me, reverend master, is your science hostile or displeasing to Notre-Dame?”
To this question from the stranger Dom Claude merely answered with a quiet dignity,—
“Whose archdeacon am I?”
“True, my master. Well; will it please you to initiate me? Let me spell with you.”
Claude assumed the majestic and pontifical attitude of a Samuel.
“Old man, it needs more years than still remain to you to undertake the journey through mysterious things. Your head is very grey! None ever leave the cavern without white hairs, but none enter save with dark hair. Science is skilled in furrowing, withering, and wrinkling human faces; it needs not that old age should bring to her faces ready wrinkled. Yet if you long to submit yourself to discipline at your age, and to decipher the dread alphabet of sages, come to me; it is well: I will try what I can do. I will not bid you, you poor old man, go visit the sepulchres in the Pyramids, of which ancient Herodotus speaks, nor the brick tower of Babylon, nor the huge white marble sanctuary of the Indian temple of Eklinga. Neither I nor you have seen the Chaldean edifices constructed after the sacred form of Sikra, or the Temple of Solomon, which is destroyed, or the stone doors of the tomb of the kings of Israel, which are shattered. We will be content with the fragments of the book of Hermes which we have at hand. I will explain to you the statue of Saint Christopher, the symbolism of the sower, and that of the two angels at the door of the Sainte-Chapelle, one of whom has his hand in a vase and the other in a cloud—”
“Here Jacques Coictier, who had been disconcerted by the archdeacon’s spirited replies, recovered himself, and interrupted in the triumphant tone of one wise man setting another right: ”Erras, amice Claudi. The symbol is not the number. You take Orpheus for Hermes.”
“It is you who err,” gravely answered the archdeacon. “Dædalus is the basement; Orpheus is the wall; Hermes is the building itself,—is the whole. Come when you will,” he added, turning to Tourangeau; “I will show you the particles of gold remaining in the bottom of Nicolas Flamel’s crucible, and you may compare them with the gold of Guillaume de Paris. I will teach you the secret virtues of the Greek word peristera. But first of all, you must read in turn the marble letters of the alphabet, the granite pages of the book. We will go from the porch of Bishop Guillaume and of Saint-Jean le Rond to the Sainte-Chapelle, then to the house of Nicolas Flamel in the Rue Marivault, to his tomb, which is in the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents, to his two almshouses in the Rue Montmorency. You shall read the hieroglyphics which cover the four great iron andirons in the porch of the Hospice Saint-Gervais, and those in the Rue de la Fer ronnerie. We will spell over together once more the façades of Saint-Côme, Sainte-Geneviève des Ardents, Saint-Martin, Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie—”
For some time Tourangeau, intelligent though his appearance was, had seemed as if he failed to follow Dom Claude. He now interrupted him with the words,—
“Odzooks! What sort of books can yours be?”
“Here is one of them,” said the archdeacon.
And opening the window of his cell, he pointed to the vast Church of Notre-Dame, which, with its two towers outlined in black against a starry sky, its stone sides and monstrous hip-roof, seemed like some huge double-headed sphinx crouching in the heart of the town.
The archdeacon silently gazed at the gigantic edifice; then with a sigh, stretching his right hand towards the printed book which lay open on the table, and his left hand towards Notre-Dame, with a melancholy glance from book to church, he said, “Alas! the one will kill the other.”
Coictier, who had eagerly approached the book, could not repress the words, “Why! But what is there so terrible about this: ‘Glossa in epistolas D. Pauli. Norimbergæ, Antonius Koburger.
1474.‘ This is nothing new. It is a book by Pierre Lombard, the Master of Maxims. Is it because it is printed?”
“That’s it,” replied Claude, who seemed absorbed in deep meditation, and stood with his forefinger on the folio from the famous presses of Nuremberg. Then he added these mysterious words: “Alas! alas! Small things overcome great ones: the Nile rat kills the crocodile, the swordfish kills the whale, the book will kill the building.”
The convent curfew rang just as Doctor Jacques once more whispered in his comrade’s ear his perpetual refrain: “He is mad.” To which his comrade now made answer, “I believe he is.”
No stranger was allowed to linger in the convent at this hour. The two visitors withdrew. “Master,” said Compere Tourangeau as he took leave of the archdeacon, “I like scholars and great minds, and I hold you in singular esteem. Come tomorrow to the Palace of the Tournelles, and ask for the Abbot of Saint-Martin de Tours.”
The archdeacon returned to his cell in amazement, realizing at last who this Compere Tourangeau really was, and calling to mind this passage from the cartulary of Saint-Martin de Tours:
“Abbas beatti Martini, SCILICET REX FRANCIÆ,
est canonicus de consuetudine et habet parvam præbendam quam habet sanctus Venantius et debet sedere in sede thesaurarii.”bvIt is said that from this time forth the archdeacon held frequent meetings with Louis XI, when his Majesty came to Paris, and that Dom Claude’s credit much eclipsed that of Oliver le Daim and Jacques Coictier, the latter of whom, as was his custom, roundly reproached the king on this score.