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Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions

C >> Charles Mackay >> Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions




Jean De Meung

All classes of men dabbled in the art at this time; the last
mentioned was a Pope, the one of whom we now speak was a poet. Jean de
Meung, the celebrated author of the "Roman de la Rose," was born in
the year 1279 or 1280, and was a great personage at the courts of
Louis X, Philip the Long, Charles IV, and Philip de Valois. His famous
poem of the "Roman de la Rose," which treats of every subject in vogue
at that day, necessarily makes great mention of alchymy. Jean was a
firm believer in the art, and wrote, besides his, "Roman," two shorter
poems, the one entitled, "The Remonstrance of Nature to the wandering
Alchymist," and "The Reply of the Alchymist to Nature." Poetry and
alchymy were his delight, and priests and women were his abomination.
A pleasant story is related of him and the ladies of the court of
Charles IV. He had written the following libellous couplet upon the
fair sex :--

"Toutes etes, serez, ou futes
De fait ou de volonte, putains,
Et qui, tres bien vous chercherait
Toutes putains, vous trouverait."

[These verses are but a coarser expression of the slanderous line
of Pope, that "every woman is at heart a rake."]

This naturally gave great offence; and being perceived one day, in the
King's antechamber, by some ladies who were waiting for an audience,
they resolved to punish him. To the number of ten or twelve, they
armed themselves with canes and rods; and surrounding the
unlucky poet, called upon the gentlemen present to strip him naked,
that they might wreak just vengeance upon him, and lash him through
the streets of the town. Some of the lords present were in no wise
loth, and promised themselves great sport from his punishment. But
Jean de Meung was unmoved by their threats, and stood up calmly in the
midst of them, begging them to hear him first, and then, if not
satisfied, they might do as they liked with him. Silence being
restored, he stood upon a chair, and entered on his defence. He
acknowledged that he was the author of the obnoxious verses, but
denied that they bore reference to all womankind. He only meant to
speak of the vicious and abandoned, whereas those whom he saw around
him, were patterns of virtue, loveliness, and modesty. If, however,
any lady present thought herself aggrieved, he would consent to be
stripped, and she might lash him till her arms were wearied. It is
added, that by this means Jean escaped his flogging, and that the
wrath of the fair ones immediately subsided. The gentlemen present
were, however, of opinion, that if every lady in the room, whose
character corresponded with the verses, had taken him at his word, the
poet would, in all probability, have been beaten to death. All his
life long he evinced a great animosity towards the priesthood, and his
famous poem abounds with passages reflecting upon their avarice,
cruelty, and immorality. At his death he left a large box, filled with
some weighty material, which he bequeathed to the Cordeliers, as a
peace-offering, for the abuse he had lavished upon them. As his
practice of alchymy was well-known, it was thought the box was filled
with gold and silver, and the Cordeliers congratulated each other on
their rich acquisition. When it came to be opened, they found to their
horror that it was filled only with slates, scratched with
hieroglyphic and cabalistic characters. Indignant at the insult, they
determined to refuse him Christian burial, on pretence that he was a
sorcerer. He was, however, honourably buried in Paris, the whole court
attending his funeral.

NICHOLAS FLAMEL.

The story of this alchymist, as handed down by tradition, and
enshrined in the pages of Lenglet du Fresnoy, is not a little
marvellous. He was born at Pontoise of a poor but respectable family,
at the end of the thirteenth, or beginning of the fourteenth, century.
Having no patrimony, he set out for Paris at an early age, to try his
fortune as a public scribe. He had received a good education, was well
skilled in the learned languages, and was an excellent penman. He soon
procured occupation as a letter-writer and copyist, and used to sit at
the corner of the Rue de Marivaux, and practise his calling: but he
hardly made profits enough to keep body and soul together. To mend his
fortunes he tried poetry; but this was a more wretched occupation
still. As a transcriber he had at least gained bread and cheese; but
his rhymes were not worth a crust. He then tried painting with as
little success; and as a last resource, began to search for the
philosopher's stone, and tell fortunes. This was a happier idea; he
soon increased in substance, and had wherewithal to live comfortably.
He, therefore, took unto himself his wife Petronella, and began to
save money; but continued to all outward appearance as poor and
miserable as before. In the course of a few years, he became
desperately addicted to the study of alchymy, and thought of nothing
but the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, and the universal
alkahest. In the year 1257, he bought by chance an old book for two
florins, which soon became the sole study and object of his life. It
was written with a steel instrument upon the bark of trees, and
contained twenty-one, or as he himself always expressed it, three
times seven, leaves. The writing was very elegant and in the Latin
language. Each seventh leaf contained a picture and no writing. On the
first of these was a serpent swallowing rods; on the second, a cross
with a serpent crucified; and on the third, the representation of a
desert, in the midst of which was a fountain with serpents crawling
from side to side. It purported to be written by no less a personage
than "Abraham, patriarch, Jew, prince, philosopher, priest, Levite,
and astrologer;" and invoked curses upon any one who should cast eyes
upon it, without being a sacrificer or a scribe. Nicholas Flamel never
thought it extraordinary that Abraham should have known Latin, and was
convinced that the characters on his book had been traced by the hands
of that great patriarch himself. He was at first afraid to read it,
after he became aware of the curse it contained; but he got over that
difficulty by recollecting that, although he was not a sacrificer, he
had practised as a scribe. As he read he was filled with admiration,
and found that it was a perfect treatise upon the transmutation of
metals. All the process was clearly explained; the vessels, the
retorts, the mixtures, and the proper times and seasons for the
experiment. But as ill-luck would have it, the possession of the
philosopher's stone or prime agent in the work was presupposed. This
was a difficulty which was not to be got over. It was like telling a
starving man how to cook a beefsteak, instead of giving him the money
to buy one. But Nicholas did not despair; and set about studying the
hieroglyphics and allegorical representations with which the book
abounded. He soon convinced himself that it had been one of the sacred
books of the Jews, and that it was taken from the temple of Jerusalem
on its destruction by Titus. The process of reasoning by which he
arrived at this conclusion is not stated.

From some expression in the treatise, he learned that the
allegorical drawings on the fourth and fifth leaves, enshrined the
secret of the philosopher's stone, without which all the fine Latin of
the directions was utterly unavailing. He invited all the alchymists
and learned men of Paris to come and examine them, but they all
departed as wise as they came. Nobody could make anything either of
Nicholas or his pictures; and some even went so far as to say that his
invaluable book was not worth a farthing. This was not to be borne;
and Nicholas resolved to discover the great secret by himself, without
troubling the philosophers. He found on the first page, of the fourth
leaf, the picture of Mercury, attacked by an old man resembling Saturn
or Time. The latter had an hourglass on his head, and in his hand a
scythe, with which he aimed a blow at Mercury's feet. The reverse of
the leaf represented a flower growing on a mountain top, shaken rudely
by the wind, with a blue stalk, red and white blossoms, and leaves of
pure gold. Around it were a great number of dragons and griffins. On
the first page of the fifth leaf was a fine garden, in the midst of
which was a rose tree in full bloom, supported against the trunk of a
gigantic oak. At the foot of this there bubbled up a fountain of
milk-white water, which forming a small stream, flowed through the
garden, and was afterwards lost in the sands. On the second page was a
King, with a sword in his hand, superintending a number of soldiers,
who, in execution of his orders, were killing a great multitude of
young children, spurning the prayers and tears of their mothers, who
tried to save them from destruction. The blood of the children was
carefully collected by another party of soldiers, and put into a large
vessel, in which two allegorical figures of the Sun and Moon were
bathing themselves.

For twenty-one years poor Nicholas wearied himself with the study
of these pictures, but still he could make nothing of them. His wife
Petronella at last persuaded him to find out some learned Rabbi; but
there was no Rabbi in Paris learned enough to be of any service to
him. The Jews met but small encouragement to fix their abode in
France, and all the chiefs of that people were located in Spain. To
Spain accordingly Nicholas Flamel repaired. He left his book in Paris
for fear, perhaps, that he might be robbed of it on the road; and
telling his neighbours that he was going on a pilgrimage to the shrine
of St. James of Compostello, he trudged on foot towards Madrid in
search of a Rabbi. He was absent two years in that country, and made
himself known to a great number of Jews, descendants of those who had
been expelled from France in the reign of Philip Augustus. The
believers in the philosopher's stone give the following account of his
adventures: -- They say that at Leon he made the acquaintance of a
converted Jew, named Cauches, a very learned physician, to whom he
explained the title and the nature of his little book. The Doctor was
transported with joy as soon as he heard it named, and immediately
resolved to accompany Nicholas to Paris, that he might have a sight of
it. The two set out together; the Doctor on the way entertaining his
companion with the history of his book, which, if the genuine book he
thought it to be, from the description he had heard of it, was in the
handwriting of Abraham himself, and had been in the possession of
personages no less distinguished than Moses, Joshua, Solomon, and
Esdras. It contained all the secrets of alchymy and of many other
sciences, and was the most valuable book that had ever existed in this
world. The Doctor was himself no mean adept, and Nicholas profited
greatly by his discourse, as in the garb of poor pilgrims they wended
their way to Paris, convinced of their power to turn every old shovel
in that capital into pure gold. But, unfortunately, when they reached
Orleans, the Doctor was taken dangerously ill. Nicholas watched by his
bedside, and acted the double part of a physician and nurse to him;
but he died after a few days, lamenting with his last breath that he
had not lived long enough to see the precious volume. Nicholas
rendered the last honours to his body; and with a sorrowful heart, and
not one sous in his pocket, proceeded home to his wife Petronella. He
immediately recommenced the study of his pictures; but for two whole
years he was as far from understanding them as ever. At last, in the
third year, a glimmer of light stole over his understanding. He
recalled some expression of his friend, the Doctor, which had hitherto
escaped his memory, and he found that all his previous experiments had
been conducted on a wrong basis. He recommenced them now with renewed
energy, and at the end of the year had the satisfaction to see all his
toils rewarded. On the 13th January 1382, says Lenglet, he made a
projection on mercury, and had some very excellent silver. On the 25th
April following, he converted a large quantity of mercury into gold,
and the great secret was his.

Nicholas was now about eighty years of age, and still a hale and
stout old man. His friends say that, by the simultaneous discovery of
the elixir of life, he found means to keep death at a distance for
another quarter of a century; and that he died in 1415, at the age of
116. In this interval he had made immense quantities of gold, though
to all outward appearance he was as poor as a mouse. At an early
period of his changed fortune, he had, like a worthy man, taken
counsel with his old wife Petronella, as to the best use he could make
of his wealth. Petronella replied, that as unfortunately they had no
children, the best thing he could do, was to build hospitals and endow
churches. Nicholas thought so too, especially when he began to find
that his elixir could not keep off death, and that the grim foe was
making rapid advances upon him. He richly endowed the church of St.
Jacques de la Boucherie, near the Rue de Marivaux, where he had all
his life resided, besides seven others in different parts of the
kingdom. He also endowed fourteen hospitals, and built three chapels.

The fame of his great wealth and his munificent benefactions soon
spread over all the country, and he was visited, among others, by the
celebrated Doctors of that day, Jean Gerson, Jean de Courtecuisse, and
Pierre d'Ailli. They found him in his humble apartment, meanly clad,
and eating porridge out of an earthen vessel; and with regard to his
secret, as impenetrable as all his predecessors in alchymy. His fame
reached the ears of the King, Charles VI, who sent M. de Cramoisi, the
Master of Requests, to find out whether Nicholas had indeed discovered
the philosopher's stone. But M. de Cramoisi took nothing by his visit;
all his attempts to sound the alchymist were unavailing, and he
returned to his royal master no wiser than he came. It was in this
year, 1414, that he lost his faithful Petronella. He did not long
survive her; but died in the following year, and was buried with great
pomp by the grateful priests of St. Jacques de la Boucherie.

The great wealth of Nicholas Flamel is undoubted, as the records
of several churches and hospitals in France can testify. That he
practised alchymy is equally certain, as he left behind several works
upon the subject.

Those who knew him well, and who were incredulous about the
philosopher's stone, give a very satisfactory solution of the secret
of his wealth. They say that he was always a miser and a usurer; that
his journey to Spain was undertaken with very different motives from
those pretended by the alchymists; that, in fact, he went to collect
debts due from Jews in that country to their brethren in Paris, and
that he charged a commission of fully cent. per cent. in consideration
of the difficulty of collecting and the dangers of the road; that when
he possessed thousands, he lived upon almost nothing; and was the
general money-lender, at enormous profits, of all the dissipated young
men at the French court.

Among the works written by Nicholas Flamel on the subject of
alchymy, is "The Philosophic Summary," a poem, reprinted in 1735, as
an appendix to the third volume of the "Roman de la Rose." He also
wrote three treatises upon natural philosophy, and an alchymic
allegory, entitled "Le Desir desire." Specimens of his writing, and a
fac-simile of the drawings in his book of Abraham, may be seen in
Salmon's "Bibliotheque des Philosophes Chimiques." The writer of the
article, "Flamel," in the "Biographie Universelle," says that, for a
hundred years after the death of Flamel, many of the adepts believed
that he was still alive, and that he would live for upwards of six
hundred years. The house he formerly occupied, at the corner of the
Rue de Marivaux, has been often taken by credulous speculators, and
ransacked from top to bottom, in the hopes that gold might be found. A
report was current in Paris, not long previous to the year 1816, that
some lodgers had found in the cellars several jars filled with a
dark-coloured ponderous matter. Upon the strength of the rumour, a
believer in all the wondrous tales told of Nicholas Flamel bought the
house, and nearly pulled it to pieces in ransacking the walls and
wainscotting for hidden gold. He got nothing for his pains, however,
and had a heavy bill to pay to restore his dilapidations.

GEORGE RIPLEY.

While alchymy was thus cultivated on the continent of Europe, it
was not neglected in the isles of Britain. Since the time of Roger
Bacon, it had fascinated the imagination of many ardent men in
England. In the year 1404, an act of parliament was passed, declaring
the making of gold and silver to be felony. Great alarm was felt at
that time lest any alchymist should succeed in his projects, and
perhaps bring ruin upon the state, by furnishing boundless wealth to
some designing tyrant, who would make use of it to enslave his
country. This alarm appears to have soon subsided; for, in the year
1455, King Henry VI, by advice of his council and parliament, granted
four successive patents and commissions to several knights, citizens
of London, chemists, monks, mass-priests, and others, to find out the
philosopher's stone and elixir, "to the great benefit," said the
patent, "of the realm, and the enabling of the King to pay all the
debts of the Crown in real gold and silver." Prinn, in his "Aurum
Reginae," observes, as a note to this passage, that the King's reason
for granting this patent to ecclesiastics was, that they were such
good artists in transubstantiating bread and wine in the Eucharist,
and therefore the more likely to be able to effect the transmutation
of baser metals into better. No gold, of course, was ever made; and,
next year, the King, doubting very much of the practicability of the
thing, took further advice, and appointed a commission of ten learned
men, and persons of eminence, to judge and certify to him whether the
transmutation of metals were a thing practicable or no. It does not
appear whether the commission ever made any report upon the subject.

In the succeeding reign, an alchymist appeared who pretended to
have discovered the secret. This was George Ripley, the canon of
Bridlington, in Yorkshire. He studied for twenty years in the
universities of Italy, and was a great favourite with Pope Innocent
VIII, who made him one of his domestic chaplains, and master of the
ceremonies in his household. Returning to England in 1477, he
dedicated to King Edward IV. his famous work, "The Compound of
Alchymy; or, the Twelve Gates leading to the Discovery of the
Philosopher's Stone." These gates he described to be calcination,
solution, separation, conjunction, putrefaction, congelation,
cibation, sublimation, fermentation, exaltation, multiplication, and
projection! to which he might have added botheration, the most
important process of all. He was very rich, and allowed it to be
believed that he could make gold out of iron. Fuller, in his "Worthies
of England," says that an English gentleman of good credit reported
that, in his travels abroad, he saw a record in the island of Malta,
which declared that Ripley gave yearly to the knights of that island,
and of Rhodes, the enormous sum of one hundred thousand pounds
sterling, to enable them to carry on the war against the Turks. In his
old age, he became an anchorite near Boston, and wrote twenty-five
volumes upon the subject of alchymy, the most important of which is
the "Duodecim Portarum," already mentioned. Before he died, he seems
to have acknowledged that he had misspent his life in this vain study,
and requested that all men, when they met with any of his books, would
burn them, or afford them no credit, as they had been written merely
from his opinion, and not from proof; and that subsequent trial had
made manifest to him that they were false and vain. [Fuller's
"Worthies of England."]

BASIL VALENTINE.

Germany also produced many famous alchymists in the fifteenth
century, the chief of whom are Basil Valentine, Bernard of Treves, and
the Abbot Trithemius. Basil Valentine was born at Mayence, and was
made prior of St. Peter's, at Erfurt, about the year 1414. It was
known, during his life, that he diligently sought the philosopher's
stone, and that he had written some works upon the process of
transmutation. They were thought, for many years, to be lost; but
were, after his death, discovered enclosed in the stone work of one of
the pillars in the Abbey. They were twenty-one in number, and are
fully set forth in the third volume of Lenglet's "History of the
Hermetic Philosophy." The alchymists asserted, that Heaven itself
conspired to bring to light these extraordinary works; and that the
pillar in which they were enclosed was miraculously shattered by a
thunderbolt; and that, as soon as the manuscripts were liberated, the
pillar closed up again of its own accord!

BERNARD of TREVES.

The life of this philosopher is a remarkable instance of talent
and perseverance misapplied. In the search of his chimera nothing
could daunt him. Repeated disappointment never diminished his hopes;
and, from the age of fourteen to that of eighty-five, he was
incessantly employed among the drugs and furnaces of his laboratory,
wasting his life with the view of prolonging it, and reducing himself
to beggary in the hopes of growing rich.

He was born at either Treves or Padua, in the year 1406. His
father is said by some to have been a physician in the latter city;
and by others, to have been Count of the Marches of Treves, and one of
the most wealthy nobles of his country. At all events, whether noble
or physician, he was a rich man, and left his son a magnificent
estate. At the age of fourteen he first became enamoured of the
science of alchymy, and read the Arabian authors in their own
language. He himself has left a most interesting record of his labours
and wanderings, from which the following particulars are chiefly
extracted: -- The first book which fell into his hands, was that of the
Arabian philosopher, Rhazes, from the reading of which he imagined
that he had discovered the means of augmenting gold a hundred fold.
For four years he worked in his laboratory, with the book of Rhazes
continually before him. At the end of that time, he found that he had
spent no less than eight hundred crowns upon his experiment, and had
got nothing but fire and smoke for his pains. He now began to lose
confidence in Rhazes, and turned to the works of Geber. He studied him
assiduously for two years; and, being young, rich, and credulous, was
beset by all the chymists of the town, who kindly assisted him in
spending his money. He did not lose his faith in Geber, or patience
with his hungry assistants, until he had lost two thousand crowns - a
very considerable sum in those days.

Among all the crowd of pretended men of science who surrounded
him, there was but one as enthusiastic and as disinterested as
himself. With this man, who was a monk of the order of St. Francis, he
contracted an intimate friendship, and spent nearly all his time. Some
obscure treatises of Rupecissa and Sacrobosco having fallen into their
hands, they were persuaded, from reading them, that highly rectified
spirits of wine was the universal alkahest, or dissolvent, which would
aid them greatly in the process of transmutation. They rectified the
alcohol thirty times, till they made it so strong as to burst the
vessels which contained it. After they had worked three years, and
spent three hundred crowns in the liquor, they discovered that they
were on the wrong track. They next tried alum and copperas; but the
great secret still escaped them. They afterwards imagined that there
was a marvellous virtue in all excrement, especially the human, and
actually employed more than two years in experimentalizing upon it,
with mercury, salt, and molten lead! Again the adepts flocked around
him from far and near, to aid him with their counsels. He received
them all hospitably, and divided his wealth among them so generously
and unhesitatingly, that they gave him the name of the "good
Trevisan," by which he is still often mentioned in works that treat on
alchymy. For twelve years he led this life, making experiments every
day upon some new substance, and praying to God night and morning that
he might discover the secret of transmutation.

In this interval he lost his friend the monk, and was joined by a
magistrate of the city of Treves, as ardent as himself in the search.
His new acquaintance imagined that the ocean was the mother of gold,
and that sea-salt would change lead or iron into the precious metals.
Bernard resolved to try; and, transporting his laboratory to a house
on the coast of the Baltic, he worked upon salt for more than a year,
melting it, sublimating it, crystalizing it, and occasionally drinking
it, for the sake of other experiments. Still the strange enthusiast
was not wholly discouraged, and his failure in one trial only made him
the more anxious to attempt another.

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