Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (27 page)

Though there was no other sign of agitation in the elderly gentleman, anyone who happened to notice him as they left the cathedral might have seen an expression similar to that on the face of the stone Alchemist. But if they searched for the cause of his consternation, they would have seen nothing in particular, and might have assumed that he was one of those melancholy lost souls who haunt the religious sites of Paris. While the few tourists who remained on the square scanned the gallery of the Kings of Judah and Israel, and, guide book at the ready, identified the signs of the Zodiac and the labours of the months on the pillars of the left-hand portal, the gentleman stared almost straight ahead of him at a row of square medallions. The medallions were sheltered by little arches at the feet of the saints and angels. They depicted a series of rather murky scenes in low relief. Compared with the larger statues above them, they were unremarkable, and few people spared them a glance.

The sun was sinking behind the Préfecture de Police, and dark shadows moved across the cadaverous face of the cathedral. The gentleman turned away and walked slowly across the square. A bell in the north tower tolled the hour, and some pigeons clattered away from the black louvres that are like the lowered lashes of the cathedral’s eyes. Without looking back, he turned towards the river and disappeared in the direction of the Right Bank.

As he left the square, a man who had been waiting a short distance away came and occupied the spot where the gentleman had just been standing. The superior quality of his suitcase, his Kodak camera and his travelling cloak–and the interest he aroused in the beggars–marked him out as a wealthy tourist. He placed his suitcase on the ground and set his camera on a tripod. He adjusted the screw, raised the lens almost to the height of the medallions and proceeded to photograph each one in turn. A group of people stopped to watch, and, following the angle of the lens, were struck by all the unsuspected details that suddenly burst into blinding clarity as each flashbulb exploded.

The scenes had no apparent connection with the Bible. In one, a man armed with a shield and a lance was protecting a citadel from a savage-looking sheath of flames protruding from the top-left-hand corner of the frame. Next to it, a man in a long robe was rushing into a sanctuary that already contained a huddled form. On the other side of the central portal known as ‘The Judgment Portal’, a group of well-preserved figures appeared to sympathize in advance with the future effects of time and vandalism on a mournful seated figure with a mutilated, three-fingered hand and flaking flesh.

The medallion that seemed to have been a particular object of scrutiny was such a peculiar composition that it was hard to believe it belonged to the original cathedral; yet there was no sign of any modern restoration. On the far left of the doorway known as ‘The Virgin’s Portal’, it showed a winged figure with its right arm raised in a gesture of aggression. Most of the panel was filled with a cloud that rose from the earth in a funnel or from an oddly shaped gourd. A small creature with a human torso and a reptilian head–perhaps a salamander–was falling headlong out of the cloud. The cloud itself was filled with six-pointed stars as though it contained a universe, though no constellation was recognizable in the arrangement of stars.

After photographing the last of the scenes, the photographer dismantled his tripod and placed the camera in his suitcase. Then he walked across the square in the same direction as the elderly gentleman. The sun was now eclipsed by the buildings on the far side of the square. Its gorgeous radiance gave way to the wan glow of street-lights along the
quai
, and the details of the medallions shrank back into darkness. A few stars glimmered in the gas-lit skies above the Île de la Cité.

T
HE ORIGINS OF
N
OTRE
-D
AME
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
quartier
s–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 ‘
á prix d’or
’ in American dollars.

Given the fantastic nature of certain espionage operations undertaken by the Nazis, and in view of their farcical attempt in 1925 to fill the party coffers with alchemically-produced gold, the base of Paris operations for the Abwehr agent is likely to have been the Hôtel Helvétia at 51, Rue de Montmorency. It was recommended to German tourists, and it occupied the oldest stone building in Paris, which was known as ‘The House of Nicolas Flamel’. A wealthy dealer in manuscripts, Flamel had built the house in 1407 as a hostel for the poor. He himself never lived there, and, despite his later reputation, was never an alchemist. This had not prevented seekers of the philosopher’s stone from demolishing half the building in their futile search for gold. Blinded by greed, they ignored the most basic precept of alchemy–that the scientist himself must be pure of heart. Evidently, they also ignored the inscription on the wall that said,

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.)

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: