Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (28 page)

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.

T
HAT 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:

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?’