Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (29 page)

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.

D
ESPITE 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:

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.

22 June 1940

E
VEN IF ANY OF
the soldiers in the escort had been willing to divulge his destination, the howl of the engines would have made conversation impossible. He pictured Berlin in the transparent light of a summer morning shrinking to the size of a balsa-wood model, and the pines of the Grunewald dropping into a bottomless gorge. The plane surged and sank, and he thought how fortunate it was that there had been no time for breakfast. A sudden modulation of the scream suggested that the plane had already levelled out. At that altitude, if there had been a window, he might have recognized the Königsallee in the pattern of streets, and even the exact spot where he had left Mimina in tears. The two SS men had worn insignia that would have revealed their rank if he had known how to interpret such things. He had kissed her briefly, as though embarrassed in front of strangers. He could not remember whether he had only thought it as they parted or had actually uttered the words: ‘In a dictatorship, anything is possible.’

There were no seats in the plane, just wooden benches along the sides, for paratroopers, he supposed. He looked along the line of faces towards the cockpit. He saw the light that came from the pilot’s window, but his view was obstructed by picnic baskets and crates of fruit juice that he had seen being loaded at Staaken airfield. Was there, he wondered, some little-known military tradition of summoning a sculptor to the victory picnic to preserve the moment in stone? A shrill telephone in a silent house at six in the morning was unlikely to announce a glorious commission. Ever since he had been ordered to devote all his future work to Berlin, and to consider himself, with this exception, a free agent, he had grown accustomed to visualizing every sculpture in his studio on a gargantuan scale, with triumphs and catastrophes to match. Speer, the only friend who might have been able to tell him what was going on, was out of town. All he knew was what the voice on the telephone had said: ‘Herr Breker.
Geheime Staatspolizei.
’ (He was sure that they had said
secret
police…) ‘You are ordered to prepare yourself for a short journey. The car will be at your door in an hour.’

The roar of the engines filled his ears and permeated his limbs. He half-slept for what might have been an hour. By now, they must have crossed the border, if there was still a border. The morning would be bright and sunny, and so the waxen light from the cockpit ruled out an easterly or a southerly direction. There was nothing to deduce from the soldiers’ demeanour or equipment, and the few words that punctuated the din told him nothing. He seemed to be invisible to them in his civilian clothes. He knew that this unaccompanied flight was somehow related to events of unimaginable grandeur and consequence. Vast new spaces were to be created for the artistic ‘energies’ that would be unleashed when the aspirations of the people were no longer frustrated by the obscurantism of modern artists. Somewhere below were human herds and hundred-mile-long traffic jams of cars with mattresses tied to the roof as a defence against the Stukas. (He knew this from talking to friends on the telephone rather than from the unreliable radio.) Hundreds of Parisians had queued for the number 39 bus to Vaugirard and taken it all the way to Bordeaux. There had been bonfires in Ministry courtyards, and barges on the Quai des Orfèvres piled high with police archives passed along a human chain. The Louvre had been surreptitiously evacuated: he imagined the
Venus de Milo
taking the sea air in Brittany or cluttering up the damp hallway of a château in the Auvergne.

More than two hours had passed when the plane began to lurch and lumber down a staircase of clouds and wind. The heat had become intolerable, and it was this that upset him most of all: the ominous discomfort that so clearly contradicted the Führer’s promise that his artists would never have to live in garrets or suffer material distress.

Brûly-de-Pesche, Belgium, 21 June 1940, 11.30 a.m.

H
E CALLED IT THE
Wolfsschlucht, which means the Wolf’s Gorge. There were some pleasant walks on the edge of the woods and behind the village whose inhabitants had been removed. It reminded him of the region of Linz in Upper Austria. The makeshift conference room in the parsonage, where maps of north-eastern France and the Low Countries hung on the walls, now smelled of leather and after-shave. The Wolfsschlucht had been his home for almost three weeks. That morning, after what the experts agreed was the most glorious victory of all time, the map of Paris had been unfurled, and, since then, he had talked of nothing else.

He had been looking forward to this for years. He had sent architects and planners to observe and take notes, but his own visit had remained a cherished dream. In the passion of youth, he had pored over street-maps and memorized blueprints of buildings and monuments. He had taught himself more than he could ever have learned from asinine professors who considered a diploma acquired at the age of seventeen to be the highest proof of artistic merit. Every detail had lodged in his memory, and when he came to make the final preparations, he was delighted to find everything still wonderfully fresh and accurate.

He was convinced that he knew Paris better than most of its inhabitants and could probably find his way about without a guide. The Baedeker had nothing to teach him. He himself had specified the composition of the tour group: Giesler, Breker and Speer; his pilot, his driver and his secretary; Frentz the cameraman, Hoffmann the photographer, and the press chief Dietrich; and General Keitel, who had asked to bring along General Bodenschatz, the physician and three adjutants. Speidel the former assistant military attaché would join them at the airport. They would fly in the Condor and take the six-wheeled Benz convertibles. He would lead the tour himself, which would be a useful lesson to them all. He often thought with a shudder of indignation of all those vapid
Reiseführer
and caretakers in blue uniforms who dispensed inane platitudes and cared only about petty restrictions–don’t touch the artefacts, don’t step on the parquet, stay between the ropes…

Six weeks before, he had astonished everyone by saying that he would enter Paris with his artists, and that he would do so in six weeks’ time. It was a source of tremendous pride and satisfaction to him that he was now in a position to pay this unprecedented compliment to what was after all, despite its foolish belligerence and the large numbers of southerners and Jews, a great
Kulturvolk
.

He knew that Parisians still thought of him as a house-painter and a
garçon-coiffeur
, because they could not yet bring themselves to see him as the defender of Paris. Time would change all that. If Churchill had had his way, there would have been fighting on every street-corner, and one of the world’s most beautiful cities would have been wiped off the map simply because a drunken, war-mongering journalist had hatched a plan of inconceivable stupidity from which his government was too cowardly to dissuade him. Baron Haussmann had seen to it–though obviously with something else in mind–that a modern army could enter Paris and occupy key positions within a few hours. Naturally, the two-thousand-year-old city had defects, but any work that had been brought to completion by kings and emperors was valuable as an example: a surgeon could study a cancerous growth and learn something from it, but what could he do with an incinerated corpse?

For the tenth time that morning, Adolf Hitler placed his finger on the map and ran it along the perpendicular avenues. When he looked up at the clock, it was almost time for lunch.

Brûly-de-Pesche, 22 June 1940, 2 p.m.

T
O THE UNDISGUISED
delight of his so-called friend, Arno Breker was visibly flustered. The pilot had pointed his plane at the ground and pulled up just in time to hit the airstrip like a wounded goose landing on the Teupitzsee. A staff car driven by a non-speaking private had taken him into a landscape of forest and moor whose inhabitants had either fled or been expelled. He had seen a meal on a table in a deserted farmhouse. He had heard cattle screaming and seen a cow choking on a bed-sheet. He had known nothing until the car had passed a crossroads with a recently carved fingerpost pointing to Brûly-de-Pesche, and even then had been none the wiser.

The staff car stopped in front of a small church and some wooden sheds marked ‘O.T.’ for Organisation Todt. A group of smiling officers came to greet him. Among them he recognized the architect Hermann Giesler and the man he had called his friend. Albert Speer’s face was a toothy, schoolboy grin.

‘You must have been petrified,’ said Speer. (It was an observation rather than a question.)

Breker suddenly felt the weight of his exhaustion. He looked at Speer and remembered how much he had had to enlarge his forehead and stiffen his mouth. ‘Why didn’t you get someone to tell me? I had to leave Mimina behind. She was in a terrible state…What’s going on?’

Speer paused for effect before replying. ‘You’re in Belgium, and this is command headquarters! You weren’t expecting
that
, were you?’

An orderly came to usher them into the parsonage, and before they had reached the door, Breker saw him standing there in his usual simple uniform, with that curiously balletic torso and the snake-charmer hands. The thought flashed through his mind that Adolf Hitler himself was part of the elaborate joke. He shook Breker’s hand and held it like a father welcoming home a son. The blue eyes that could make every man in a crowd of thirty thousand say, ‘The Führer looked straight at me,’ fastened themselves on Breker’s face. Hitler was still shaking his hand, nodding slowly as though confirming an earlier judgement: Herr Breker would be equal to the task. Then he touched his elbow and took him to one side.

‘I am sorry that this had to be done in such haste. Everything has gone according to plan and exactly as I expected. A new phase is now beginning.’

He spoke like an actor impersonating camaraderie or some complex form of duplicity. ‘Paris has always fascinated me. Now the gates stand open. As you know, it was my intention all along to visit the capital of art with my artists. A triumphal parade might have been arranged, but I did not wish to inflict further pain on the French people after their defeat.’

Breker thought of his friends in Paris and nodded.

‘I must think of the future,’ the Führer went on. ‘Paris is the city by which others are measured. It will inspire us to reconsider our plans for the reconstruction of our major cities. As an old Parisian, you will be able to devise an itinerary that includes all the architectural highpoints of the city.’

Some urgent news was brought to the Führer, and the audience ended. Breker was left to settle in to the guesthouse. He washed and shaved, then went for a short walk in the woods. The thought of seeing Paris again after so many years was thrilling, but he knew that it would be like visiting an old friend in hospital. When he returned from his walk, he was told that since the Führer did not want to be seen touring a captured city with civilians, they would all have to wear a military uniform. Breker chose a garrison cap that belonged to a lieutenant and a trench coat that covered his grey suit. They fitted him quite well but made his body feel small.

He telephoned Mimina, who had been told nothing, then sat at the table in his room and drew up a list of monuments, which he was to submit to the Führer’s staff. At six o’clock, he left the guesthouse in his borrowed clothes and walked over to the mess. It was a strange experience to see the soldiers salute him as he passed. When he entered the mess, dressed up as an officer and walking like a civilian, gales of laughter erupted from the Führer’s table.

Dinner was served by soldiers in white jackets. There was meat for anyone who did not wish to share the Führer’s vegetarian meal, but the only drinks were water and fruit juice. After nightfall, they heard the sound of thunder. Shortly afterwards, they went to bed. The storm had passed, and the only sounds outside were the hum of a generator and the tramp of a guard’s boots.

H
E WAS STILL WAITING
for sleep when an orderly came to wake him at three in the morning. He pulled on his uniform and walked out into the darkness. An hour later, he was back in the air, trying to remember the route he had submitted, and remembering instead his first days in Paris in 1927: his landlady had taken him to the Galeries Barbès to buy a double bed (she had insisted on a double), and at the Bal des Quat’z Arts, a beautiful negress had engaged him in a discussion about Nietzsche. He thought of his little studio at Gentilly, twenty-five minutes by Métro from the cafés of Montparnasse, where vegetable plots and hen-houses were guarded by dogs of mixed race.

The Condor had proper seats with windows. When the light began to colour the fields, he looked down and saw sheep and cattle but no other signs of life. The centipedal lines of refugees with their wheelbarrows and prams had passed away to the south. All around him, he heard cheerful conversations, and wondered why he seemed to be the only one who knew that they were embarked on a dangerous mission.

Paris, Sunday 23 June 1940

5.45
A.M
.–T
HE ENORMOUS CLOUD
of smoke that had filled the streets for several days, and that was said to have rained soot over the south coast of England, had finally drifted off. It had come and gone without explanation, and taken with it all the life of Paris. The city seemed to have been prepared for a grand occasion to which no one was invited. Two guardsmen at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier peered through the low, dawn mist along the Champs-É lysées and saw nothing move except the swastika flags and the grey pigeons.

Six miles across the city, at the far end of the Rue La Fayette, a car appeared from the direction of Le Bourget. It was followed by another, and then by three more, forming a little convoy of five sedans. The leather roofs had been rolled back, and as the cars rumbled across the cobbles, the heads bobbed about in perfect synchrony.