Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

“But that’s dealing hardly with Epidaurus and Chaldea,” returned the physician with a sneering laugh.
“Listen, Messire Jacques. I speak in all good faith. I am not physician to the King, and his Majesty did
not give me a Labyrinth in which to observe the constellations. Nay, be not angry, but listen to what I
say: what truths have you extracted from the study—I will not say of medicine, which is too foolish a
matter—but from astrology? Explain to me the virtues of the vertical boustrophedon, 58 or the treasures
contained in the numeral ziruph, and in those of the numeral zephirod.”
“Will you deny,” said Coictier, “the sympathetic influence of the clavicula, and that it is the key to all
cabalistic science?”
“Errors, Messire Jacques! None of your formulas have anything definite to show, whereas alchemy has
its actual discoveries. Can you contest such results as these, for instance—ice, buried underground for
two thousand years, is converted into rock crystal; lead is the progenitor of all 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 condition of lead to that of red arsenic, from red arsenic to tin, from tin to silver. Are these facts, or
are they not? But to believe in the clavicula, in the mystic significance of the junction of two lines, in the
stars, is as ridiculous as to believe, like the inhabitants of Cathay, that the oriole changes into a mole, and
grains of wheat into crap-like fish.”
“I have studied hermetics,” cried Coictier, “and I affirm——”
The impetuous Archdeacon would not let him finish. “And I—I have studied medicine, astrology, and
hermetics. Here alone is truth” (and as he spoke he took up one of those phials of glass of which mention
has been made), “here alone is light! Hippocrates—a dream;—Urania a dream; Hermes—a phantasm.
Gold is the sun; to make gold is to be God. There is the one and only science. I have sounded medicine
and astrology to their depths—null, I tell you—null and void! The human body—darkness! the
stars—darkness!”
He sank into his chair with a compelling and inspired gesture. Tourangeau observed him in silence;
Coictier forced a disdainful laugh, shrugging his shoulders imperceptibly while he repeated under his
breath, “Madman.”
“Well,” said Tourangeau suddenly, “and the transcendental result—have you achieved it? Have you
succeeded in making gold?”
“If I had,” answered the Archdeacon, dropping his words slowly like a man in a reverie, “the name of
the King of France would be Claude and not Louis.”
Tourangeau bent his brow.
“Pah, what am I saying?” resumed Dom Claude with a disdainful smile. “What would the throne of
France be to me when I could reconstruct the Empire of the East?”
“Well done!” exclaimed Tourangeau.
“Poor ass!” murmured Coictier.
“No,” the Archdeacon went on, as if in answer to his own thoughts, “I am still crawling, still bruising
my face and my Knees against the stones of the subterranean path. Fitful glimpses I catch, but nothing