01_-_The_Alchemyst

backed onto the great Notre Dame Cathedral made a good and easy living.
Adopting the name Chatte Noire—Black Cat—because of her jet-black hair,
she set herself up in a little booth in sight of the cathedral. Within a matter of
weeks she built a reputation for being genuinely talented. Her clients
changed: no longer were they just the tradespeople and stall holders, now
they were also drawn from the merchants and even the nobility.
Close to where she had her little covered stall sat the scriveners and
copiers, men who made their living writing letters for those who could
neither read nor write. Some of them, like the slender, dark-haired man with
startling pale eyes, occasionally sold books from their tables. And from the
first moment she saw that man, Perenelle Delamere knew that she would
marry him and that they would live a long and happy life together. She just
never realized quite how long.
They were married less than six months after they first met. They’d been
together now for over six hundred years.
Like most educated men of his time, Nicholas Flamel was fascinated
with alchemy—a combination of science and magic. His interest was
sparked because he was occasionally offered alchemical books or charts for
sale or asked to copy some of the rarer works. Unlike many other women of
her time, Perenelle could read and knew several languages—her Greek was
better than her husband’s—and he would often ask her to read to him.
Perenelle quickly became familiar with the ancient systems of magic and
began to practice in small ways, developing her skills, concentrating on how
to channel and focus the energy of her aura.
By the time the Codex came into their possession, Perenelle was a
sorceress, though she had little patience for the mathematics and calculations
of alchemy. However, it was Perenelle who recognized that the book written
in the strange, ever-changing language was not just a history of the world that
had never been, but a collection of lore, of science, of spells and
incantations. She had been poring over the pages one bitter winter’s night,
watching the words crawl on the page, when the letters formed and reformed,
and for a heartbeat she had seen the initial formula for the
philosopher’s stone, and realized instantly that here was the secret to life
eternal.