distillations, tried to calcinate gold and silver; but all my
labour was in vain. The weight of the gold I drew out of my furnace was
diminished by one-half since I put it in, and my four hundred crowns were
very soon reduced to two hundred and thirty. I gave twenty of these to my
Italian, in order that he might travel to Milan, where the author of the
receipt resided, and ask him the explanation of some passages which we
thought obscure. I remained at Toulouse all the winter, in the hope of his
return; but I might have remained there till this day if I had waited for
him, for I never saw his face again.

"In the succeeding summer there was a great plague, which forced me to
quit the town. I did not, however, lose sight of my work. I went to
Cahors, where I remained six months, and made the acquaintance of an old
man, who was commonly known to the people as 'the Philosopher;' a name
which, in country places, is often bestowed upon people whose only merit
is, that they are less ignorant than their neighbours. I shewed him my
collection of alchymical receipts, and asked his opinion upon them. He
picked out ten or twelve of them, merely saying that they were better than
the others. When the plague ceased, I returned to Toulouse, and
recommenced my experiments in search of the stone. I worked to such effect
that my four hundred crowns were reduced to one hundred and seventy.

"That I might continue my work on a safer method, I made acquaintance, in
1537, with a certain abbe who resided in the neighbourhood. He was smitten
with the same mania as myself, and told me that one of his friends, who
had followed to Rome in the retinue of the Cardinal d'Armagnac, had sent
him from that city a new receipt which could not fail to transmute iron
and copper, but which would cost two hundred crowns. I provided half this
money, and the abbe the rest; and we began to operate at our joint
expense. As we required spirits of wine for our experiment, I bought a tun
of excellent _vin de Gaillac_. I extracted the spirit, and rectified it
several times. We took a quantity of this, into which we put four marks of
silver and one of gold that had been undergoing the process of calcination
for a month. We put this mixture cleverly into a sort of horn-shaped
vessel, with another to serve as a retort; and placed the whole apparatus
upon our furnace to produce congelation. This experiment lasted a year;
but, not to remain idle, we amused ourselves with