lead, copper, into noble metals like silver and gold, but
also for a panacea curing all ailments and prolonging life, without
infirmities, beyond the limits formerly assigned to the patriarchs.

"Singular science," ruminated Durtal, raising the fender of his
fireplace and warming his feet, "in spite of the railleries of this
time, which, in the matter of discoveries but exhumes lost things, the
hermetic philosophy was not wholly vain.

"The master of contemporary science, Dumas, recognizes, under the name
of isomery, the theories of the alchemists, and Berthelot declares, 'No
one can affirm _a priori_ that the fabrication of bodies reputed to be
simple is impossible.' Then there have been verified and certified
achievements. Besides Nicolas Flamel, who really seems to have succeeded
in the 'great work,' the chemist Van Helmont, in the eighteenth century,
received from an unknown man a quarter of a grain of philosopher's stone
and with it transformed eight ounces of mercury into gold.

"At the same epoch, Helvetius, who combated the dogma of the spagyrics,
received from another unknown a powder of projection with which he
converted an ingot of lead into gold. Helvetius was not precisely a
charlatan, neither was Spinoza, who verified the experiment, a credulous
simpleton.

"And what is to be thought of that mysterious man Alexander Sethon who,
under the name of the Cosmopolite, went all over Europe, operating
before princes, in public, transforming all metals into gold? This
alchemist, who seems to have had a sincere disdain for riches, as he
never kept the gold which he created, but lived in poverty and prayer,
was imprisoned by Christian II, Elector of Saxony, and endured martyrdom
like a saint. He suffered himself to be beaten with rods and pierced
with pointed stakes, and he refused to give up a secret which he
claimed, like Nicolas Flamel, to have received from God.

"And to think that these researches are being carried on at the present
time! Only, most of the hermetics now deny medical and divine virtues to
the famous stone. They think simply that the grand magisterium is a
ferment, which, thrown into metals in fusion, produces a molecular
transformation similar to that which organic matter undergoes when
fermented with the aid of a leaven.

"Des Hermies, who is well acquainted with the underworld of science,
maintains that more than forty alchemic furnaces are now alight in
France, and that in Hanover and Ba