ther according to the
different proportions of their elements. With the aid of an agent which
will displace these proportions one may transmute mercury, for example,
into silver, and lead into gold.

"And this agent is the philosopher's stone: mercury--not the vulgar
mercury, which to the alchemists was but an aborted metallic sperm--but
the philosophers' mercury, called also the green lion, the serpent, the
milk of the Virgin, the pontic water.

"Only the recipe for this mercury, or stone of the sages, has ever been
revealed--and it is this that the philosophers of the Middle Ages, the
Renaissance, all centuries, including our own, have sought so
frantically.

"And in what has it not been sought?" said Durtal, thumbing his notes.
"In arsenic, in ordinary mercury, tin, salts of vitriol, saltpetre and
nitre; in the juices of spurge, poppy, and purslane; in the bellies of
starved toads; in human urine, in the menstrual fluid and the milk of
women."

Now Gilles de Rais must have been completely baffled. Alone at
Tiffauges, without the aid of initiates, he was incapable of making
fruitful experiments. At that time Paris was the centre of the hermetic
science in France. The alchemists gathered under the vaults of Notre
Dame and studied the hieroglyphics which Nicolas Flamel, before he died,
had written on the walls of the charnal Des Innocents and on the portal
of Saint Jacques de la Boucherie, describing cabalistically the
preparation of the famous stone.

The Marshal could not go to Paris because the English soldiers barred
the roads. There was only one thing to do. He wrote to the most
celebrated of the southern transmuters, and had them brought to
Tiffauges at great expense.

"From documents which we posses we can see his supervising the
construction of the athanor, or alchemists' furnace, buying pelicans,
crucibles, and retorts. He turned one of the wings of his chateau into a
laboratory and shut himself up in it with Antonio di Palermo, Francois
Lombard, and 'Jean Petit, goldsmith of Paris,' all of whom busied
themselves night and day with the concoction of the 'great work.'"

They were completely unsuccessful. At the end of their resources, these
hermetists disappeared, and there ensued at Tiffauges an incredible
coming-and-going of adepts and their helpers. They arrived from all
parts of Brittany, Poitou, and Maine, alone or escorted by promoters and
sorcerers. Gilles de Sille and Roger de Bricqueville, cous