I nodded. “Of course, it was mentioned frequently in the books my father studied.”
“It has always been said alchemists coveted it for its promise of turning metal to gold, but that wasn’t their true objective. No, it wasn’t riches they were after. The gold created from those metals was claimed to be the major component of the beverage that bestowed immortality to those who drank it. Some writings suggest the philosopher’s stone itself was the main ingredient of the drink. But a fifteenth-century master, Bernard Trevisan, claimed he knew the recipe for this miraculous liqueur and that submerging the stone in mercurial water was the key to what Cagliostro called the Elixir of Life.
“The ancients claimed this rare fluid cured diseases, could repair skin and organs, and kept one looking young forever. If a dead body was embalmed with the ambrosia, it was said, it would remain uncorrupted forever. Even the Bible references the potion and warns against men partaking of it.”
He paused, fascinated with his own tale.
“And how does all this connect to my family?” I asked.
“Have you really never heard of ‘The Witch of Rue Dragon’?” Dujols’s tone was incredulous.
Shivers ran up my arms and down my back. I’d never consciously heard references to a witch, but at the same time I was not surprised. Had the phrase been whispered in the shadows when I was young and the adults thought I wasn’t listening? Or perhaps I’d been sleeping and they had spoken of her as they left my nursery, and the memory had left an impression on me like a footprint in the snow.
“The witch, was she called La Lune?” I guessed.
Dujols nodded. “Yes, yes, the sixteenth-century courtesan who learned alchemy in Prague and brought her secrets back to Paris with her. Brought them to her home, which sat on the property where your grandmother’s house now sits. It was said La Lune lived to be over one hundred and fifty years old but remained young and beautiful and as fresh as a rose because she had discovered what so many before her had been searching for.”
“The elixir?” I asked.
Dujols nodded.
“What happened to the formula?” Julien asked.
“We know part of it, but it means nothing to us. ‘Make of the blood, a stone. Make of a stone, a powder. Make of a powder, life everlasting.’ But how to use that? How to interpret it? Lost to us. Forever lost to us,” Dujols said.
I was having a déjà vu. Or had I heard that phrase before? Make of the blood, a stone. Make of a stone, a powder. Make of a powder, life everlasting. But where? In what context?
Dujols was still talking: “All we have is a legend that La Lune, fearing she would one day be struck by old age and become forgetful, hid the recipe somewhere safe. And when she did become old finally, and needed it, she couldn’t remember where she’d hid it.” He shook his head. “Perhaps, Mademoiselle Verlaine, you will be the one to unearth it somewhere in your grandmother’s fine house. If you do, I am at your service to aid you in creating La Lune’s magick.”
After we left the shop, as we walked to the corner to search for a carriage, I asked Julien if he found the occult distasteful. I’d sensed his impatience when Dujols was talking about the Elixir of Life.
“I don’t want to insult the memory of your father, but yes, a bit. I think it’s a waste of time,” Julien said.
“Oh, he wouldn’t feel insulted. My father loved debate. Especially on topics that captivated him. And secret and forbidden knowledge did. The Kabala explains the relationship between the eternal and mysterious. At its heart is the human effort to define the nature of life and the universe. He wanted to understand that—the ‘un-understandable,’ he called it.”
“It does sound a bit as if your father was a mystic, you know.”
I laughed. “Are you picturing a man with a long beard, wearing robes and disappearing into trances? No, he was a banker and art collector who also happened to be interested in arcane knowledge.”
Julien managed to hail a carriage, and our conversation halted while we climbed in and he gave the driver the address of the Crédit Municipal.
“So was he a mystic?” Julien asked.
I laughed again. “He was curious. And I with him. He hosted symposiums at our house attended by many of the leading thinkers, writers, mathematicians, art historians, and philosophers, even some who were zealots.”
“All that searching for the un-understandable?”
“I think at its heart was the recurring dream my father suffered. He’d always been curious as to its meaning, but after I began to have the same dream, he became determined to decipher it.”
“You shared the same dream?”
I nodded.
“How curious. What was his dream, do you mind telling me?”
“Not at all. It began with him sitting in a tree on some kind of a platform and looking down at the ground at a barren rosebush. As he watched, the bush blossomed, and in the center of each flower was a woman’s face—the same woman every time—but no one he’d ever met.
“In the dream she spoke to him, giving him instructions, but he could never hear her from his perch. He’d climb down to try and catch her whisper, except the closer he got, the fainter her voice became. The woman, he told me, was very beautiful, with long reddish-brown hair and eyes almost the same fiery color. That she looked something like me did not escape him in the dream. When he was close enough that he could finally look into her eyes, he saw a reflection in her pupils. A full scene of that same woman drawing stars on the floor of a darkened dirty cell, weeping as she worked.
“My father was never able to decipher what she said or understand what she was doing other than to know she was trying to pass on some secret information to him in that drawing. He knew some of the words, he said, but they made no sense.
“The more he studied, he told me, the more he became convinced she was doing what he said the Kabalists called tikkun olam. I think he said it meant ‘repairing the world,’ and that Jews believed it was every human being’s duty.”
“What an extraordinary dream,” Julien said. “No wonder it preoccupied him. And no wonder he told you about it.”
“He didn’t. When I was about ten, I drew a picture of the bush, full of roses, each with a face in its center. When he asked me about it, I told him I’d seen it in my dream.”
“How many times have you had the dream?”
“About half a dozen. My father had it more often and was determined to understand what it meant, and although he never did, it led him into some very dark and dangerous places, as well as some exalted ones.”
I looked out the window at the ordinary street scene. Talking about my father had made me sorrowful, and I was glad that we had reached our destination and that this conversation was at its close.
“Could you hear what the woman in your dreams said?” Julien asked.
“I don’t really know. When I try to remember, all that happens is that in my mind I see white light mixed with the colors of the rainbow.”
“You try to remember words and see colors?”
“Yes, I know it makes no sense.”
“Dujols says there are so many mysteries that we have yet to explore. I suppose he’s right.”
“Didn’t you think he was right before?”
“In theory, yes, but it’s what I’ve seen since you came to the house. How did you open the door to the artist’s studio?”
“I’m sure I don’t know.”
“Are you familiar with Debussy, the musician?” Julien asked.
I shook my head.
“He and Erik Satie are creating music that fits the world you’re talking about. They believe that there are symbols in sounds as well. They are often at Dujols’s.”
We had arrived at rue des Francs-Bourgeois. The carriage stopped in front of an imposing building where a long line suggested pawning was quite popular in Paris.