“There are more than one hundred and fifty different butterflies in this part of where we live.” He started turning the pages in the book. On each one was another drawing, carefully outlined, not as carefully colored in. As he continued flipping through the books, I noticed a photograph of a woman with Nicky’s coloring, but he didn’t stop to show it to me.
“Whenever I see a new kind—I mean species—I bring it home to show Papa. We study it, and after I draw it, we let it go.” His face became very solemn. “Some people kill them and collect them. We always let them go. I ask them all to fly up to heaven and visit Maman. And they always say they will. She loves them, too.”
My heart seized up. There was something about this little boy that touched me profoundly.
Gaspard stood. “I think we should get you back to the chateau, Mademoiselle Duplessi. It’s almost time for lunch, and Madame doesn’t like having to send out search parties for her guests.”
“Please, call me Delphine.”
Gaspard nodded.
I said good-bye to Nicky and thanked him for showing me his book of butterflies.
“If you’d like, you can come hunting with me tomorrow?”
“That sounds wonderful. I have to work tomorrow, but as soon as I’m free, I’d love to join you.”
“Mademoiselle is an artist. She might be able to show you how to color inside the lines,” Gaspard said.
Nicky pouted.
“I think coloring outside the lines is much more fun.” I winked at him, and he winked back.
With the dog at his heels, Gaspard led me around to the other side of the cottage, through a gate, and back into the woods.
We talked about his son for most of the way. And then about the woods and the fact that, like Nicky, he had been studying butterflies since he was a boy.
“How many have you seen?”
“I think by now I’ve seen them all.”
Something about how he said it made it sound as if he’d lived longer than what I guessed was thirty or so years. He spoke like an old, old man.
After about ten minutes, we came to a second gate, which he unlocked. On the other side, we walked down a small hill and from there took a path that led to a cobblestone road. I couldn’t believe I’d walked so far that morning.
“Is the route through the forest much shorter?” I asked him.
“No, it’s actually longer.” Gaspard pointed to the left. There, not far off—possibly another ten-minute walk—was the castle. “I’ll leave you here. It’ll be easy now. In the forest, it’s almost impossible to see through the ceiling of trees and find the chateau’s towers. But anywhere else you go, just look up and search for them. That’s how to orient yourself.”
“Thank you. I really had no idea where I was. I’m not sure I could ever find my way here again, even if I wanted to.”
Gaspard’s expression surprised me. I thought he’d enjoyed my visit, that he’d been happy I’d met Nicky, but the look in his eyes suggested that it would be better if I didn’t try.
Chapter 29
Back at the chateau, I was just in time for the abundant midday meal that had been prepared for us—country bread, paté, and a robust ni?oise salad made the same way we served it at home, with a variety of crisp vegetables including raw red peppers and artichoke hearts, along with tuna, olives, and tart vinaigrette.
I had questions about the book I’d be searching for, and Madame was only too happy to talk about her obsession.
“Flamel was a scrivener and manuscript dealer. Not well off. Not very successful. And then, around 1365 or so, he purchased a mysterious book written in what appeared to be Hebrew. He made it his life’s work to learn more about it. Finally, he traveled to Spain in 1378, where there were more Jews than in France, in the hopes that he’d find someone to translate it.”
She stopped to pour more of the local rosé into her glass and then Sebastian’s. I had barely touched mine.
“Flamel’s mission failed. But on the road back from Santiago de Compostela, he met a sage, a converso who recognized the book as a copy of the Book of Abraham and aided him in the translation. Everything changed for Flamel after that.” She took another sip of wine. “Do either of you know very much about alchemy?”
Sebastian and I both said we did not.
“I have been a student most of my adult life. The principles come from ancient Egyptians, who learned it from Arabs. It’s an art that involves sacred geometry, magick, chemistry, philosophy, hermeticism, and cosmology. The true goal of alchemy is not to create gold—that’s just a by-product of the methodology. The real goal is to create the Elixir of Life in order to delay the aging process and even perhaps lead to immortality. Alchemists, you see, were simply scientists and seekers of knowledge. But in the Middle Ages, the church forbade their experiments and labeled them heretics, forcing the alchemists underground. And so their research became known as the black art.”
“Why would experiments with metals for the purpose of a longer life be heretical?” I asked.
“Because the secret to immortality is bound up in the Great Work. Through the ages, we’ve come to believe that turning base metal into gold was the formula for the elixir.” She flipped her hand as if making that look easy. “Flamel accomplished that in the early 1380s, when he first created silver and then gold.”
“That’s astonishing,” I said.
She picked up the basket of bread, took a second slice, and passed it to me. I had been listening so intently to her story that I hadn’t touched my food. I’d read about Flamel but had no in-depth knowledge of him. What she was recounting was tickling my memory, but I wasn’t sure why.
“Yes, but more astonishing was the portal his achievement opened. The threshold one crossed into spiritual enlightenment, where slowing down or stopping the aging process is merely one aspect . . .” Madame’s eyes glittered. Her voice lowered to a seductive whisper. She wet her lips. “The Great Work is a state of being. A life force. An act of secret initiation and physical revitalization. Its symbol is a hermaphrodite. You know it?”
Sebastian and I both said we did.
“Then you know it is a male who is a female, a female who is a male. The perfect symbol for sexual union and the moment of orgasm.”
She looked at us to see if she had gone too far, if either of us was shocked or uncomfortable. Sebastian didn’t seem to be, and I wasn’t. Although it certainly wasn’t the norm to talk of orgasms at the lunch table in 1925, how could we, descendants of France’s most famous courtesans, have possibly been shocked?
“It is in that moment of coming together that real magick occurs. That the Great Work is achieved. When male and female become part of each other and can reach a mystical awareness of both themselves and the universe and in that moment know the secrets to achieve immortality. Very few can reach that pinnacle, but with the help of the book, on January 17, 1382, Nicolas Flamel and his wife, Perenelle, did.”