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While, therefore, the alchymist was slowly recovering, the student busied himself in getting the laboratory once more in order. It was strewed with the wrecks of retorts and alembics, with old crucibles, boxes and phials of powders and tinctures, and half-burnt books and manuscripts. As soon as the old man was sufficiently recovered, the studies and experiments were renewed.
Was it a marvel that waking or sleeping he saw only that house, and that room, and that casket chained to the wall; that he saw at one time the four steps rising to the door, and the placid front with its three tiers of windows; at another time, the room itself with its litter of scripts and dark-bound books, and rich furnishings, and phials and jars and strangely shaped alembics?
In this receptacle it is boiled for a considerable time, but owing to the carelessness of those in charge of the vat about a third of it is spilled on the ground. What is left is reduced to a kind of sugary molasses, to which is given the name of "honey." Some of the cane-growers distill with rude alembics a sort of sweet liquor from the cane-juice, which is called caña.
For occupation I read the Neo-Platonists, Thaumaturgy, Demonology and the like, which I had always found a fascinating although futile study. I regretted my bowing acquaintance with modern science, which forbade my setting up a laboratory with alembics and magic crystals wherewith to conduct experiments for the finding of the Elixir Vitae and the Philosopher's Stone. I seldom read the newspapers.
He turned his back on these Doctor Wagners, brooding on their alembics to hatch out some homunculus in bottle: and, running away from French music, he sought to enter literary circles and Parisian society. Like many millions of people in France, Christophe made his first acquaintance with modern French literature through the newspapers.
Whilst this party were away, the two alembics were set to work to distil sea-water, which was effected so successfully that as long as the vessel stayed there, no other water was drunk but that obtained by this process, and all on board were satisfied with it.
He mixed by pouring from an ancient gravy-boat into a handleless pitcher; he poured with a noble dignity, holding his alembics high beneath the powerful Mazda globe, his face hot, his shirt-front a glaring white, the copper sink a scoured red-gold. He tasted the sacred essence. "Now, by golly, if that isn't pretty near one fine old cocktail! Kind of a Bronx, and yet like a Manhattan. Ummmmmm!
It would be unfair to say that anything so complex as the growth of a new literature was wholly due to any single influence, but the intellectual drift of the time seems to have found its impulse in the salons. They were the alembics in which thought was fused and crystallized. They were the schools in which the French mind cultivated its extraordinary clearness and flexibility.
"Oh, come now," cried the student, gazing in turn at his brother and the alembics on the furnace, "everything is preposterous here, both ideas and bottles!" "Jehan, you are on a very slippery downward road. Do you know whither you are going?" "To the wine-shop," said Jehan. "The wine-shop leads to the pillory."
A stove of peculiar fashion, equipped with a powerful bellows, cumbered the hearth; before this on a long table were ranged a profusion of phials and retorts, glass vessels of odd shapes, and earthen pots. Crucibles and alembics stood in the ashes before the stove, and on a sideboard placed under the window were scattered a set of silver scales, a chemist's mask, and a number of similar objects.
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