One Sunday before Easter I went very early through the Jardin de Luxembourg, crossed the street, and passed under the arcades of the Odeon; I stood still before an edition of Balzac in a blue binding, and by chance picked out his novel Séraphita. Why just that one? Perhaps it is an unconscious recollection of reading a criticism of my book, Sylva Sylvarum, in the periodical Initiation, in which I was called “a countryman of Swedenborg.” When I got home I opened the book, which was almost entirely unknown to me, for so many years had passed between my first acquaintance with it and this second reading. It was like a new work to me, and now my mind was prepared for it, I swallowed down the contents of this extraordinary book wholesale. I had never read anything of Swedenborg, for in his own native land and mine he passed for a charlatan, dreamer, and quack. But now I was seized with enthusiastic admiration, as I heard this heavenly giant of the last century speak by the mouth of such a genial French interpreter.
I read now with religious attention, and found on page 16 the 20th of March given as the day on which Swedenborg died. I stopped, considered, and consulted the almanac; it was exactly the 20th of March, and also Palm Sunday. It was then that Swedenborg entered into my life, in which he was to play such a great part as judge and master, and on the anniversary of his death he brought me the palm, whether of the victor or the martyr—who could say?
Séraphita became my gospel, and caused me to enter into such a close connection with the other world, that I felt sick of life, and an irresistible homesickness for heaven seized me. Doubtless, I was being prepared for a higher existence. I despised the earth, the impure earth, its inhabitants and their doings. I felt like a perfectly righteous man, whom the Eternal was testing, and whom the purgatory of this world would soon make fit for deliverance. The courage produced by the consciousness of my confidential relation to the powers was always increased, when I saw my scientific experiments crowned with success. According to my computations and the observations of the metallurgists, I had succeeded in making gold, and I believed I could prove it. I sent my proofs to Rouen to a friendly chemist. He opposed me with counterarguments, and for eight days I could find no flaw in them. Then turning over by chance the Chemistry of my Master Orfila, I learned the secret of my mistake.
This old, forgotten, and despised chemical treatise of 1830 helped me at the critical moment, and became my oracle. My friends Orfila and Swedenborg protected, encouraged, and chastised me. They did not appear to me in dreams or waking visions, but in small daily occurrences showed me that they did not leave me alone in the vicissitudes of my life. The spirits had become naturalistic like the times, which were no longer content with visions.
The following, for instance, cannot be explained by the word, “coincidence.”
I had succeeded in producing spots of gold on paper, and I wished now to do the same on a large scale in the furnace. A couple of hundred experiments failed, and I laid the blowpipe aside in despair. One morning, I walked to the Observatory Avenue, where I often used to admire the group of the four quarters of the world, for the secret reason that the most graceful of the female figures resembled my wife. It stood under the armillary sphere and the sign Pisces, and a pair of sparrows had built their nest behind her back. At the foot of the monument I found two pieces of cardboard cut in an oval shape, one stamped with the number 207, the other with the number 28. These are the signs for the atomic weight of lead, and of silicium. I made a note of the discovery, and when I got home began a series of experiments with lead, leaving silicium for another time. As I was aware, from my knowledge of metallurgy, that lead refined in a furnace, fed with bone-ashes, always produces a recognisable amount of silver, and this silver, a little gold, I drew the conclusion that phosphate of lime, being the chief constituent of bone-ashes, must be an important element in the gold produced from lead.
And, as a matter of fact, molten lead poured upon a deposit of chalk containing phosphate of lime, also assumed on its underside a golden colour. The powers, being unpropitious, did not allow me to finish my experiments. A year later, in Lund, a sculptor, who made experiments in his own potteries, gave me some glaze composed of lead and silicium, by means of which I for the first time produced in the furnace mineralised gold of great beauty. Out of gratitude, I showed him the two pieces of cardboard numbered 207 and 28. Is one to call it “accident” or “coincidence,” this sign of an irrefragable logic?
I repeat that I have never been plagued by visions, but actual objects sometimes seem to me to assume a human shape in a grandiose style. Thus, one day the cushion which my head has been pressing during a midday siesta, looks like a marble head carved in the style of Michaelangelo. One evening when I return home in the company of the “double” of the American empiric doctor, I discover, in the half-shadow of the alcove where my
