III
Messer Galeotto had consumed his whole life in the search for the philosopher's stone. Having finished his medical course at Bologna University, he had entered as famulus the service of Count Bernardo Trevisani, renowned as an adept in the occult sciences. Afterwards, for fifteen years, he had sought the transforming mercury in all possible substances; in volatile salts, bismuth, arsenic, human blood, gall, and hair, in animals and plants. In this fashion the six thousand ducats of his patrimony had been dissipated in the smoke which ascended from his chimney. He must needs live on the wealth of others. Money-lenders cast him into prison; he escaped; and for eight years experimented with eggs, destroying some twenty thousand. Next he studied copperas with Maestro Enrico, the papal pronotary, fell ill from the poisonous fumes, lay in bed for fourteen months, and, deserted by every one, came near dying. Having endured all humiliations and persecutions, starvation, beggary, contempt, and even judicial torture, he wandered as an itinerant artificer through France, Spain, the countries of the Empire, Holland, Greece, Persia, Palestine, Northern Africa. At last, old and worn out, but not yet disillusioned, he returned to Lombardy, where Il Moro promised him the office of court alchemist.
At Milan, in the lonely cottage by the Porta Vercellina, he had set up his laboratory. It was a large chamber, in the middle of which was a clumsy stove of fire-proof earth divided into compartments, and fitted with valves, crucibles and bellows. In one corner of the room was a pile of refuse. The working-table was heaped with every sort of complicated apparatus, cubes, rectifiers, receivers, retorts, funnels, mortars, test-tubes, bottles, baths. A pungent smell was given off by poisonous alkalis and acids. Here the seven gods of Olympus, the seven heavenly planets, a whole occult and mystic universe had its counterpart in metal: the sun in gold, the moon in silver, Venus in brass, Mars, iron, Saturn, lead, Jupiter, tin, and Mercury in quicksilver. Here were substances with barbaric names which struck terror into the profane. Here were wolf's milk, the iron of Achilles, anacardines, asterites (clear-shining stones, having in the midst an image of a full moon), androgyna, and rhaponticum, aristolochia or hart-wort (for giving ease in childbirth); and a priceless drop of the blood of a lion which had cost years to obtain, a gem, red as a ruby, which cures all diseases and blesses with eternal youth.
At his table sat the alchemist, meagre, small, wrinkled as an old mushroom, but still alert and tireless. His head supported on his two hands, Messer Galeotto was gazing intently at a retort, in which with low noise and bubbling was burning oil of Venus, a clear green fluid. The candle that burned by the philosopher's side sent an emerald light through the retort on an ancient parchment folio, a work by the Arab chemist Djabira Abdallah.
Hearing voices and footsteps on the stair, Galeotto rose, threw a glance round the laboratory to make sure all was ready, signed to his silent famulus to throw fuel on the furnace, and sallied forth to meet his guests.