“The Alchemist"

At long last, I’m getting around to backfilling my complete Let’s Read of H.P. Lovecraft’s works onto this site. I went through most of them in publication order, with a few exceptions. For those who already followed this readthrough on Sufficient Velocity or Patreon, I’ll also be editing and polishing the early posts up a bit.

1908 was the year Lovecraft finished high school, but what he would later describe as a "nervous breakdown" prevented him from picking up his diploma. Its not clear what caused this breakdown, but Lovecraft's teens had not been pleasant. Four years earlier, his grandfather - himself a frustrated gothic fiction writer who encouraged Lovecraft's literary inclinations - had died, and mismanagement of the estate left the family in relative poverty. Shortly after that death, Lovecraft and his long-widowed mother were forced to move into a small apartment in a less upscale neighborhood of Providence. Lovecraft was something of a prodigy when it came to reading, writing, and memorization, but he struggled in math and other abstract subjects, which proved an obstacle at school. His social life was likely poor. I don't know if he wrote “The Alchemist” before or after this psychotic event, but either way it must have been at around the same time.

Notably, while this story was written in 1908, it wasn't published until eight years later in November of 1916. What I'm about to read was likely edited considerably between these two dates, and possibly rewritten (though Lovecraft's notes suggest that the changes weren't THAT drastic).

The Alchemist is also a story I not only haven't read before, but I hadn't even heard of until the other day when I started researching for this readthrough. I'll be going into this one completely blind.

“High up, crowning the grassy summit of a swelling mound whose sides are wooded near the base with the gnarled trees of the primeval forest, stands the old chateau of my ancestors. For centuries its lofty battlements have frowned down upon the wild and rugged countryside about, serving as a home and stronghold for the proud house whose honoured line is older even than the moss-grown castle walls. These ancient turrets, stained by the storms of generations and crumbling under the slow yet mighty pressure of time, formed in the ages of feudalism one of the most dreaded and formidable fortresses in all France. From its machicolated parapets and mounted battlements Barons, Counts, and even Kings had been defied, yet never had its spacious halls resounded to the footsteps of the invader.”

Well, that was somewhat unexpected. We're in France, talking about a majestic castle who's architecture isn't described as foreboding. Lovecraft was a bit more flexible than he’s often thought of, at least in his early career.

“But since those glorious years all is changed. A poverty but little above the level of dire want, together with a pride of name that forbids its alleviation by the pursuits of commercial life, have prevented the scions of our line from maintaining their estates in pristine splendour; and the falling stones of the walls, the overgrown vegetation in the parks, the dry and dusty moat, the ill-paved courtyards, and toppling towers without, as well as the sagging floors, the worm-eaten wainscots, and the faded tapestries within, all tell a gloomy tale of fallen grandeur. As the ages passed, first one, then another of the four great turrets were left to ruin, until at last but a single tower housed the sadly reduced descendants of the once mighty lords of the estate.”

Ahhh, that's more like it. Worm-eating, decay, obscure technical words that I need to google, this is more familiar. 

I don't want to be one of those hipsters who tries to psychoanalyze everything (Message from 2020 Leila: I retroactively take back this apology. Lovecraft is impossible to not psychoanalyze when you read him. His works are a high-yield laser guided missile targeted at the Death of the Author principle), but the parallels here are pretty damned hard to ignore, especially considering the pride that the Lovecrafts placed on their heritage as descendants of the first wave of New England colonists post-Mayflower. The young lord in this story bemoaning the mismanagement of his family's historic estate...its hard to imagine young Lovecraft NOT seeing himself along these lines.

“It was in one of the vast and gloomy chambers of this remaining tower that I, Antoine, last of the unhappy and accursed Comtes de C——, first saw the light of day, ninety long years ago. Within these walls, and amongst the dark and shadowy forests, the wild ravines and grottoes of the hillside below, were spent the first years of my troubled life. My parents I never knew. My father had been killed at the age of thirty-two, a month before I was born, by the fall of a stone somehow dislodged from one of the deserted parapets of the castle; and my mother having died at my birth, my care and education devolved solely upon one remaining servitor, an old and trusted man of considerable intelligence, whose name I remember as Pierre.”

Yeah, the parallels aren't exactly getting more subtle. At this point I'd put my money on this character being deliberately autobiographical.

“I was an only child, and the lack of companionship which this fact entailed upon me was augmented by the strange care exercised by my aged guardian in excluding me from the society of the peasant children whose abodes were scattered here and there upon the plains that surround the base of the hill. At the time, Pierre said that this restriction was imposed upon me because my noble birth placed me above association with such plebeian company. Now I know that its real object was to keep from my ears the idle tales of the dread curse upon our line, that were nightly told and magnified by the simple tenantry as they conversed in hushed accents in the glow of their cottage hearths.

Thus isolated, and thrown upon my own resources, I spent the hours of my childhood in poring over the ancient tomes that filled the shadow-haunted library of the chateau, and in roaming without aim or purpose through the perpetual dusk of the spectral wood that clothes the side of the hill near its foot. It was perhaps an effect of such surroundings that my mind early acquired a shade of melancholy. Those studies and pursuits which partake of the dark and occult in Nature most strongly claimed my attention.

Of my own race I was permitted to learn singularly little, yet what small knowledge of it I was able to gain, seemed to depress me much. Perhaps it was at first only the manifest reluctance of my old preceptor to discuss with me my paternal ancestry that gave rise to the terror which I ever felt at the mention of my great house; yet as I grew out of childhood, I was able to piece together disconnected fragments of discourse, let slip from the unwilling tongue which had begun to falter in approaching senility, that had a sort of relation to a certain circumstance which I had always deemed strange, but which now became dimly terrible. The circumstance to which I allude is the early age at which all the Comtes of my line had met their end. Whilst I had hitherto considered this but a natural attribute of a family of short-lived men, I afterward pondered long upon these premature deaths, and began to connect them with the wanderings of the old man, who often spoke of a curse which for centuries had prevented the lives of the holders of my title from much exceeding the span of thirty-two years.”

This is turning out to be much more similar to his later works than it seemed at first. We have many of Lovecraft's trademark elements: a noble lineage fallen into disgrace, superstitious peasants who fear and tell dark stories about them, hereditary curses or taints, and the young scion who must confront the eerie mystery of his ancestors. All we're still missing are the mad scientists, uncomfortably racialized pagan cultists, and tentacle monsters.

“Upon my twenty-first birthday, the aged Pierre gave to me a family document which he said had for many generations been handed down from father to son, and continued by each possessor. Its contents were of the most startling nature, and its perusal confirmed the gravest of my apprehensions. At this time, my belief in the supernatural was firm and deep-seated, else I should have dismissed with scorn the incredible narrative unfolded before my eyes.

The paper carried me back to the days of the thirteenth century, when the old castle in which I sat had been a feared and impregnable fortress. It told of a certain ancient man who had once dwelt on our estates, a person of no small accomplishments, though little above the rank of peasant; by name, Michel, usually designated by the surname of Mauvais, the Evil, on account of his sinister reputation. He had studied beyond the custom of his kind, seeking such things as the Philosopher’s Stone, or the Elixir of Eternal Life, and was reputed wise in the terrible secrets of Black Magic and Alchemy. Michel Mauvais had one son, named Charles, a youth as proficient as himself in the hidden arts, and who had therefore been called Le Sorcier, or the Wizard. This pair, shunned by all honest folk, were suspected of the most hideous practices. Old Michel was said to have burnt his wife alive as a sacrifice to the Devil, and the unaccountable disappearances of many small peasant children were laid at the dreaded door of these two. Yet through the dark natures of the father and the son ran one redeeming ray of humanity; the evil old man loved his offspring with fierce intensity, whilst the youth had for his parent a more than filial affection.”

Interesting; plotwise, this is like a million other Lovecraft stories, but the way its written gives it a very different tone. Being burdened with the family secret on your birthday by a loyal servant or mentor is a high fantasy trope, not a horror one. Likewise, the bad guy (at least, I'm assuming Mauvais is the bad guy) is openly described as a wizard from early on in the story; no beating around the bush or purple prosed implications.

I have to wonder what our hero's ancestors were thinking by letting this guy operate in their fiefdom. It sounds like his crimes were well known to the locals, and wizard or not the guy was also a serial killer. Sounds like the Comtes de C-, at least at that time, weren't the most responsible lords.

“One night the castle on the hill was thrown into the wildest confusion by the vanishment of young Godfrey, son to Henri the Comte. A searching party, headed by the frantic father, invaded the cottage of the sorcerers and there came upon old Michel Mauvais, busy over a huge and violently boiling cauldron. Without certain cause, in the ungoverned madness of fury and despair, the Comte laid hands on the aged wizard, and ere he released his murderous hold his victim was no more. Meanwhile joyful servants were proclaiming the finding of young Godfrey in a distant and unused chamber of the great edifice, telling too late that poor Michel had been killed in vain. As the Comte and his associates turned away from the lowly abode of the alchemists, the form of Charles Le Sorcier appeared through the trees. The excited chatter of the menials standing about told him what had occurred, yet he seemed at first unmoved at his father’s fate. Then, slowly advancing to meet the Comte, he pronounced in dull yet terrible accents the curse that ever afterward haunted the house of C——.

“May ne’er a noble of thy murd’rous line
Survive to reach a greater age than thine!”

spake he, when, suddenly leaping backwards into the black wood, he drew from his tunic a phial of colourless liquid which he threw into the face of his father’s slayer as he disappeared behind the inky curtain of the night. The Comte died without utterance, and was buried the next day, but little more than two and thirty years from the hour of his birth. No trace of the assassin could be found, though relentless bands of peasants scoured the neighbouring woods and the meadow-land around the hill.”

The authorities accost and kill a creepy old country sorcerer...and he turns out to have been innocent? Man, Howard, what happened to you after you wrote this that turned you into a self-righteous authoritarian? This is much more nuanced than I'd have ever expected, and even casts some doubt on the earlier account of Mauvais having killed his wife and those children; if he was falsely suspected of this crime, who's to say he isn't also innocent of those others?

I have to wonder about Charles' spell there. What are the odds that he would just happen to have a potion on hand that does such a specifically karmic thing? Did he come up with that rhyme on the spot? If so...well, its better than I could do at such short notice, but the meter doesn't fit at all. And the word choice...he specifies "noble?" What happens if the family loses its holdings and titles? Will the curse be lifted once they stop being noblemen? This whole curse feels unconvincing and cliched.

“Thus time and the want of a reminder dulled the memory of the curse in the minds of the late Comte’s family, so that when Godfrey, innocent cause of the whole tragedy and now bearing the title, was killed by an arrow whilst hunting, at the age of thirty-two, there were no thoughts save those of grief at his demise.”

Supernatural curse, or tragic consequence of hunting with Dick Cheney?

“But when, years afterward, the next young Comte, Robert by name, was found dead in a nearby field from no apparent cause, the peasants told in whispers that their seigneur had but lately passed his thirty-second birthday when surprised by early death. Louis, son to Robert, was found drowned in the moat at the same fateful age, and thus down through the centuries ran the ominous chronicle; Henris, Roberts, Antoines, and Armands snatched from happy and virtuous lives when little below the age of their unfortunate ancestor at his murder.

That I had left at most but eleven years of further existence was made certain to me by the words which I read. My life, previously held at small value, now became dearer to me each day, as I delved deeper and deeper into the mysteries of the hidden world of black magic. Isolated as I was, modern science had produced no impression upon me, and I laboured as in the Middle Ages, as wrapt as had been old Michel and young Charles themselves in the acquisition of daemonological and alchemical learning.”

I'm guessing that doesn't include the human sacrifices. Though of course, as mentioned, those might have been a lie to begin with.

I find myself wondering when exactly this story is set. It seems like it must be earlier than Lovecraft's time, so "modern science" could mean just about anything. Honestly, the way this story is written I have an easier time imagining it set in some fantasy kingdom than in modern-ish France.

The subject matter has definitely gotten more haunting. Being told you have a finite lifespan, and knowing EXACTLY when it will end, god that must be depressing. This is hardly a new idea, it dates back in folklore and mythology for millennia, but something about this story makes it hit harder than usual. Part of it might just be that Antoine is a fairly likable character so far.

“Yet read as I might, in no manner could I account for the strange curse upon my line. In unusually rational moments, I would even go so far as to seek a natural explanation, attributing the early deaths of my ancestors to the sinister Charles Le Sorcier and his heirs; yet having found upon careful inquiry that there were no known descendants of the alchemist, I would fall back to occult studies, and once more endeavour to find a spell that would release my house from its terrible burden. Upon one thing I was absolutely resolved. I should never wed, for since no other branches of my family were in existence, I might thus end the curse with myself.

As I drew near the age of thirty, old Pierre was called to the land beyond. Alone I buried him beneath the stones of the courtyard about which he had loved to wander in life. Thus was I left to ponder on myself as the only human creature within the great fortress, and in my utter solitude my mind began to cease its vain protest against the impending doom, to become almost reconciled to the fate which so many of my ancestors had met. Much of my time was now occupied in the exploration of the ruined and abandoned halls and towers of the old chateau, which in youth fear had caused me to shun, and some of which, old Pierre had once told me, had not been trodden by human foot for over four centuries. Strange and awesome were many of the objects I encountered. Furniture, covered by the dust of ages and crumbling with the rot of long dampness, met my eyes. Cobwebs in a profusion never before seen by me were spun everywhere, and huge bats flapped their bony and uncanny wings on all sides of the otherwise untenanted gloom.

Of my exact age, even down to days and hours, I kept a most careful record, for each movement of the pendulum of the massive clock in the library told off so much more of my doomed existence. At length I approached that time which I had so long viewed with apprehension. Since most of my ancestors had been seized some little while before they reached the exact age of Comte Henri at his end, I was every moment on the watch for the coming of the unknown death. In what strange form the curse should overtake me, I knew not; but I was resolved, at least, that it should not find me a cowardly or a passive victim. With new vigour I applied myself to my examination of the old chateau and its contents.”

Dawww, bats. :3

How big is this castle, for parts of it to have gone completely untouched for four hundred years? Once again, my mental image is more like something from Westeros than any realistically sized castle.

I wonder if he'll think of abdicating his estate like I mentioned before, to make himself a non-noble? It seems like the most obvious loophole in the curse.

So, we're in his final year. Very paranoia inducing. His resolve to meet death on his feet and fighting seems a little unconvincing, though. His prose and his implied lifestyle don't suggest a man of action at all. I wonder if this was intentional on Lovecraft's part, or just a failed attempt at writing a sincerely active and physical character who ended up sounding too much like his shy, bookish creator.

“It was upon one of the longest of all my excursions of discovery in the deserted portion of the castle, less than a week before that fatal hour which I felt must mark the utmost limit of my stay on earth, beyond which I could have not even the slightest hope of continuing to draw breath, that I came upon the culminating event of my whole life. I had spent the better part of the morning in climbing up and down half-ruined staircases in one of the most dilapidated of the ancient turrets. As the afternoon progressed, I sought the lower levels, descending into what appeared to be either a mediaeval place of confinement, or a more recently excavated storehouse for gunpowder. As I slowly traversed the nitre-encrusted passageway at the foot of the last staircase, the paving became very damp, and soon I saw by the light of my flickering torch that a blank, water-stained wall impeded my journey. Turning to retrace my steps, my eye fell upon a small trap-door with a ring, which lay directly beneath my feet. Pausing, I succeeded with difficulty in raising it, whereupon there was revealed a black aperture, exhaling noxious fumes which caused my torch to sputter, and disclosing in the unsteady glare the top of a flight of stone steps. As soon as the torch, which I lowered into the repellent depths, burned freely and steadily, I commenced my descent. The steps were many, and led to a narrow stone-flagged passage which I knew must be far underground. The passage proved of great length, and terminated in a massive oaken door, dripping with the moisture of the place, and stoutly resisting all my attempts to open it. Ceasing after a time my efforts in this direction, I had proceeded back some distance toward the steps, when there suddenly fell to my experience one of the most profound and maddening shocks capable of reception by the human mind. Without warning, I heard the heavy door behind me creak slowly open upon its rusted hinges.My immediate sensations are incapable of analysis. To be confronted in a place as thoroughly deserted as I had deemed the old castle with evidence of the presence of man or spirit, produced in my brain a horror of the most acute description. When at last I turned and faced the seat of the sound, my eyes must have started from their orbits at the sight that they beheld. There in the ancient Gothic doorway stood a human figure. It was that of a man clad in a skull-cap and long mediaeval tunic of dark colour. His long hair and flowing beard were of a terrible and intense black hue, and of incredible profusion. His forehead, high beyond the usual dimensions; his cheeks, deep-sunken and heavily lined with wrinkles; and his hands, long, claw-like, and gnarled, were of such a deathly, marble-like whiteness as I have never elsewhere seen in man. His figure, lean to the proportions of a skeleton, was strangely bent and almost lost within the voluminous folds of his peculiar garment. But strangest of all were his eyes; twin caves of abysmal blackness, profound in expression of understanding, yet inhuman in degree of wickedness. These were now fixed upon me, piercing my soul with their hatred, and rooting me to the spot whereon I stood. At last the figure spoke in a rumbling voice that chilled me through with its dull hollowness and latent malevolence. The language in which the discourse was clothed was that debased form of Latin in use amongst the more learned men of the Middle Ages, and made familiar to me by my prolonged researches into the works of the old alchemists and daemonologists. The apparition spoke of the curse which had hovered over my house, told me of my coming end, dwelt on the wrong perpetrated by my ancestor against old Michel Mauvais, and gloated over the revenge of Charles Le Sorcier. He told how the young Charles had escaped into the night, returning in after years to kill Godfrey the heir with an arrow just as he approached the age which had been his father’s at his assassination; how he had secretly returned to the estate and established himself, unknown, in the even then deserted subterranean chamber whose doorway now framed the hideous narrator; how he had seized Robert, son of Godfrey, in a field, forced poison down his throat, and left him to die at the age of thirty-two, thus maintaining the foul provisions of his vengeful curse. At this point I was left to imagine the solution of the greatest mystery of all, how the curse had been fulfilled since that time when Charles Le Sorcier must in the course of Nature have died, for the man digressed into an account of the deep alchemical studies of the two wizards, father and son, speaking most particularly of the researches of Charles Le Sorcier concerning the elixir which should grant to him who partook of it eternal life and youth.”

...and holy wall-o-text, Batman.

This would be a pretty spine-tingling scene if it were written differently. Its hard to make jump scares work in prose, but when the door creaked shut, I kinda startled. The scene really suffers from all being one endless paragraph; there are some obvious breaks in the action where it should have been divided.

The spookiness faded in the second half of the textwall. Simply summarizing the newcomer's speech sort of took me out of the story, and it’s summarized in too genial and erudite a way for the tension that this scene opened with. This really, really should have been written in dialogue, not only so the attacker gets to be scary in person, but also so we can see if Antoine was just bullshitting when he said he wouldn't meet death passively. Did he get in any words himself? Did he try to put on a brave face? The text leaves me completely in the dark on what the protagonist is actually DOING while the bad guy is making his rant.

Then there was that bizarre word choice in the "that debased form of Latin in use amongst the more learned men of the Middle Ages." In what was was the Latin of medieval scholars "debased?" How does Antoine know the difference anyway, has he learned any version of Latin besides this one? I have no idea what's being described to me here, which, again, takes me out of the story, which is a pity after that excellent intro.

I'm guessing the attacker is the immortal Charles le Sorcier, or a servant or child of his who was given the Lazarus Well to play in. Wonder why they never patented that shit? Seems like it would have been a more rewarding use of their time then sticking around a half-ruined castle and waiting for each generation of Comtes to reach killing age.

“His enthusiasm had seemed for the moment to remove from his terrible eyes the hatred that had at first so haunted them, but suddenly the fiendish glare returned, and with a shocking sound like the hissing of a serpent, the stranger raised a glass phial with the evident intent of ending my life as had Charles Le Sorcier, six hundred years before, ended that of my ancestor. Prompted by some preserving instinct of self-defence, I broke through the spell that had hitherto held me immovable, and flung my now dying torch at the creature who menaced my existence. I heard the phial break harmlessly against the stones of the passage as the tunic of the strange man caught fire and lit the horrid scene with a ghastly radiance. The shriek of fright and impotent malice emitted by the would-be assassin proved too much for my already shaken nerves, and I fell prone upon the slimy floor in a total faint.
”

Good thing evil wizards are so flammable. Otherwise, he might have easily killed you while you were gasping on the floor like a fish after putting his robes out.

“When at last my senses returned, all was frightfully dark, and my mind remembering what had occurred, shrank from the idea of beholding more; yet curiosity overmastered all. Who, I asked myself, was this man of evil, and how came he within the castle walls? Why should he seek to avenge the death of poor Michel Mauvais, and how had the curse been carried on through all the long centuries since the time of Charles Le Sorcier? The dread of years was lifted from my shoulders, for I knew that he whom I had felled was the source of all my danger from the curse; and now that I was free, I burned with the desire to learn more of the sinister thing which had haunted my line for centuries, and made of my own youth one long-continued nightmare. Determined upon further exploration, I felt in my pockets for flint and steel, and lit the unused torch which I had with me. First of all, the new light revealed the distorted and blackened form of the mysterious stranger. The hideous eyes were now closed. Disliking the sight, I turned away and entered the chamber beyond the Gothic door. Here I found what seemed much like an alchemist’s laboratory. In one corner was an immense pile of a shining yellow metal that sparkled gorgeously in the light of the torch. It may have been gold, but I did not pause to examine it, for I was strangely affected by that which I had undergone. At the farther end of the apartment was an opening leading out into one of the many wild ravines of the dark hillside forest. Filled with wonder, yet now realising how the man had obtained access to the chateau, I proceeded to return. I had intended to pass by the remains of the stranger with averted face, but as I approached the body, I seemed to hear emanating from it a faint sound, as though life were not yet wholly extinct. Aghast, I turned to examine the charred and shrivelled figure on the floor. Then all at once the horrible eyes, blacker even than the seared face in which they were set, opened wide with an expression which I was unable to interpret. The cracked lips tried to frame words which I could not well understand. Once I caught the name of Charles Le Sorcier, and again I fancied that the words “years” and “curse” issued from the twisted mouth. Still I was at a loss to gather the purport of his disconnected speech. At my evident ignorance of his meaning, the pitchy eyes once more flashed malevolently at me, until, helpless as I saw my opponent to be, I trembled as I watched him.

Suddenly the wretch, animated with his last burst of strength, raised his hideous head from the damp and sunken pavement. Then, as I remained, paralysed with fear, he found his voice and in his dying breath screamed forth those words which have ever afterward haunted my days and my nights. “Fool,” he shrieked, “can you not guess my secret? Have you no brain whereby you may recognise the will which has through six long centuries fulfilled the dreadful curse upon your house? Have I not told you of the great elixir of eternal life? Know you not how the secret of Alchemy was solved? I tell you, it is I! I! I! that have lived for six hundred years to maintain my revenge, FOR I AM CHARLES LE SORCIER!””

And that, apparently, is the end.

Was this supposed to be some kind of surprise twist? The story is called "The Alchemist." Immortality and the Philosopher's Stone were alluded to repeatedly. And honest to god, if Antoine already believes in curses, why is magical life extension so much harder to swallow? It definitely makes it darker; I can scarcely imagine the kind of sheer, stubborn hate that would keep someone living in hiding for centuries, ostensibly without human companionship, just to murder someone every three decades. But the way its written, it seems like the assassin's identity was meant to be a twist, and it was much too late for that. Then there's this very unconvincing detail of Charles regaining consciousness just long enough to explain everything for no reason...

I think the ending would have been much stronger if Antoine had simply deduced the story himself after killing Charles, and if the closing lines called attention not to the obvious (the dead guy is Charles), but to the sad implications of that, maybe Antoine's eyes lingering on the squalid centuries-old bed and cracked and stained alchemy flasks.

This story explores a lot of Lovecraft's favorite themes: sins of the fathers, an externally triggered loss of humanity, isolation and alienation, crumbling ruins that seek to bury the living as well as the dead, etc. The anticlimactic ending though - both in how strangely easy it was to defeat Charles, and the utter nonsurprise of the final "twist" - drags this story down considerably. I got the feeling that Lovecraft was relying heavily on cliches when he wrote the details of the wizard family, both earlier when Antoine was reading about them and during the final confrontation with Charles, which detracted from the otherwise solid atmosphere and characterization.

Considering Lovecraft was seventeen year old when he wrote this, though, its flaws are much more forgivable.

This story was published in The United Amateur, the magazine whose pages Lovecraft would grace most often until 1923, when he found a new patron in Weird Tales. The next item on the list was another United Amateur submission the next year (1917), and another story that I'd never heard of before starting this project: "A Reminiscence of Doctor Samuel Johnson."