The White Road

by Edmund de Waal

  Secondly, that this boy has run away before, and his mother had to come up from Magdeburg to plead for him to be taken back as an apprentice. Which he had done.

  And thirdly, that there have been some intriguing visitors to Herr Zorn’s apothecary. Kunckel, the great glassmaker, has been a frequent presence and has got to know the boy well. And the mendicant friar called Laskaris from Patmos had rung the bell of Zorn’s in the Molksmarkt to buy honey and pepper – or possibly ‘a healing cream’ – and had spent a great deal of time with the boy, passed on the red powder without charge and has also disappeared.

  Leibniz can get no more out of his witness Herr Zorn, this anxious man, caught between fury and outrage and perplexity about his lost apprentice, wondering how this story is going to reflect on his house of probity, his long years of quiet calm thrown into turmoil.

  I see Laskaris walking steadily, deliberatively, down the road, the traffic of horses, children, pedlars, the ordinary weaving around him, untouched, walking his road from Patmos, the rocky island of revelation and visions to who knows where, leaving behind him stories and confusion.

  iii

  And then the rumours really start. It is late October and the fugitive boy has been seen everywhere.

  For a month there are conflicting stories. It emerges that he fled from Berlin to Wittenberg in Saxony, was arrested after a violent struggle in which some pots were broken, and has been kept closely confined. He is a valuable boy. No one wants to let the boy escape, so he is moved to the fourth floor of the castle and his guard is doubled, he is not allowed to talk to anyone. And his satchel and case, ‘containing test ash, a flask with the tincture, mercury, other utensils, Calendarium magicum’, are taken away and locked in a vault, secured with three locks, each key held by a different man.

  Shady characters appear. A messenger from Berlin offering safe conduct. Others accusing Böttger of being a mere thief, of stealing a valuable ring. Three dark figures are heard in a tavern talking about the goldmaker and a disreputable man in a habit gets into the castle courtyard asking about his whereabouts. Zorn’s son-in-law turns up. Böttger’s stepfather even arrives with a letter saying that his mother is grievously ill, asking for sight of the boy.

  Berlin wants him back, but Augustus is determined to keep this goldmaker for himself and orders that the boy be brought to Dresden and his notebooks and alchemist’s equipment sent to him in Warsaw.

  Sophie, wife of the elector of Hanover, hearing of all this, writes back to her friend Leibniz, ‘I pity the poor goldmaker. More people are fighting over him than fought over the beautiful Helen of Troy.’

  It is more apposite than she can believe. The walls of Dresden and the walls of Troy are now under siege for the hand of impossible, truculent beauty.

  Chapter twenty-four

  there is no gold

  i

  On 25 November, just before dawn, Böttger and his gaoler start the heavily guarded journey to Dresden on the back roads, to avoid any chance of Prussian banditry.

  A courtier rushes with the new suitcase to Warsaw. There are constant letters between the two courts. Augustus himself writes to the boy assuring him of His Protection. And on 26 December 1701, the king and a courtier prepare to make gold, following the instructions of the boy. This does not go well. A dog knocks over the mercury, and though the borax and the alchemical tincture melt there is a sintered mess. No gold.

  Who lights the fire? Who pours in the tincture? Whose dog?

  There are flurries of letters. Could Böttger be more exact about the order in which the experiment unfolds? Could he write down his experiments properly? Well could the king explain, counters the boy, how it is possible to create gold if you are under the duress of imprisonment with no ‘calmness of atmosphere’?

  Even though it is terrible winter weather, the reports say that Böttger ‘spends his whole day without his underclothes, completely bare except for his dressing gown’. And he keeps his hands in a tank of ice-cold water in which there are fish swimming, trying to catch them ‘until his arms were swollen’. He gets so wet that ‘one night when His Serene Highness came to him, he had to convince him to put on dry and different clothes’.

  I think of him trying to catch the fish, hour after hour after hour, the gold slipping and twisting away. You’d lose all feeling in your hands and then in your arms and then you’d lose yourself.

  Böttger is moved and given a small laboratory in Dresden, in a ‘miserable house’. He is by himself, still a prisoner, only given the chance to breathe fresh air from an attic window. He is to fulfil God’s purpose and be kept safe, says Augustus, from those ‘snakes’ who wish him ill.

  The boy demands more and more materials, two barrels with minerals, bottles of nitric acid, a refining furnace, tongs, crucibles, spades, coal, mortar, tin, glass flasks, distilling glasses, ampullae, wood. He needs Testasche, a mixture of wood and bone ash, used to test the value of minerals. He demands more freedom, fresh air, space away from the capricious men who supervise him, he needs reassurance. He needs books. And newspapers and some beer, Freiburg for preference. He writes to his mother asking what people think of him at home, what Zorn thinks.

  His letters are intercepted and censored. Augustus writes that Böttger should proceed with calmness, that he will gain his freedom ‘after he gives all his knowledge’, that he will ‘remain with us until we release him’. And if the king dies, then he will be free. Which the more you think about it, the less generous it becomes.

  So that is that. It is bewildering and it is utterly clear. All you see of the world is a patch of grey sky when you are allowed into the attic. All you know of the world is what you read in the demeanour of the men who guard you, and that changes like the weather from cold to colder. All you hear of the world is the echo of servants from the mansion across the way, and music, sometimes, the tremor of life being lived. And church bells. You are dependent on a king, who is capricious as God.

  Böttger writes to the king, pleadingly, obsessively, manically: ‘Your Majesty has never had such an important creature as me in his hands … so I will now in God’s name do the thing he has divinely appointed me to do.’ He swears an oath:

  Written and signed in the name of God, at free will and sealed, by good and healthy mind. I hereby promise and guarantee Your Majesty, I will never and at no time, without the permission and the most gracious will of Your Majesty, leave the Electorate of Saxony. I also pledge and promise that all my knowledge, which might be useful for Your Royal Majesty and your land, especially my knowledge of the Arcanum, will be given to you in writing, truthfully and uprightly, without any fault or evil intent. And everything else which is of my knowledge and in the field of Chemistry.

  If he goes against the oath, he will suffer ‘the eternal punishment of God and the loss of eternal bliss’. He sends the king his captor an amulet.

  Augustus replies on 25 December 1702, ‘because of the Holy date, I want to submit my best wishes and ask God to give his blessing on Böttger and success to his planned works’. He thanks the alchemist for his gift. ‘I keep it as requested, by my chest.’

  ii

  Böttger needs to make gold but there is no gold.

  How can you trace back your thin trail of an idea to its source, make it breathe, get up, and walk? You sit surrounded by all the piles of materials you have ordered and it is clear that you are totally lost.

  Böttger is at sea in the needs of others. He receives a letter from Kunckel who has been following his ‘young friend’s instructions’ on the philosopher’s stone and is also completely lost; ‘How strong should the first degree of fire be? What am I doing wrong? There is a red powder remaining, which can’t be suffused … my lead was unchanged … I suppose I am doing something wrong.’

  There is a sort of grand dereliction in Kunckel’s hunger, not just for money – though God knows he needs it – but for a return to honour, the completeness of getting something right again, for this abject need for adv
ice from a boy.

  Böttger needs supervision. And finally the court machinery gets something right. Pabst von Ohain, the official in charge of all the mining in Saxony and a metallurgist of great seriousness, interviews Böttger and sends him to the Goldhaus to work under Tschirnhaus.

  iii

  So my mathematician and my alchemist meet. Tschirnhaus is fifty-one, the writer of Medicina mentis and member of the Académie française, interlocutor of Newton and Spinoza, friend of Leibniz, a feted maker of burning glasses, a man in search of porcelain, poorer by the day.

  And Böttger is twenty and scared and may have discovered how to turn lead into gold.

  It is not clear who needs who more.

  Chapter twenty-five

  ‘double, or even triple amount of effort’

  i

  Tschirnhaus watches.

  Böttger runs away, is caught and brought back. He swears eternal fidelity to the king. He lies. He promises gold by this time next month, by Whitsun, ‘by next Peter and Paul Day a sum of 300,000 thalers’.

  He is given chances and rooms near to the Goldhaus that open on to the Zwinger gardens. He is given assistants, books, materials, wine. Böttger receives 4,000 ducats from the king, and four days later another 2,800. He is allowed to play billiards and pray in the chapel and to dine with others. ‘Herr von Tschirnhaus would join us.’ He runs away again. He blames ‘bad people’ who have tricked him, lied to him.

  Tschirnhaus sees a boy who has no experience and who lurches from idea to idea, who has no real sense of empirical method beyond that of an apothecary’s apprentice taught to compound pills for gout, lotions for bee stings. He sees arrogance. Dear God, Böttger is arrogant. I’m lucky, Böttger says to the other workers in the Goldhaus, I’m an orphan, he tells people. I’m not from around here. I have gifts. I know people. He is cool in responses. He blusters. He needs attention. He is solitary. Alchemy is donum Dei, a gift of God. It means he is elect.

  It is frustrating to have this storied youth in the workshops, hear the swell and slap of excitement that follows in his wake, but Tschirnhaus is pragmatic. He has spent twenty years watching work in glass workshops and factories for faience, seen grinders of lenses, men building bridges, compounders and refiners and assayers. He is a mathematician and can see how patterns unfold, how you need time to follow an idea through all its possible permutations. And he senses another kind of quickness in Böttger, sees the runnels that allow his ideas to go there, or there, or there, separate and join up like quicksilver in a dish. The boy is intuitive with materials. He can cut corners.

  Tschirnhaus explains his idea.

  Tschirnhaus’s own trials go on and on, testing and compounding for porcelain. It must be hard, returning day after day to your tests, opening a kiln, opening a crucible to find another sintered, coagulated expensive morass of minerals, another good idea turned to a stony mess. He works very hard. He works those around him very hard: ‘Kohler and I had to stand nearly every day by the large burning glass to test the minerals. There I ruined my eyes, so that I now can perceive very little at a distance’, wrote one of his assistants of these years. Böttger works on other experiments – how to make silver from non-precious ores – alongside his goldmaking. And Tschirnhaus draws Böttger closer into the porcelain tests.

  There are oaths sworn on both sides. And then more oaths. ‘I, Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, hereby swear and promise that all of what Herr Johann Friedrich Böttger passes on to me for His Royal Majesty, I won’t reveal to anyone, and I will keep silent until my grave about all information I receive on the Arcanum.’ More documents are raised, considered, copied and signed and sealed. There is a series of guidelines for how the gold would be distributed from the Arcanum. Money is to go to miners and their widows and towards a Saxon Academy of science.

  I realise that they are all scared about money. Each of them feels poor. They have every right to feel worried too, as money isn’t simple at court. I had imagined that the court functioned with the king paying wages or salaries, but it is more fragile than that, a series of binding ad hoc agreements, throwaway remarks and whimsy backed up by threat. There are ventures that Augustus invests in and ones he owns, but it is not clear how he regards protocols or documents. Sometimes bills pile up, tradesmen complain, courtiers are left with debts for wages, equipment, entertainments. It is possible to make things in the hope that Augustus will buy them, and then wait years to be paid. Augustus doesn’t clear the payment to the jeweller Dinglinger for a particularly sumptuous coffee pot for fifteen years. He is capricious. This means that sometimes money flows, and sometimes not. Huge sums beget huge expectations.

  Tschirnhaus has spent a decade in pursuit of porcelain. He could throw it all over and just go home, but he needs to finish his idea, draw the curves into perfect tension, make a conclusion.

  Augustus has had to pawn his jewels to fund the civil war in Poland.

  Böttger is in chronic debt against the moment Zeus will spill gold in showers and ravish him like Danae.

  ii

  On 5 March 1705, exhilarated, Böttger sits down and writes to the king. ‘I can happily recognise that we expect within eight days to have the sum of two tons of gold if God gives us luck.’ This is the colossal sum of 2 million thalers, enough to win the war, conquer Sweden, build a palace for the latest mistress and the one after that.

  And again there is no gold. Augustus has tried fear and he has tried collegiate empathy. His patience is at an end. Böttger has ‘used three times the amount of time he initially asked for and has now revealed that despite all his studiousness, the processes haven’t worked’.

  The king is returning to Poland. Böttger is to be brought, under guard, the fifteen miles from Dresden to a ‘secret laboratory’ at Albrechtsburg Castle in Meissen, 300 feet above the Elbe.

  iii

  Meissen is hell.

  Hell means fire, of course, and that means the heat that makes you faint, knocks you at the back of your knees, fells you mid-sentence. But it is fumes that define hell. Before you are aware of the roar of the furnaces, the smells, the light and the dark, you get the fumes. The ‘secret laboratory’ is partly below ground, but the windows are almost completely bricked up to prevent onlookers, so that the ventilation is terrible. There are twenty-four kilns of different sizes, ‘running night and day’, and the fumes are appalling. ‘In summertime’, writes Böttger, ‘there is a cruel heat day and night.’ It is terrible ‘to eat, sleep and work in the same room … alongside the unbearable fumes from the coal and other unpleasant substances’. Some are noxious and they disorientate you, your eyes lose focus, you cannot feel your hands and you are nauseous. If you burn coal in a room like this, carbon monoxide creeps unknowingly into your lungs.

  Albrechtsburg Castle, Meissen, 1891

  The light is livid.

  There are too many men for these spaces. Five Berg und Hüttenleuten, miners and smelting workers, are sent from Freiburg to help Böttger with the hard work of mixing and grinding materials and firing the furnaces, there’s a specialist in building and repairing them, and there’s someone who keeps the notes. In these confined rooms, with guards outside the doors and more guards outside the castle, they are to work on the ‘secret task’. Every visitor is recorded.

  They are few. Tschirnhaus comes and Pabst von Ohain, but otherwise there is no one to release the pressure. Which increases week by week. There is an order from the king on 13 April 1706 that ‘all possible studiousness should be applied to speed up the works … it should be done with double, or even triple amount of effort’. Tschirnhaus replies on the workshop’s behalf, that they are at risk of danger to their health. How can they make more effort?

  They are buried. They can hardly breathe. Sleep has disappeared. They are penned like animals in a peasant’s barn. They are in a castle high up above the Elbe with wooded hills unfolding softly in all directions and there is no air.

  And Böttger spirals back into his manic behaviour
.

  He knows he is on the cusp of something. He is recording what happens when he mixes X with Y, Y with Z, and there are piles of rubble as Böttger orders kilns to be pulled down and rebuilt with different sized and shaped chambers for burning wood and coal. He is searching for ‘the inner nature of the fire’.

  He writes to the king and his words are scattered, his sentences ending everywhere:

  With huge joy and burning desire, I would like to have reported to His Majesty the lucky result of my work … with even bigger desperation and consternation of my mind, I have now to experience … that all the effort and hard work, which was connected to the aim of the life, was without result … I see disappearing all desire to live any longer.

  Böttger wears no shoes. He worries those around him. He talks about Daniel and the lions’ den, St Paul, Job punished by Jehovah. His speech is rapid, slow, nowhere.

  iv

  Between 27 and 29 May 1706, Tschirnhaus and Pabst are at the castle for a kiln opening.

  The kiln door is unbricked and the tests drawn and it is clear, immediately, that one test is different. This has been made from a combination of red clay and quartz. It is a simple vessel, a crucible for gold making, and it is unusually hard. It is also intact, it hasn’t cracked in the firing, and it hasn’t cracked when it was plunged into the bucket of cold water at the fire-mouth. It is dense, a red-brown, closer in feel to a stone picked up from a riverbed than to terracotta; stroke it with your fingers and it is cool.

  It is also beautiful. Startlingly beautiful.

  Because materials are queries – can we make glass, grind alabaster to dust and re-form it, create porcelain, melt and fuse gem stones – they need scrutiny. Tschirnhaus and Böttger look at each other. This test is a material that makes you think of cornelians, of alabaster, but it has the most kinship with the Chinese red pottery that the king has bought at great expense from his agents in Amsterdam. These wares don’t feel like clay objects so much as carved sculpture, they are unglazed with finely worked surfaces with relief decoration or engraving of adamantine precision. A tiger sits, bored, on the cover of a teapot. A vine trails languidly round and over becoming a handle for another, there are leaves and tendrils and grapes covering the vessel.