The Elixir of Immortality

by Gabi Gleichmann

  Once the clapping had died away, a man stood up to ask a question—the same individual she had noticed earlier. He had continued to stare at her throughout her talk, unobtrusive but intent. He asked her to name the quality she found most important for an author.

  She replied, “Having one eye for those things all humans share, and another for their differences.”

  Later that evening the princess introduced Chiara to her questioner, Amschel Rothschild, who had come from Frankfurt with the express purpose of meeting the authoress. He turned out to be an excellent conversationalist, quick-witted and well-educated, and his graceful remarks were delivered with a warmth and sensuality that was unapologetic but not in the least insistent. There was something about his general aspect that Chiara found remarkably attractive, an evident nobility of spirit that impressed her.

  She was somewhat taken aback when he interrupted himself in the middle of a thought to ask whether they might meet again. She came close to blushing. The wine served that afternoon may have influenced her, for despite her natural reserve toward men, she agreed.

  THE NEXT MORNING Chiara and Amschel Rothschild took a stroll in the city’s English Garden. They discussed writing and death, love and loneliness, not in the manner of casual acquaintances but with a warmth and frankness that surprised them both. He made it perfectly clear that he was married and that he considered that fact to be no hindrance to their developing a friendship based on mutual respect. Chiara found that he was an honorable man with original views and an open enjoyment of life. She agreed to correspond with him.

  How often they met, how things played out between them, when exactly Chiara surrendered to Amschel after his fiery courtship of her, how he expressed his gratitude for that gift—my great-uncle could tell us nothing of any of that. Or perhaps, because Sasha and I were young and tender, he preferred not to share the details of their love affair. In any case, he told us that Amschel soon asked Chiara to move to Frankfurt, his home city, even though she was nothing like the archetypal petite amie cherished by bourgeois gentlemen of the time.

  Eventually, but only after three years and a hundred and fifty letters, she agreed. During that period she occasionally asked herself what she saw in him. The answer was always the same: Amschel made everything more intense and her life became more vivid. He communicated to her a feeling of hope, of growth, of new possibility. Wherever he was, she knew, her future was destined to be.

  A CERTAIN DELICACY was required to explain to her sons, Gérard and Guido, her plans to move. Chiara presented the project as an exciting departure from their humdrum lives, and she dwelt at length upon the beautiful home that awaited them. Guido’s interest was immediately piqued when she told him of the young physicist Johann Friedrich Benzenberg and the astronomical observatory he had founded in Frankfurt with the support of Rothschild’s bank. But Gérard, who was older, regarded her with suspicion. He remained extremely doubtful about the project—until she told him about the excellent schools available to him, for Amschel in his generosity had pledged to pay his tuition. She had foreseen that such a promise would entice Gérard, because his heart was set upon studying the law and she did not have the money to send the boys to the best schools.

  CHIARA HAD AN UNEASY FEELING that Amschel might be a burden to his wife, Angela, instead of a strong supporting arm, for he had never brought her to the places that Chiara and Amschel visited. But Chiara had never met Angela and had no idea what she desired. Perhaps Angela felt her needs had already been met.

  Amschel assured Chiara that his wife—in fact, she was his cousin and theirs was an arranged marriage, not a love match—had never objected at all to the proposal that Chiara and the boys share their spacious residence instead of living in rented accommodations. He asserted that Angela in fact welcomed the idea, for such an intimate arrangement would allow him and his lady friend to celebrate their love in freedom. Even so, Chiara felt a certain disquiet. Her misgivings turned out to be unwarranted.

  ANGELA WAS A FEW YEARS older than Amschel. She had the habit unusual in sophisticated circles of chattering gaily and speaking completely without inhibition to strangers. There was a refreshing lightheartedness about her that touched even the hardest heart. She was a great adorer of children; for years she thought of children every moment of the day, but she proved unable to have any of her own. Perhaps that was why she was so eager to have the boys in the house; and the fact that there were two of them made her twice as happy. She spent every afternoon tutoring them in German. Within a couple of weeks she was lavishing motherly love upon Gérard and Guido as if they were her own sons.

  Angela was grateful that Chiara and the boys had come into her life. She knew all too well how lonely that vast residence could be. That was why she even consented to the proposal that she, her husband, and Chiara, whom she treated as a sister instead of as a rival, should sleep together in the same bed.

  MY GREAT-UNCLE once told us that Chiara, Amschel, and Angela were united by the bands of love not only in life but also in death. They were laid to rest in the same grave.

  THE ROTHSCHILD RESIDENCE was enormous. It had salons and bedrooms too many to count and plenty of nooks and crannies—furnished with a taste that Chiara found entirely too formal. She deeply disliked the huge oil paintings with heavy gold frames hung throughout the house. They depicted the most impressive scenery the Alps had to offer: mighty mountains, snow-covered peaks, leafy valleys, and dramatic swirling clouds pierced by the rays of the sun. One could almost hear Swiss cattle mooing from the canvases. Chiara found those paintings completely tasteless and lacking in significance; they depressed her. No matter how hard she tried, she could not imagine how Amschel, a soul in perpetual quest of originality, could have purchased these epic scenes and hung them in his residence. He eventually explained that they were an inheritance from his father, the founder of the family bank, who all his life had sought to distance himself from everything that might remind him of his origins: the narrow Judengasse in the ghetto where Frankfurt’s Jews were locked away from sunset until sunrise, as well as on every Sunday and every Christian holiday.

  NO ONE AROUND CHIARA could fail to see her dislike of Frankfurt. With pursed lips she often delivered sharp remarks disparaging her new city of residence. She was constantly finding something or other to complain about: the fact that all Germans were stiff and formal and made her feel she had no home anywhere; the city’s ugliness and dismal appearance; and especially the prevailing chill. She always felt cold, for winter never seemed to end. The sun did not warm the place up until July, rather than by April as it did in Rome, that city the springtime bathed in hot, glittering brilliance.

  She was always talking about her native city. The people were warmer, the streets were more beautiful, and the air was healthier. “Life in Rome is better than anywhere else,” she insisted in a tone that brooked no opposition, so no one dared to disagree. Still, many people laughed behind her back when she claimed in all seriousness that if one threw a straw into Frankfurt’s Main River it would sink like a stone, while even objects of lead would float in the blue waters of the Tiber.

  CHIARA DID NOT TELL anyone why she had never returned to Rome after marrying Nicolas Spinoza in 1788 and moving to Paris. It was a mystery to everyone, especially given that she often expressed a deep longing to see her two sisters.

  HOTEL QUELLENHOF in Bad Ragaz. Napoleon’s cannons were thundering in Prussia, Austria, and Poland, but everything was quiet in the province of Graubünden in eastern Switzerland. The war seemed far away. Amschel Rothschild had long ago established the tradition of spending Christmas in that little spa town, taking his rheumatism treatments far from the world’s tumult and putting himself in the hands of experienced doctors who made him limber once again. In December 1808, he brought Chiara and her sons with him for the first time.

  In the hotel lobby Amschel ran into an acquaintance from Berlin, Anton von Wiedersack, a dried-up little fellow who concealed the haughty covetousness of
a Prussian noble behind dark glasses and an impeccable cravat. The gentlemen greeted each other with pleasantries and exchanged the usual remarks about the difficult times they were living in. They decided to meet again with their families for afternoon tea.

  The air was warm and fragrant in the elegant salon. The guests who sat chatting at other tables were well-dressed and bored, both of which were qualities essential to the art of socializing with the wealthy in that tradition-laden atmosphere.

  Amschel introduced Chiara and her sons to his acquaintance. Herr von Wiedersack rose and greeted them politely, but he became notably less cordial when he heard Rothschild’s female friend and her boys speaking rudimentary German with heavy French accents. This immediately marked them as of suspect origin. Frau von Wiedersack moved restlessly in her chair as she greeted this foreign woman who had popped up from nowhere, and she commented without concealing her displeasure, “We had hoped to meet your wife here, my dear banker.” Her daughter, Désirée, hid a yawn.

  Amschel responded with a small smile to this remark that in other circumstances could have been taken as an affront. Chiara seated herself and examined the von Wiedersack couple, puzzled that their attitude to her had suddenly turned frosty. For a few moments there was a painful silence.

  Obsequious waiters wearing tuxedos and displaying perfect posture served diminutive golden-brown petits fours with their tea, lightening the mood somewhat.

  Herr von Wiedersack initiated conversation by vigorously condemning Napoleon, calling him a mere commoner who had the outrageous ambition of ruling all of Europe. The little man seemed completely to have forgotten his childhood in the backstreets of Ajaccio. “Bonaparte est merde,” he said to stress his exasperation. This appeared to have exhausted his supply of French. “His victories are as ephemeral as soap bubbles, and he himself is more insubstantial than the rainbows reflected in them!” Von Wiedersack laughed in self-congratulation. He had absolutely no doubt that the French army’s victory march across Europe would soon be checked for good. He then expressed his admiration for the Prussian soldier, that strong and healthy fellow whose only thought was for the welfare of his people. “You have no idea what splendid soldiers we have,” he said emphatically, turning toward Chiara. “You have never seen them march along Unter den Linden.” This was the prologue to a lecture on the greatness of Prussia. He concluded by expressing his thanks to Amschel for loaning funds to King Frederick Wilhelm III to build up the army. “Believe me, Herr Rothschild, everyone in Berlin is pleased that you have managed to acquire a huge fortune during the Napoleonic Wars and have so generously loaned it to us.”

  Chiara shared von Wiedersack’s opinion of Napoleon, of course, but she found his words proof of his simplicity. His declarations were laden with a narrow-minded nationalism that made her extremely uncomfortable. She saw that his rant against the emperor was in fact directed more against her than against the Corsican. Von Wiedersack obviously assumed that a woman from an enemy land was a spy. She had a comment on the tip of her tongue, something about how she was sorry for all of the young men about to die in the war, but she considered it more prudent to remain silent, because she was not certain that she would be able to carry on such a discussion in German. She lowered her eyes and sank deep into her chair.

  Amschel noted at once that the smile on her face had stiffened into a mask. He quickly changed the subject and spoke of the hotel’s beautifully decorated salons.

  The pompous von Wiedersack responded that the opulent hotel must have appeared just the same in the days when Paracelsus was employed by the spa there as a physician and prescribed the consumption of copious amounts of its mineral-rich water to those who journeyed there to seek relief from their pains.

  Amschel listened to the Prussian nobleman with polite interest and to Frau von Wiedersack with astonishment. Chiara on the other hand found it difficult to refrain from exposing von Wiedersack’s ignorance. She was tempted to inform him that Paracelsus had practiced in Bad Ragaz in 1535, two hundred years before the hotel was built. But she resisted. The silent submission of intelligence to stupidity, she told herself, is the price one must pay to be accepted in sophisticated company.

  The young people at the table—Gérard, Guido, and Désirée—said nothing. They had been taught not to speak in the company of their elders unless addressed directly.

  Guido sat next to Désirée. He looked furtively at the unexpectedly gorgeous sixteen-year-old creature. She had long blond hair and temptingly sensual lips, and a melancholy cast to her eyes gave her face a mysterious air. Her waist was narrow and her bosom—soon to become one of the chief attractions of Berlin society—was of impressive dimensions. When she dropped her napkin, they both reached for it. The tips of their index fingers touched for just a moment. Guido felt an electric shock go through his body. The memory of that touch remained with him for years. It was the closest brush with heaven he experienced in all his years of adolescence.

  THE FRIENDSHIP between Guido and Anton was an unusual one. Anton von Wartenburg came from an ancient military lineage. His father was a general and his uncle was a Prussian field marshal who had fought heroic battles against Napoleon. His mother’s family, the Hohensteufens, was one of the oldest noble lines and traced its origins to Frederick I Barbarossa, the German-Roman emperor who led the third crusade but never reached Jerusalem because he drowned in the Salef River in Turkey on June 10, 1190—which, as my great-uncle told Sasha and me, happened to coincide with the day that Baruch, the founding father of the Spinoza line, died in Lisbon.

  Anton’s father, General von Wartenburg, was a towering man, strongly built, impeccably clad, and self-confident, a man who blended military dignity with aristocratic elegance. The general was not pleased with Anton, his puny and inhibited only child. The boy often suffered horrendous asthma attacks and had little aptitude for practical matters. His only interests were algebra and physics. His heroes were Kepler and Huygens, Copernicus and Newton. His bible was Galileo Galilei’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, and he possessed—a gift from a Bohemian maternal uncle for his fifteenth birthday—the fifth vertebra of the Italian scientist, which someone had carved out and stolen from his cadaver where it lay entombed in the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence.

  CHRISTIANS IN FRANKFURT did not associate with Jews. They lived in different worlds and only very seldom did their contacts cross ethnic and religious boundaries, which for all practical purposes were nearly the same.

  The fact that General von Wartenburg found Rothschild agreeable and preferred his company to that of his own peers wasn’t due to Amschel’s superb spiritual qualities and disarmingly egalitarian outlook. The principal reason the aristocrat chose to frequent the rich banker, risking a certain degree of social opprobrium for associating with a Jew, was a simpler one: His finances happened to be extremely precarious. The Wartenburg fortune had been handed down through the centuries, but as soon as his wife got her hands on it, she started spending it on grandeur, luxury, and pleasure. The general found himself obliged to borrow to finance her extravagant way of life, particularly the vast estate and household she expected him to maintain. He contracted a considerable amount of debt. Old loans were paid off with new ones, and he became ever more dependent upon Amschel’s generous lending. That was also why he allowed his son to meet and invite home the young Jewish boy of the same age who had come from Strasbourg and was staying at the Rothschild residence.

  The boys got along immediately. They were bound less by their shared status as outsiders than by their belief that the deepest secrets of existence had been carefully formulated and concealed in some mystery that one might be able to solve with the help of the right keys. They expected to find them in the natural sciences. They united in deep friendship in their search for the philosopher’s stone.

  IT WAS SUMMERTIME. Warm breezes gently touched the friends’ cheeks. They sat in the grass beneath an apple tree in the splendid park that surrounded the Rothschild residence.
They were discussing Newton’s work on the gravitational attraction of heavenly bodies and its effects upon human beings. They were both nineteen years old. Their shoulders occasionally touched as if by accident. Suddenly Anton seized Guido’s hand, smiled, and looked deep into his eyes. Their fingers intertwined. Their movements were languid. The air was charged with a strange energy, and they felt as if they were in a dream. Anton whispered something in Guido’s ear, but Guido didn’t understand what he was saying. Anton pulled Guido close, and the eyes of both boys betrayed a longing for warmth and physical gratification. They kissed. Anton’s mouth was sweet, and his skin had a tang of perspiration that excited Guido. He held Anton tight and ran his hands through Anton’s hair. Guido’s breathing became louder. He gasped; he almost whistled. He could feel the growing stiffness of his penis and the pounding of his pulse. His abdomen was suffused with a heat that traveled slowly up his spine to his head. His hands roamed freely and explored his friend’s body. He felt a deep, overwhelming gratitude that Anton was a man. Never before had he experienced such an emotion. He loved Anton for the very fact that he was male. Suddenly he realized that the two of them, brought together by destiny, by the act of possessing each other’s bodies, were penetrating into the deepest, darkest secret region of passion, the forbidden zone, and with this act they would become sinners subject for their transgression to the ruthless, unforgiving punishment of expulsion from Paradise. Guido was ready to endure that punishment, for he knew that he did not wish to pull back from this newly discovered desire.

  THE FRIENDS’ HAPPINESS did not last for long. Their love and the boundless pleasure they found in each other’s arms could not be concealed from the watchful supervision of faithful servants. The watchers reported everything to the general, as they were bound to do, and one day he surprised Anton and Guido in bed together. The nightmarish scene that ensued put a brutal end to the bliss of their young lives. The general bellowed that his son was a perverted swine. Beside himself with rage, he promised to take his sword and chop him into tiny pieces for tarnishing the family’s centuries-old motto “Semper purus” (Forever pure). He gave Guido a smashing blow across the face, delivered forceful epithets best not repeated here, and challenged the young man to a duel, for the honor of the von Wartenburg family had to be upheld. In issuing this challenge the general was infringing the code of honor prevalent among the military: Every son of a Jewish mother is to be regarded as devoid of honor, and therefore a gentleman is not permitted to duel with such a person.