Utz by Bruce Chatwin Page B

porcelain.’
    â€˜He may have invented porcelain. But even that is not so sure.’
    I reached for my notebook. He reeled off a synopsis of Böttger’s career.

J ohannes Böttger is born in 1682, in Schleiz in Thuringia, the son of an official of the Mint. After a childhood in the workshop of his grandfather, a goldsmith, he is apprenticed to a Berlin apothecary by the name of Zorn.
    He studies books on alchemy: the Blessed Raymond Lull, Basilius Valentinus, Paracelsus and Van Helmont’s ‘Aphorismi Chemici’ in which alchemical substances are listed as the Ruby Lion, Black Raven, Green Dragon, and White Lily.
    He convinces himself that gold and silver are matured in the bowels of the earth, out of red and white arsenic. One night, his fellow apprentices find him in Zorn’s laboratory half-asphyxiated by arsenic fumes.
    Among the customers of the pharmacy is a Greek mendicant monk, Lascaris, who is reputed to possess the Red Tincture, or ‘Ruby Lion’, a grain of which will transmute lead into gold.
    The monk falls for the boy.
    Böttger obtains a phial of the tincture and performs his first ‘successful’ transmutation, in the lodgings of a student friend. The second ‘successful’ experiment takes place in front of Zorn and other sceptical witnesses.
    The ladies of Berlin find the young alchemist irresistible. His reputation spreads: to King Frederick William, the ‘Giant Lover’, who obtains a specimen of the gold from Frau Zorn – and issues a warrant for Böttger’s arrest.
    Böttger escapes to Wittenberg: a dependency of Augustus the Strong.
    In November 1701 the Kings of Prussia and Saxony hold military manoeuvres along their borders. Which of these indigent sovereigns shall possess the goldmaker? Böttger — like a fugitive nuclear physicist — is escorted to Dresden under armed guard.
    In the Jungfernbastei, one of several prisons he will occupy over the next thirteen years, he dines off silver plate, keeps a pet monkey and, in a secret laboratory, sets to work on the ‘arcanum universale’ or Philosopher’s Stone.
    By 1706 the Saxon Treasury is exhausted: from the cost of the Swedish War and the King’s compulsive purchases of Chinese porcelain. Augustus, infuriated by Bottger’s failure, threatens to remove him to another laboratory: the torture chamber.
    Böttger meets Ehrenfried Walther, Graf von Tschirnhaus. This outstanding chemist, the friend of Leibniz, is on the way to discovering the secret of ‘true’ porcelain, but cannot devise a kiln sufficiently hot to fuse the glaze and the body. He recognises Böttger’s talents, and asks for his co-operation. The alchemist, to save his skin, agrees.
    Over the door of this workshop Böttger hangs a notice:
    God, Our Creator
    Has turned a Goldmaker into a Potter.
    In 1708 he delivers to Augustus the first specimens of red porcelain and, in the following year, the white.
    In 1710 the Royal Saxon Porcelain Manufactory is founded at Meissen and begins work on a commercial scale. ‘Arcanum’ — a word usually employed by alchemists – is the official term for the chemical composition of the paste. The formula is declared a State secret. Almost at once, the secret is betrayed by Böttger’s assistant — and sold to Vienna.
    In 1719 Böttger dies, of drink, depression, delusion and chemical poisoning.
    During the German inflation of 1923 the Dresden banks issue emergency money, in red and white ‘Böttger’ porcelain.

U tz had some specimens of this ‘funny money’ to show me. He dropped them, like chocolates, into the palm of my hand.
    â€˜Very interesting,’ I said.
    â€˜But now I tell you something more interesting.’
    Most porcelain experts, he continued, interpreted Böttger’s discovery as the utilitarian by-product of alchemy – like Paracelsus’s mercurial cure for