“I accept it, madam, with all the more gratitude in that I know its worth.”

From the library we went into the laboratory, at which I was truly astonished.  She shewed me matter that had been in the furnace for fifteen years, and was to be there for four or five years more.  It was a powder of projection which was to transform instantaneously all metals into the finest gold.  She shewed me a pipe by which the coal descended to the furnace, keeping it always at the same heat.  The lumps of coal were impelled by their own weight at proper intervals and in equal quantities, so that she was often three months without looking at the furnace, the temperature remaining the same the whole time.  The cinders were removed by another pipe, most ingeniously contrived, which also answered the purpose of a ventilator.

The calcination of mercury was mere child’s play to this wonderful woman.  She shewed me the calcined matter, and said that whenever I liked she would instruct me as to the process.  I next saw the Tree of Diana of the famous Taliamed, whose pupil she was.  His real name was Maillot, and according to Madame d’Urfe he had not, as was supposed, died at Marseilles, but was still alive; “and,” added she, with a slight smile, “I often get letters from him.  If the Regent of France,” said she, “had listened to me he would be alive now.  He was my first friend; he gave me the name of Egeria, and he married me to M. d’Urfe”

She possessed a commentary on Raymond Lully, which cleared up all difficult points in the comments of Arnold de Villanova on the works of Roger Bacon and Heber, who, according to her, were still alive.  This precious manuscript was in an ivory casket, the key of which she kept religiously; indeed her laboratory was a closed room to all but myself.  I saw a small cask full of ‘platina del Pinto’, which she told me she could transmute into gold when she pleased.  It had been given her by M. Vood himself in 1743.  She shewed me the same metal in four phials.  In the first three the platinum remained intact in sulphuric, nitric, and muriatic acid, but in the fourth, which contained ‘aqua regia’, the metal had not been able to resist the action of the acid.  She melted it with the burning-glass, and said it could be melted in no other way, which proved, in her opinion, its superiority to gold.  She shewed me some precipitated by sal ammoniac, which would not precipitate gold.

Her athanor had been alight for fifteen years.  The top was full of black coal, which made me conclude that she had been in the laboratory two or three days before.  Stopping before the Tree of Diana, I asked her, in a respectful voice, if she agreed with those who said it was only fit to amuse children.  She replied, in a dignified manner, that she had made it to divert herself with the crystallization of the silver, spirit of nitre, and mercury, and that she looked upon it as a piece of metallic vegetation, representing