Free Planus by Blaise Cendrars Page A

of Dr Plugs, a Kraut, I was nine years old. For me it was a prison. But that is another story, as Kipling would say.
    daily, especially on moonless nights and certain fatidical dates in the year, when the influence is strong and then, so it appears, there ■ is a veritable Witches' Sabbath.
    'All the more reason for believing closely in the tradition, since I he business was known solely to the initiates. No one has yet published the diary of Kammerer, the Count's valet de chambre, which describes the experiments.'
    'Nevertheless, you quote long extracts from it, Le Rouge.'
    'Yes, indirectly . . .'
    'I know, Le Rouge. But tell me, where do they keep the original of this diary, which is sub-titled "Account Book Kept by Joseph Kammerer, servant to his most gracious Lord, Monsieur le Comte de K. . ."?'
    'Ah, you know about that, Cendrars?'
    'Yes, Haliphas Levy quotes it in a private letter. It is a day-today book of expenses. Even the price of the jars in which the homunculi were imprisoned when they became unmanageable . . .!'
    'My word, one can't hide anything from you. In any case, it's not in the Arsenal library!'
    (The book was, in fact, there, and Le Rouge deliberately lied to me to put me off the scent. This is a form of avarice amongst scholars.)
    'I'm not so sure, Le Rouge. I can tell you that there exists a copy of the account book, abridged, it is true, but contemporary and written in the beautiful calligraphy of the late eighteenth century on fine paper, in the library of the Chamber of Deputies, on the reserved list. You can ask for it in my name . . .!'
    'It's of no importance, since the homunculi left no descendants.'
    'That was not Pasquale's opinion.'
    'Oh no, not again!' cried my friend Le Rouge. 'Really, you're becoming absurd, old man. . . .'
    I give here a summary of this extraordinary history of the homunculi of Count Kueffstein, a Rosicrucian traveller, like so many others at the end of the eighteenth century who, in the wake of a Saint-Germain, a Mesmer or a Cagliostro, flourished in the salons, according to the literary tradition. I have no books to hand, not even Le Rouge's The Mandragora, but the whole business is clear in my mind, as I was involved in it on various occasions : just after the First World War, in Vienna, where I was making a film at (he Hofsburg, after the fall of the Hapsburgs, but the archives of the masonic lodge had been dispersed; in Prague, in 1923, where I vainly leafed through the minutes of the meetings of the Rosicruc- ians at the home of the descendants of the Comte de Thun, and, in Presbourg, with Professor Wilhelm Grosz, the famous criminologist, Dean of the Faculty of Law, who possessed what was probably the finest collection in Europe of esoteric works on witchcraft; nowhere could I find mention of Virgil or his tomb in this connection, but I nevertheless believe Pasquale's account to be exact, at least as to the geographic location of the place where this curious brood of homunculi were spawned and where, whatever Le Rouge might think to the contrary, their offspring proliferated.
    Count Kueffstein was a rich nobleman and an ardent devotee of the occult who, like Paracelsus, the demiurge of the West, travelled through the countries of Europe seeking solutions to the great philosophical problems, and played host to all the alchemists, necromancers, cabalists and initiates with whom he indulged, not in parlour tricks but in laboratory research. He was a born scientist, and Joseph Kammerer has related in his account book some of his master's adventures and incredible experiments, including the most wonderful of all, that of the spontaneous or 'unwonted' generation, as he calls it, the artificial creation of the homunculi. '
    In the course of a voyage in southern Italy, the Count met Fra Geloni, like himself a Rosicrucian and a disciple of Paracelsus, whose arcane secrets he claimed to have penetrated, and the two of them set to work to bring about a supernatural