Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
doing, writers acknowledged to some extent the experimental power of
chemistry but criticized the experimenters' narrow-minded scope of
aims. As the British writer Wilkie Collins (1824-89) put it in his The
Woman in White (1860) “the illimitable power of Chemistry remains the
slave of the most superficial and the most insignificant ends”. 23 Thus, the
medieval plot needed to be modified in order to point out that experimen-
tal success is by no means success overall, that the human condition is
much more complex, and that reducing one's effort to chemistry is but
blind obsession. Writers thereby reflected the growing impact of chemis-
try on society and warned of uncritical hopes and promises.
There are also other nineteenth-century stories that reintroduced the
medieval alchemist with only little modification but elaborated on the
theme in more psychological, dramatic, or criminological detail. The
most well-known, although perhaps overestimated, example is Honoré de
Balzac's novel La Recherche de L'Absolu (1834), 24 which in English
translations is known as The Alkahest , The Quest of the Absolute , or The
Philosophers' Stone . Balthazar Claes, a Flemish diamond-maker, is ex-
plicitly said to have been a former a pupil of Lavoisier in Paris before he
returned home to marry and run the business of his wealthy family.
Nonetheless, the story retells the fate of the miserable seeker, the 'mad
alchemist', which Balzac composed with every detail he could find in the
medieval literature. After fourteen years of harmony and wealth, Claes
suddenly becomes infected with a “moral malady”, i.e . the addiction to
diamond-making, transmitted by a Pole who figures as the medieval
tempter. As it happens, Claes ruins his family both financially and mor-
ally - his wife dies from sorrow - and destroys his mental and physical
health, social status, and so on. By referring to the chemical debates of
the early nineteenth century, e.g . electrochemistry, and Prout's concep-
tion of a materia prima , Balzac tried hard to make the link to contempo-
rary chemistry plausible, because his hero should, as he later confessed,
“represent all the efforts of modern chemistry”. 25 At the same time, it
23 First published London: Sampson Low, 1860, 3 vols.
24 First published Paris: Vve Béchet, 1834.
25 In a letter to Hippolyte Castille, Balzac explains, “Le héros de La Recherche de
L'Absolu représente tous les efforts de la chimie moderne” (quoted from Ambrière
1999, p. 401).
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