He dropped them, like chocolates, into the palm of my hand. ‘Very interesting,’ I said. ‘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 syphilis. He did not agree. He felt it was foolish to attribute to former ages the materialist concerns of this one. Alchemy, except among its more banal practitioners, was never a technique for multiplying wealth ad infinitum. It was a mystical exercise. The search for gold and the search for porcelain had been facets of an identical quest: to find the substance of immortality. As for himself, he had taken up alchemical studies on the advice of Zikmund Kraus: both as a field for his polymathic impulses, and as a means of elevating his ‘porcelain mania’ onto a metaphysical plane: so that if the Communists took the collection, he would none the less continue to possess it. Utz had read his Jung, his Goethe, Michael Maier, the ramblings of Dr Dee and Pernéty’s ‘Dictionnaire Mytho-Hermétique’.
