Chapter I

The life of Denis Zachaire has been made the subject of an interesting and well-written novel--“A Professor of Alchemy”--by “Percy Ross,” recently published by Mr George Redway. The life of the great adept, after his accomplishment of the Magnum Opus, is detailed at some length, M. Louis Figuier being apparently the authority for the bare facts of the case. The alchemist is represented by the French writer as having travelled to Lausanne, where he became enamoured of a young and beautiful lady, whom he carried from Switzerland into Germany, and then abandoned himself completely to a life of dissipation and folly, which closed tragically at Cologne in the year 1556. He was strangled in the middle of a drunken sleep by the cousin who had accompanied him in his travels, and who coveted his wealth and his mistress. The murderer effected his escape with the lady, who appears to have been his accomplice. The sole authority for this narrative appears to be a poem by Mardoché de Delle, who was attached, as a sort of laureate, to the court of Rodolph II. It is not improbably a mere invention of the versifier; there is nothing in the sober treatise of Denis Zachaire, written at the period in question, to give colour to the account of his extravagance.