St. Vincent de Paul, sold again at Tunis, tends an alchemist's furnaces

TUNIS, Barbary, September 1605 AD — Ten or fifteen furnaces are kept always burning in a workshop in this city, and the man who feeds them was sold for the second time this month. A fisherman had bought Saint Vincent de Paul out of the market-place and got rid of him when the sea made his new slave ill. An old Muslim apothecary bought him to tend the fires — “an old chemist,” as St. Vincent de Paul has it, “a mighty extractor of quintessences.”

St. Vincent de Paul is twenty-four, a priest of nearly five years and a bachelor of divinity of Toulouse. At Tunis a slave is owned outright and can be sold on again at any time. The corsairs who brought him in had posted a notice at the landing that their captives were Spaniards, so no French claim could be made for them.

He was on that boat over a debt. A legacy from an old lady he knew was mostly money a debtor owed her. St. Vincent de Paul chased the man to Marseilles, settled for three hundred crowns and took ship for Narbonne. In July three Turkish brigantines working the Gulf of Lyon gave chase and took the boat. Every man aboard was killed or wounded, and an arrow hit St. Vincent de Paul; the wound has not healed. The pirates steered for Barbary.

At Tunis the captives were stripped, given a pair of drawers, a linen coat and a cap, and walked through the town with chains round their necks. In the market-place the merchants were “judging, just as if buying horses or cattle, making us open our mouths to see our teeth, feeling our sides, probing our wounds, making us walk, trot, run, raise weights and wrestle, in order to test our strength,” St. Vincent de Paul wrote afterwards to one of his first pupils.

In the workshop the old man had spent fifty years mixing metals in search of the philosopher’s stone, the substance that was to turn base metal into gold. St. Vincent de Paul wrote: “I have often seen him melt equal quantities of gold and silver, then mixing them with powder in the bottom of a crucible, place the whole in the fire for twenty-four hours, when the mixture would become all gold. Very often he amalgamated bad with good silver, and sold it for the benefit of the poor. My business was to keep up ten or fifteen furnaces, which, thank God, I made even a pleasure.”

The old man made medicines as well. M. de Commet, the lawyer at Dax who had taken him in at sixteen and the father of that pupil, was suffering from kidney stones. “With the hope and belief of seeing you again, sir, I was constantly asking my master to teach me how to cure the gravel, for I witnessed him working wonders every day,” St. Vincent de Paul wrote. “He taught me, and actually made me go through the process of mixing the ingredients.”

The old man was mild and easy-tempered, and he grew fond of the slave who tended his fires. “My master liked me very much and took pleasure in talking to me of alchemy, and even of his religion, making every effort to win me over, promising me great riches and knowledge,” St. Vincent de Paul wrote. The price was his faith: he was to become a Muslim. He refused, and the asking went on for the rest of the year, coaxing and threats both. What carried him, he wrote, was this: “God always inspired me with an assurance of my release, through the constant prayers I offered to the Blessed Virgin, and to her intercession I attribute my deliverance.”

He tended the furnaces for almost a year, from this month until the following August. By then the old apothecary’s name had carried to Constantinople, and Sultan Ahmed I sent for him to try his skill at court. The old man died on the road, and left his slave to a nephew, a man St. Vincent de Paul called “a thorough man-hater.” The nephew heard that the French consul, M. de Braves, had reached Tunis with the Sultan’s orders to release the French slaves, and sold him on before the consul could get to him. The buyer was a man from Nice in Savoy who had turned Muslim.

Two letters about those months outlived him: this one to his pupil, and another from Rome in 1608 AD. They were produced against him at the congregation of January 22, 1715 AD, called to weigh whether he had practised the virtues to a heroic degree. The Promoter of the Faith, whose office is to argue against a cause and who is commonly called the devil’s advocate, was Prosper Lambertini, afterwards Pope Benedict XIV. He held up the letters of the captivity as evidence that the young slave had believed in alchemy and the occult sciences. He did not press it hard.

The objection failed. On June 16, 1737 AD Pope Clement XII sang the Mass of canonisation at St. John Lateran, and came back to the old man’s art. St. Vincent de Paul, the Pope said, “made better use of it than those who try to change the nature of metals; for he has converted evil into good, the sinner into a just man, slavery into freedom, hell into paradise.”