Despite a heavy workload, I found time this evening to work on Day 29's challenge -
Blue Powder. The very open ended nature of the title led me off in a rather curious direction...
Blue Powder
I sat in the window of the bistro and watched the early
morning mist rising off the Seine.
I left my Ipad on the blue and
white checked tablecloth in front of me and admired the view as a flotilla of tiny
boats pottered up the river, their bows pushing against the fog as if it were a
tangible thing. Ever since I had found this place, I had spent my mornings here
soaking up the Parisian atmosphere. The coffee they served was thick and black
and possessed a slightly acrid taste that I found perfectly balanced their
delightful pastries.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” said a
voice to my right.
I looked up to see a middle-aged man
with dark hair and a cream blazer taking his seat on the table adjacent to me.
“Paris in the morning,” he said, with
a somewhat wistful smile, “There is just something magical about it, don’t you
agree?”
“I love it,” I admitted.
“Ah, you’re English,” he said, “Based
upon your accent, I would guess from somewhere near Wolverhampton?“
“Spot on, actually,” I said,
feeling slightly nonplussed. I liked to believe that all traces of my childhood
accent had long since been cleansed from my voice by my many years of moving
around the UK. “And you?”
“Me? Oh, I’m from all over,” he
said, beckoning the waitress over and ordering ‘his usual’ before turning back
to face me. “Truth is, I’ve moved around so much that I don’t really feel like
anywhere is my home these days.”
“I guess I know how that is.”
“So what brings you to Paris?”
“I’m here working.”
“Ah, such a shame to have to spend
one’s time working in such a beautiful city…”
“Well I’m doing some freelance
work; installing a network for a company. It’s going to take a couple of weeks
so I get to hang out and enjoy Paris quite a bit.”
“Wonderful,” he said with a
beaming smile, “Personally, I never can resist coming back to Paris.”
“You don’t live here, then?”
“Once, long ago, I did” he said, again
smiling “But now, I am just a tourist.”
“Nice.”
“Oh yes. I admire the wonderful
history that the whole place is steeped in. Everywhere in Paris has history;
why, even this humble bistro has its own little footnote.”
“Oh?” I replied, feeling
genuinely curious. I always found old cities amazing in that respect; to be able to walk
streets that had been walked for centuries before me, to see places that had
been unchanged for centuries.
“Have you ever heard,” said the
man, leaning in towards me almost conspiratorially, “of the Count of St.
Germain?”
The name rang a vague bell but it
tinkled away so quietly in the recesses of my brain that I couldn’t dredge up
any details.
“Rings a bell, but I can’t quite
place it.”
“Do you have time for me to tell
you his story?”
Technically, I knew I didn’t have
time; I had a meeting in a couple of hours and I’d need to get back to my hotel
and pick up a few things before then. But, for some reason, I found myself
saying “Sure, I’ve got time.”
The man smiled broadly.
“That’s marvellous. I was
beginning to worry that the art of listening had rather gone the way of the
dodo.”
“So who was this Count of St.
Germain?”
“Well, two hundred and fifty
years or so ago, he was very much the celebrity in European high society. An
accomplished musician and courtier, an alchemist and an adventurer; this was
his very favourite bistro in all of Paris.”
I looked around at the plain
furnishings and found it hard to believe that, two hundred and fifty years ago,
this was a place favoured by the elite.
“Here?”
“Right here,” said the man, his
eyes twinkling. “And it was here in this very bistro that he told a tale that would
eventually give rise to a legend. It was right in this very part of the room that
he revealed to two of his closest companions that he was immortal.”
I laughed. “And did they believe
him?”
“Well, of course, not at first. At
first they thought, like you do now, that he was a charlatan or perhaps mad.
But he told them a story of how, as a boy, he had been an assistant to a great
alchemist in the times of Ancient Egypt and that this alchemist had, after
communing with the Egyptian god Thoth, developed an elixir capable of extending
the life of a man indefinitely.”
The waitress brought over his
coffee and a croque-monsieur and he stopped to thank her in what was, to my ears
at least, flawless French before turning back to me. Despite myself, I found
myself drawn into his story as his voice and manner were incredibly
charismatic.
“The alchemist intended to
present the elixir to the Pharaoh but the Count, or whatever his name was then,
stole the elixir in the dead of night. One pinch of this blue powder was said
to be enough to preserve a man’s life for fifty years but the boy knew nothing
of this and he ate mouthfuls of the powder, despite the way it tasted foul and
burnt his lips and tongue. Delirious and in pain, he wandered way into the
desert for weeks but the elixir had changed him irreparably; even without water
or food he lived on. And as the weeks became years, and the years became
decades, he realised that he was aging so slowly that it was as if the rest of
the world were turning a hundred times faster for everyone else.”
He sipped at his coffee.
“And as the decades turned to
centuries he began to appreciate the folly of his actions. He could not stay in
one place or he would be burned as a witch; he could not love, for anything he
loved would eventually die before his eyes. What he had originally thought
would be a blessing turned out to be a curse, and so he wandered the world and
sought refuge in learning. He became a virtuoso musician, he became a
playwright, he became a lothario and a magician and, eventually, he became
himself an alchemist so that he could unravel the mysteries of that which had
given him this endless life.”
The man sighed.
“But it was no use. While he
could create a substance that appeared similar, the blue powder that the Count
created was far less potent. It could keep a man young for twenty years but its
power was finite, it was nothing more than a poor facsimile. And so, as the
centuries became millennia he sought death. But death would not come to him. He
threw himself from a ship into the sea but found that he could not drown. And,
while he could feel pain, he would eventually heal from even the most grievous
of wounds. One time he even allowed
himself to be burnt at the stake, only to awaken the next morning as if nothing
had happened to him. There was no escape. And so he accepted his fate and found
amusement in moving constantly, in finding new people even if the places themselves
seemed old to him.”
“That is a cool story,” I said, “but
I still don’t understand how he convinced them he was immortal?”
“Oh, he allowed them to sample
the elixir he had himself created. While twenty years to him was as a drop to
the ocean, to them it was a tremendous bounty.”
“But surely it can’t have worked?”
"Do
you know what the average lifespan of a man in the 18th century was?”
I shrugged.
“Fifty?”
“The
average man in the 18th century died at thirty five.”
“Wow.”
“And yet, one of his companions
in the bistro that night, Prince Charles of Hesse Kassel would go on to live to
the ripe old age of ninety one.”
“A coincidence, surely?”
“Perhaps,” nodded the man, “but
it was Prince Charles who also supposedly buried the Count when he died in
1784. There are those who believe that Prince Charles enabled the Count to move
onso that his youthfulness would not be detected. And there, it would seem that
the story of the Count ends.”
“It is a great story,” I said
with a smile. “And you tell it well.”
He held his hands up in mock
protest “It is far too early in the morning to tell the story well; but I hope
that it was at least something interesting to know about this place.”
I looked again at the bistro,
wondering how much of the story was true and whether the mysterious Count had
indeed sat close to where I was now having my breakfast all those centuries
ago. I was interrupted from my thoughts by my phone ringing and fished it from
my pocket to see that my boss was calling.
“Sorry,” I said to the man, “duty
calls.”
“Of course,” he said, “In fact, I
must shortly be off. But, it was a pleasure.”
I smiled and stood up so that I
could walk to the other side of the room and take the call in private. Then
spent a few minutes half listening as my boss prattled on about how he wanted
to make sure that people couldn’t use the internet on the work network and I studied
the engravings that hung on the wall. They were mainly French figures that I’d
never heard of but I stopped at the fifth one and found myself staring.
“Are you listening to me?” said
my boss.
“Got to call you back.” I said
and thumbed the red button to end the call.
The engraving showed a dark
haired man dressed in decorative coat and waistcoat; a tiny plaque at the
bottom was inscribed with Count Saint
Germain. There was, however, no mistaking the fact that the man in the
engraving was the very same as the one I had just sat next to.
I spun round but the table where
the man had been sitting was empty.
A flash of thoughts ran through my
head. This had to be some kind of practical joke, was my first thought.
Whatever was the French equivalent of Candid
Camera and as soon as I reacted, a host was going to come in and poke fun at
me. But that didn’t seem possible; no one could have foreseen that I would
choose to go to the other side of the room.
“The man that was sitting here,” I asked the waitress,
“do you know him?”
“He comes here on and off for
many years,” shrugged the waitress.
I felt suddenly dizzy and sat
back down at my seat. Clearly just a coincidence, I told myself, just a silly
coincidence. But, as I picked up my Ipad I noticed that two things were tucked
beneath it.
The first was a short note. It
read: Thank you for sparing the time to
listen to my story. Sharing it is one of the few pleasures that I have left so
please accept this as a token of my esteem. C.S.G.
The second was a small glass vial
containing blue powder.
No more than a pinch.
