Lovecraft, H P - The Alchemist

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The Alchemist

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written 1908

Published November 1916 in The United Amateur, Vol. 16, No. 4, p. 53-57.

High up, crowning the grassy summit of a swelling mount whose sides are wooded near

the base with the gnarled trees of the primeval forest stands the old chateau of my

ancestors. For centuries its lofty battlements have frowned down upon the wild and

rugged countryside about, serving as a home and stronghold for the proud house whose

honored line is older even than the moss-grown castle walls. These ancient turrets,

stained by the storms of generations and crumbling under the slow yet mighty pressure of

time, formed in the ages of feudalism one of the most dreaded and formidable fortresses

in all France. From its machicolated parapets and mounted battlements Barons, Counts,

and even Kings had been defied, yet never had its spacious halls resounded to the

footsteps of the invader.

But since those glorious years, all is changed. A poverty but little above the level of dire

want, together with a pride of name that forbids its alleviation by the pursuits of

commercial life, have prevented the scions of our line from maintaining their estates in

pristine splendour; and the falling stones of the walls, the overgrown vegetation in the

parks, the dry and dusty moat, the ill-paved courtyards, and toppling towers without, as

well as the sagging floors, the worm-eaten wainscots, and the faded tapestries within, all

tell a gloomy tale of fallen grandeur. As the ages passed, first one, then another of the

four great turrets were left to ruin, until at last but a single tower housed the sadly

reduced descendants of the once mighty lords of the estate.

It was in one of the vast and gloomy chambers of this remaining tower that I, Antoine,

last of the unhappy and accursed Counts de C-, first saw the light of day, ninety long

years ago. Within these walls and amongst the dark and shadowy forests, the wild ravines

and grottos of the hillside below, were spent the first years of my troubled life. My

parents I never knew. My father had been killed at the age of thirty-two, a month before I

was born, by the fall of a stone somehow dislodged from one of the deserted parapets of

the castle. And my mother having died at my birth, my care and education devolved

solely upon one remaining servitor, an old and trusted man of considerable intelligence,

whose name I remember as Pierre. I was an only child and the lack of companionship

which this fact entailed upon me was augmented by the strange care exercised by my

aged guardian, in excluding me from the society of the peasant children whose abodes

were scattered here and there upon the plains that surround the base of the hill. At that

time, Pierre said that this restriction was imposed upon me because my noble birth placed

me above association with such plebeian company. Now I know that its real object was to

keep from my ears the idle tales of the dread curse upon our line that were nightly told

and magnified by the simple tenantry as they conversed in hushed accents in the glow of

their cottage hearths.

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Lovecraft, H P - The Alchemist

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