Pierre-Jean Fabre (1588-1658) was a doctor and alchemist born in Castelnaudary. He published numerous works on medicine under his Latin name Petri Johannis Fabry. He is considered the best plague specialist of his time and as physician to King Louis XIII. He claims to have transformed lead into silver.
Pierre-Jean Fabre was born in 1588 in Castelnaudary in a bourgeois environment. One of his brothers, Master Bernard Fabre, doctor of theology, is a priest at the Saint-Michel collegiate church. He himself studies medicine in Montpellier. Aware of the ideas of the alchemist Paracelsus (1493-1541), he took sides in favor of the medicinal use of antimony in a real war which opposed supporters and opponents of this violent purgative. In 1615, he received a doctorate in medicine and opened his practice in Castelnaudary. He practices medicine according to spagyric, that is to say alchemical, principles, inspired by the work of Paracelsus.
After besieging Montauban, the young King Louis XIII marches at the head of his army, determined to re-establish royal authority and Catholic worship throughout the kingdom. He comes to dislodge the Huguenots who hold several localities in Lauragais.
In July 1622, in Toulouse, His Majesty was in bad shape, if we are to believe Jean Héroard, the king's First Physician, who noted in his diary: “The 4th, Monday. Awake at half past three after midnight, he complained, shouting and telling me that he was cold while lying in bed, and slept very little, his eyes were hot and his head was heavy. Up, pale, he feels weak and tired; dressed, booted, prayed to God, breakfasted at four o'clock. He leaves Toulouse and arrives at half past ten in Villefranche de Lauraguais; at half past eleven he is still complaining about the same things he did here above; dine though. He then goes to his room, to his study; his bed had not come, he lay down fully dressed on a pallet that had been prepared for him with fresh straw.” At dawn, Louis XIII took the road towards Castelnaudary with more than six hundred carts loaded with war munitions and ten thousand men who were going to bivouac in Castelnaudary.
The consuls of Castelnaudary welcome the sovereign at the Capelette. This is the chapel located at the crossroads of the road to Revel and the road to Toulouse, which nowadays serves as a bakery. Jean Héroard recounts: “The 5th, Tuesday. He arrives in Castelnaudary, after hearing the harangues of the magistrates in the suburbs. Entry at eleven o’clock.” The King of France complains of terrible stomach aches. The care given to him by his First Doctor proved ineffective. The King then called to his bedside the three city doctors: Clément Guilhermy, Jean Ferrand and Pierre-Jean Fabre. After examining the king, Fabre diagnosed “pernicious dysentery”. The king is impressed by his knowledge.
In Castelnaudary, the sovereign, even bedridden, continues to govern. Fabre has all the rights. He reported to the king that a Huguenot gentleman named Marc de Gaillard was scouring the country and robbing merchants of their goods on the road near Castelnaudary and did not hesitate to take their lives. Fabre, who had the opportunity to treat this character, complains bitterly of not being able to be paid. Louis XIII orders Marshal Bassompierre to crush Mas Saintes-Puelles, a Huguenot stronghold “which calls itself a town, but which is only a large village”. Bassompierre had the walls and bell tower brought down with cannon fire and set fire to the houses that remained standing.
Fabre strives to relieve the pain in the king's stomach and succeeds. So much so that on Thursday July 14, feeling a little better, Louis XIII left the town of Castelnaudary, at the head of the “royal armade.” He continues his march towards Carcassonne. Louis XIII takes Fabre to Court and grants him the envied office of Physician to the King. Now the Chaurian Aesculapius, having left his province, is not the man to take pleasure among courtiers, especially since Jean Héroard and the other colleagues are jealous of him, and do not fail to wisely emphasize that his treatments have as much merit. effect on the illness from which the King suffers, than a plaster on a wooden leg. Feeling the wind of disgrace blowing, Fabre promptly returned to his office in Castelnaudary. Naturally, it was to the King that Pierre-Jean Fabre dedicated his first work, the Palladium Spagyricum, a medical treatise against the plague, which he had printed in Toulouse in 1624.
We know today that the good doctor Fabre had little chance of curing his royal patient. Because he suffers from a serious intestinal disease, an illness progressing through acute attacks of stomach aches, alternating with phases of remission. It may be Crohn's disease, given the autopsy report carried out on the sovereign in 1643: "We found [...] the small intestines disproportionately swollen and pale in color and swimming in a quantity of serosities sanitary and purulent, [...] an ulcer poured out its purulent matter, which was found accumulated throughout the stomach, in which the intestines were swimming, in the quantity of more than a pint. Crohn's disease was only described in 1932. The king passed through Castelnaudary again, after the famous battle of 1632, ten years later. However, in the meantime the illness and perhaps the potions that his doctor Héroard made him take, will have caused him to lose all of his hair. Louis XIII will return to Castelnaudary wearing a wig. It suited him so perfectly that all the gentlemen of the Court also wanted to have a wig. The fashion was on.
The notoriety of Pierre-Jean Fabre becomes immense the day he realizes in front of witnesses, the dream of all alchemists: a transmutation. In the Alchymista Christianus, he recounts the experience: “In the year of the Lord 1627, in Castelnaudary, on July 22, the feast of Saint Madeleine, I experienced the virtue of this famous physical salt, in the presence and with the help of several trustworthy people. The Reverend Father Anaclet and the venerable Father Adrien, very devout religious of the order of the Capuchins, were there, as well as the Lord of Sérignol, magistrate full of equity, presidential lieutenant in the seneschal of Lauragais, in charge of judicial investigations. In great secrecy, the latter assisted me in almost all operations. He himself handled the bellows and activated the fire, so that in an experience so rare, so unprecedented, so incredible, of metallic transmutation, one could not conceive the slightest suspicion of fraud. Half a grain of powder of this admirable salt, in the space of half an hour, transformed an entire ounce of quicksilver into absolutely pure silver, much sharper and more brilliant than ordinary silver. This grain, carefully collected and weighed, turned out to be not only redder, but also larger and heavier than it originally was. Its power was in no way exhausted in the first transmutation of an ounce of quicksilver: it still had some left and, thanks to it, a drachma of lead was changed into pure and true silver, in a final controlled experiment. » (Translation by René Nelli)
Pierre-Jean Fabre believes he has achieved a transmutation. Henry Ricalens and other modern historians call it an imposture. We asked ourselves: What if Fabre was telling the truth? As a metals connoisseur, Benjamin Piveteau, pointed out to me, and I thank him, there is nothing to call it a miracle. What Fabre seems to ignore is that the lead ore he uses undoubtedly contains silver in its natural state. It is quite simply silver lead coming from a mine known since Antiquity, which is located a few leagues from Castelnaudary. “There is a lead mine which seems quite rich in silver”, at Loubatière, near Salsigne, in the Montagne Noire, noted in 1777, M. de Gensanne, commissioner for the States of Languedoc. In conclusion, Pierre-Jean Fabre believes, in good faith, to have succeeded in a transmutation, but many things escape him.
In Castelnaudary, on December 18, 1628, the consuls of Castelnaudary were distraught. The population dies en masse from the plague. It is by cartload that the corpses are evacuated through the Baffe gate, open for their passage. The Church invites people to pray in the face of what it considers to be punishment from God. The consuls had masses said every day at the collegiate church. They decide to burn ten white wax candles, “weighing a pound and a half”, before the altar of Saint Roch and to attend a mass themselves, at the end of which “they will make a vow to God, to put an end to the epidemic, to go, as soon as the roads are clear and the disease has ceased, to visit the chapel of Notre-Dame de Garaison near Monléon-Magnoac, in Bigorre and to offer her a lamp of money that will be made at the expense of the public, at the price of three hundred pounds.” Because, at the time, it was said that miraculous healings had taken place there since the Virgin appeared to a shepherdess. Garaison in Gascon means healing. A sung mass is celebrated, with a procession of the Blessed Sacrament taking place across the city, at the risk of spreading the contagion a little further.
The municipality of Castelnaudary also trusts science. It grants 75 pounds per month in wages to doctors Pierre-Jean Fabre and Guilhermy, “on condition of going to Saint-Roch three times a week for free.” It is, in fact, in Saint-Roch, away from the city, that the “infectious” are kept in quarantine. The surgeon, who works on site, is already ill. It is ordered to make fires near ditches and in front of gates with juniper. Fabre and his fellow doctors think they are protecting the city from “pestilent venom”. He himself wears a raven mask in which he burns rosemary and other aromatic plants. In fact, but he doesn't know it, what protects him is not his mask, but the long leather coat which protects him from flea bites. At the time, the role of rats and fleas in the spread of the plague was unknown.
In 1629 Maître Valette, notary of Castelnaudary, after having received nearly fifty wills from plague victims or their families, became frightened and fled to Laurabuc. Pierre-Jean Fabre shows himself to be particularly courageous. Charged by the consuls with stopping the scourge, he succeeded so well that the city printed his Treatise on the Plague, which made him famous.
The Chaurian alchemist will continue his experiments well after 1627. And Fabre affirms, in chapter XXX of his Manuscriptum ad Fridericum: “I have endured and suffered a lot, I have sweated and endured the cold, before having accomplished this secret work. Does he want to tell us that he found the Philosopher's Stone which is supposed to make gold? Not at all and quite the contrary. He declared in a letter of October 24, 1642, regarding gold: “If I had some on hand, I would gladly offer you some, but, I do not know by what law of an obscure destiny, these mysteries of nature have been denied to me until now.” In 1636, another work by Pierre-Jean Fabre appeared printed in Paris: “The summary of chemical secrets where we see the nature of animals, plants & minerals entirely discovered: with the virtues and properties of the principles which compose & preserve their being; & a Treatise on General Medicine. Fabre travels a lot. He visited Germany and stayed in Frankfurt. In 1650, his reputation crossed borders and his numerous works were translated and published abroad. He was brought to Barcelona to organize the fight against the plague reigning in the Catalan capital. Very wealthy, Fabre acquired the position of advisor to the King and became consul of Castelnaudary. He owns the Fabry estate, on the edge of Castelnaudary, where we can still see an enigmatic inscription engraved above the door, referring to alchemy.
After being forgotten for around twenty years, the "contagious disease" struck Lauragais again in 1652. In 1654, his health declining, Fabre gave 1,100 pounds to the Cordeliers of the convent of Saint-François so that they could celebrate every day of his life a low mass of the Holy Spirit and after his death a Requiem mass. He bequeathed his rich library to the Saint-Michel de Castelnaudary collegiate church, as well as eight pieces of tapestry. Pierre-Jean Fabre died in 1658. He was buried in the chapel of the town's White Penitents.
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