The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [77]
Philip said “I saw your watery pot at Todefright. I was looking already of course, I grew up, with the clay, but I saw that pot.”
It was the most personal thing he had ever said. Fludd, who was painting a jar with a stripped goose-plume dipped in manganese, looked up and smiled straight at Philip, seeing the serious square face.
“It’s a form of madness,” he said. “Palissy was a madman, and in my book supremely sane, and you’ll come to see—if you stay here—that I too am a madman. When the wind’s in the wrong quarter, I’m driven the wrong way. So to speak. You’ll see, I’m telling you in advance. A good gale in the right direction—and some solid earth—and I’m driven to be a perfectionist.”
He told how from seeing the one cup, Palissy had narrowed and intensified his search for perfection to the discovery of a pure white enamel to put on earthenware. He had a wife, and many children, and lived in poverty, for years upon years, experimenting with mixtures of metals and tinctures he’d learned from glass on hundreds and hundreds of shards of pot, which he took to local potters, or glaziers, to be fired. And he failed, and failed. Fludd gave a bark of laughter, and observed that failure with clay was more complete and more spectacular than with other forms of art. You are subject to the elements, he said. Any one of the old four—earth, air, fire, water—can betray you and melt, or burst, or shatter—months of work into dust and ashes and spitting steam. You need to be a precise scientist, and you need to know how to play with what chance will do to your lovingly constructed surfaces in the heat of the kiln. “It’s purifying fire and demonic fire,” he said to Philip, who took in every word and nodded gravely. “Very dangerous, very simple, very elemental—”
Palissy had given up his search, for a time, and turned his attention to other things—the nature of salt, or salts, the way plants used salts, the way plants used manure, and the way it was connected to salts—and the construction of artificial salt marshes—“on earths which are tenacious, clammy, or viscid, like those of which are made pots, bricks and tiles.”
He loved the earth, said Benedict Fludd. He worked with the earth and he loved it. He got his hands dirty, and improved his mind.
Another day, he told the heroic story of the initial discovery of the white glaze. He enacted Palissy’s four-hour wait at a glass furnace for the three hundred broken pieces of clay, each numbered and covered with a different chemical mixture. The furnace is opened. One of the shards has a melted compound on it, and is taken out, dark and glowing. Palissy watched it cool. His thoughts were black. But as the black shard cooled it whitened—“white and polished”—a white enamel—“singularly beautiful.” Palissy is a new creature, reborn. The glaze contained tin, lead, iron, antimony, manganese and copper.
Palissy ground a quantity of it—he tells no one the proportions, of course—coats a kiln-full of vessels, relights his own kiln and tries to raise it to the heat of the glassmaker’s kilns. He works for six days and nights, heaping in faggots, and the enamel will not melt or fuse. “He lost the first firing,” said Fludd. “He went out and bought new pots, and reground his glaze, and relit his furnace, and laboured another six days and nights. In the end, he had to feed his furnace with his own floorboards, and smash up his kitchen table. And still the firing failed, and he was thought of as a mad alchemist or forger, and reduced to extreme poverty. He worked for another eight years, built a new kiln, and lost a whole firing of delicately glazed pieces because the mortar had been full of flints which splintered, and spattered his pots.”
“But in the end,” said Philip. “In the end, he found the enamel, and made the pots.”
“He worked for kings and queens, he designed a Paradise Garden,