The importance and profile of transmutational alchemy in royal and princely courts of the early modern period, particularly in German lands, has been a valuable area of research for some time. Hopeful transmuters, or those with other valuable chymical knowledge, frequently offered themselves and found patronage at such courts, and often enough ending up imprisoned or executed. The French crown, on the other hand, avoided alchemical speculations, and through the seventeenth century, Louis XIV and his ministers positively forbade chrysopoetic endeavors in connection with state activities, such as by members of the crown-sponsored Académie Royale des Sciences. Nevertheless, this situation changed dramatically in the early eighteenth century when several high ministers of state engaged with reputed transmuters, and appear to have had them actively sought out. This paper will detail this remarkable change of heart, its causes and results, by following the histories and activities of several such transmuters and their relations with multiple arms of the French state. It will also offer a portrait of the strangely bifurcated reputation—oscillating between hope and fear—of chymistry and its practitioners in the period, with implications for explaining why chrysopoeia suddenly “went underground” in France in the 1720s.
