Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (58 page)

^*
E. J. Dillon,
The Inside Story of the Peace Conference
(New York and London, 1920).

^*
‘With how little wisdom is the world governed!’

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‘Fate’.

^*
Notre-Dame de Paris
, IV, 5.

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‘Let each man be content with what he has. / The dissatisfied man has nothing.’

^*
Hantaro Nagaoka, at Tokyo University in 1924.

^*
François Jollivet-Castelot,
Comment on devient alchimiste: traité d’hermétisme et d’art spagyrique
(Paris, 1897).

^*
The name ‘Fulcanelli’ may be a compound of Vulcan, patron deity of alchemy, and Helios, the sun god. The search for anagrams has proved inconclusive: Lucien Fall, fil nucléal, le cul final, etc. The preface to the second edition (1957) was written by the master’s young pupil, Eugène Canseliet. Canseliet belonged to a group called ‘The Brothers of Heliopolis’, two of whom lived in the Pigalle district, near Helbronner’s laboratory, at 59, Rue Rochechouart. They included an absinthe-addicted painter called Champagne, a son of Ferdinand de Lesseps (architect of the Suez Canal), and a man who worked for the Rhône-Poulenc pharmaceutical company. This address was listed in
The Foreign Bachelor’s Secret Guide to Paris
as the address of a male brothel called the ‘Sacré Cœur’. The Abwehr agent was evidently aware of this, and one can only imagine what adventures he had as a result.

^*
Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des Sciences
, 24 May 1948 (CCXXVI, pp. 1655–56).

^*
Lt.-Col. Selby Skinner to Col. W. R. Shuler, 18 February 1946. National Archives and Records Administration, RG 226, Entry 210, Box 431, Folder 2.

^*
HLM (pron.
ash-el-em
):
Habitation à loyer modéré
(low-cost public housing).

^*
CRS (pron.
say-air-ess
): Compagnie Républicaine de Sécurité.

^*
Le Policier et les jeunes
(‘The Police and Young People’), distributed by the Préfecture de Police; still in print, in a slightly modified form, in 2008.

^*
‘Under the cobbles, the beach.’

^*
Vache
: ‘cow’, equivalent here to British or American ‘pig’.

^*
CGT: Confédération Générale du Travail. The most powerful trades union federation, dominated by the French Communist Party.

^*
É lectricité de France.