The Arcanum (13 page)

Ambivalence too is evoked by the written accounts of Böttger's personality. There are stories on the one hand of a man of
great sensitivity, one who engendered enormous loyalty and dedication in those with whom he worked. Wildenstein, one of his
earliest assistants, recalled that even during the most arduous moments of the experiments in Dresden “he spoke to the workers
in such an unassuming manner that we would have worked day and night for him.” It was, on more than one occasion, Böttger's
misplaced sympathy for and trust in his workers that led to secrets being stolen. Yet Böttger was certainly no soft touch.
On his order, workers at the Meissen factory were fined a week's wages if they dared miss a day's work.

Depression, engendered by years of lonely captivity, made Böttger prone to displays of maudlin self-pity, but throughout the
long years of his imprisonment he was certainly not treated as a common criminal. Even though he was constantly guarded and
watched by soldiers, in the later years of his confinement he had comfortable rooms next to his laboratory in Dresden. The
king's begrudging respect for him is reflected in the extraordinary range of privileges he was permitted. Böttger was titled
baron by Augustus in 1711, and from then on he lived the life of an aristocratic gentleman, albeit a captive one. He entertained
lavishly, freely discussing his ideas with the king and other leading scientists, philosophers and artists at the court, and
enjoying bacchanalian bouts of drinking. He felt free enough to open his heart to the king, with little apparent restraint.
Writing to the king of his achievements as he saw them, he said: “The works are, so to speak, my first-born children and I
trust you will therefore not take it amiss when I say that, for myself, I love them tenderly.”

So Baron Böttger was neither alone, nor deprived of comfort and intellectual stimulation. Yet one feels, from the pattern
of his life, that anything that this impassioned soul lacked could easily become an overriding obsession, and the one thing
missing after he had found the formula for porcelain was liberty. Augustus, however, had no intention of setting him free
until he fulfilled his promise to produce gold. In 1713, the king, urged on by Nehmitz, began yet again to pressure Böttger
to provide some concrete evidence of his skill. He was ordered to demonstrate a transmutation in the presence of the king,
Prince von Fürstenberg and Nehmitz on March 20. If he failed, his fate would again hang in the balance. Yet again Böttger
was forced to return to the illusions that had ultimately been responsible for the years of captivity. In front of the royal
party he placed copper in one crucible and lead in another and placed them on the furnace. As before, when the metals were
molten he added a mystery tincture and waited for the contents to mingle. When the crucibles were removed from the heat and
uncovered, the copper was found to have transmuted into silver, the lead was now gold. Once again Böttger by clever sleight
of hand had managed to cheat the executioners axe.

But the strain of living as a prisoner under such constant threats had by now taken a serious toll on his health. Fondness
for alcohol had caused irreparable physical damage. Contemporary reports stated that scarcely a day passed that Böttger was
sober. His eyesight was failing, almost certainly as a result of the experiments he had carried out with Tschirnhaus's burning
glasses. Most damaging of all, the prolonged exposure to the toxic fumes of chemicals—arsenic and mercury were commonly used
ingredients in gold-making experiments—had injured his lungs and poisoned him. Dr. Bartholmäi ministered to him with endless
preparations but there was little to be done. By early 1714 Böttger was becoming severely ill with symptoms that included
epileptic seizures and consumptive fever, and recurring depression was leading to increasing mental instability.

The king, hearing of the gravity of Böttger's condition, at last took mercy on his plight and on April 19, 1714, after twelve
and a half years' imprisonment in Dresden, the thirty-two-year-old Böttger was granted his freedom, with the proviso that
he should not leave Saxony for the rest of his life and should still continue his search for gold. Ill health now provided
Böttger with a far harsher and more effective prison than the one in which Augustus had held him captive for so long, and
when he was given the news that he was now a free man he burst into maniacal peals of laughter.

While his day-to-day life probably changed little, freedom, once he had recovered from his illness, allowed him a few extra
pleasures he had long been denied. His stepfather, Tiemann, had died in 1713 and Böttger was now able to send for his mother
and younger sister, who arrived together with his stepbrother. Böttger was able to introduce his sister to his friend Steinbrück,
whom she married in 1716.

As a prisoner he almost certainly had little privacy and virtually no opportunity to enjoy romantic liaisons, a fact that
can hardly have failed to compound his frustrations and unhappiness. One early biographer describes how in later years Böttger
was permitted to enjoy the charms of several mistresses, like a nobleman, although there seems to be no concrete evidence
for this claim. There are signs, however, that his housekeeper, Christine Elisabeth Klünger, was his mistress for several
years, though this relationship does not seem to have been particularly happy. Steinbrück recorded that she often took advantage
of Böttger's dependence on her, but even though she pestered Böttger to marry her he never did.

The king's long-awaited gesture did little to dispel Böttger's concerns for the factory's survival. Despite his impressive
arguments three years earlier, the improvements he had managed to engineer in the factory's financial fortunes proved as ephemeral
as the king's fondness for his various mistresses. The impoverished Augustus had been forced by his treasury to fund his porcelain
factory by borrowing money from private bankers. When the time came to repay the debts, instead of reimbursing them in gold
as they expected, Augustus decided it was more expedient to settle his debts in porcelain—his precious white gold. Prestigious
though the porcelain from the king's manufactory was, the commercially minded bankers of Dresden remained unconvinced that
the deal was a fair one, and halted all future payments until the matter could be resolved to their satisfaction.

By 1715, a smart new shop selling Meissen porcelain had opened in Dresden, where the chic could browse for choice items. Sales
were buoyant and production at the factory was increasing. But the storm clouds of discontent were gathering. The workers
at the Meissen factory had not been paid for four months, as far as anyone knew no more payments were promised either from
the treasury or the private financiers, and the king, once again in Warsaw, was impossible to reach.

The workers became so disgruntled and frantic for payment that they put down their tools and invaded the counting house at
the Albrechtsburg, refusing to return to work until such time as their demands were properly dealt with. Production was gravely
threatened.

Such a desperate situation called for desperate measures. Böttger, temporarily recovered from his illness, remained firmly
committed to the factory's survival. It was unthinkable that all he had labored to achieve should be lost for the want of
cash that the king so readily squandered on himself and his mistresses. He embarked on a characteristically dramatic course
of action.

Borrowing money at his own expense, he enlisted the services of a Dresden advocate, Vollhardt, and paid for him to go to court
at Warsaw to petition the king for the much needed financial aid. Böttger never imagined that such a costly venture would
go unnoticed, but the pleasure-loving Augustus was otherwise engaged, and he neglected to give an audience to Böttger's emissary.
Vollhardt waited hopelessly at court for nearly two years, finally returning to Dresden without once having been given the
chance to plead his case.

In the meantime, Böttger waited helplessly in Dresden. As his creditors demanded repayment for the loans he had incurred,
he was forced to pawn his luxurious furniture and borrow more money at ever higher rates of interest, on the understandable
assumption that this was just a stopgap until the money from Augustus arrived. Eventually there was nothing left to pawn,
nowhere else to turn to borrow, and Böttger's cash supply ran out altogether. Finding him unable to pay, his creditors took
their case to the judiciary. Böttger was convicted of insolvency and thrown ignominiously into the debtors' prison.

News that the factory's chief administrator was locked up in jail for debts incurred on behalf of the king's factory eventually
filtered through to the court and, finally, to the king himself. Augustus, outraged, demanded Böttger's freedom, promising
personally to settle all his debts. Böttger was thus released, but despite Augustus's grandiose gesture little actually changed.
Ignoring his pledge, the king never properly settled the outstanding debts. The physician Bartholmäi was left unpaid for decades
and his bill was eventually settled “in kind” with vases, teacups and caddies. A lucky few received the odd consignment of
porcelain in recompense for their outlay, but it was all very hit and miss. Böttger never received all the money he was owed.
The king's chief response to the drama was yet again to order the factory commission to sort out the mess.

In the years following his release from captivity, Böttger's physical and mental fragility had begun increasingly to be reflected
in his ability to run the factory. Even his amicable brother-in-law, the factory supervisor, Steinbrück, now complained to
the commission that Böttger's unreliability was proving damaging to the factory he had fought so hard to create. Perhaps recognizing
a germ of truth in these criticisms, and with little strength left for a fight with his long-standing friend, Böttger responded,
not with a forceful argument in his own defense as he had in 1711, but by confessing sadly to the king that many of the problems
had occurred “as a result of the illness that has overtaken me.”

On this note he unofficially relinquished the running of the factory, calling on Steinbrück, who was forced to abandon his
job as a supervisor at Meissen, to come to Dresden to look after the work there. Böttger, meanwhile, locked himself in his
laboratory, immersing himself in his experiments with colors, and returning once again to his quest for gold.

Genius, it is said, is only a greater aptitude for patience. In Böttger's case the tenacious genius that had fueled his early
discoveries began gradually to elude him. The search for gold and for a formula for under-glaze blue continued fitfully, and
in the latter case probably because of his ill health, unsuccessfully.

Inspiration, though, had not totally deserted him, and he achieved modest success with enamel colors and gilding. In between
sporadic bouts of illness he managed to produce a formula for fired gilding, which was far more hard-wearing and lustrous
than the cold-painted variety used on early wares. He discovered ways of creating silver-fired decoration as well as developing
a wonderfully rich pink luster that could be used to paint monochrome decorations or to adorn the inner surfaces of cups and
tea bowls. He developed formulas for one or two rather dull-colored enamels, including a deep green and dark red, but these
must still have seemed far from the brilliant clarity of tone for which he strove.

In other areas too Böttger had made technological advances. Turning his attentions to glassmaking, he had improved a recipe
for ruby glass, also considered a much coveted rarity, first developed by Kunckel in the seventeenth century. The ruby glass
made by Böttger incorporated powdered gold and its color only emerged as the mixture of glass and gold was exposed to heat.
It seems likely therefore that the exquisite ruby vases that Augustus proudly displayed in his treasury were a by-product
of research into enameling.

But still no successful recipe for underglaze blue had been found. Augustus had grown markedly more impatient at this failure
since his addition of the most precious items yet to his collection of Oriental porcelain.

On visits to the Prussian palace of Charlottenburg Augustus had noted and deeply envied the priceless collection of porcelain
vases acquired by the Prussian King Frederick I. But Frederick died in 1713 and his successor, Frederick William I, was a
puritanical and militaristic leader, far more interested in collecting soldiers than in collecting china; under his rule the
Prussian army was to double in size to a deadly force of 83,000 men. Augustus, seeing an opportunity, therefore dispatched
his agents to see if Frederick William would sell the collection. After lengthy negotiations a deal was struck. Augustus would
get the vases along with over a hundred other pieces of porcelain in return for payment to Frederick William of six hundred
dragoons from the mounted regiments of the Saxon army. The soldiers, regarded as little better than chattels, had no say in
the matter.

Thus on April 19, 1717, a regiment of six hundred men from Poland, Russia, Bohemia and Silesia who had been enlisted in Augustus's
army were the bargaining chips handed over to officials at Jüterbog. Saxon officials then proceeded to Charlottenburg, where
the eighteen monumental vases, together with seven smaller covered vases, five beakers, twenty colored plates, thirty-seven
large bowls, sixteen blue and white plates, and sundry blue and white dishes—151 pieces in all—were carefully packed and sent
to Dresden, where they were impatiently awaited by the king. The dragoon vases, and much of the rest of the collection, remain
in Dresden to this day.

The king's delight in this porcelain conquest heightened his disappointment in Böttger, for the dragoon vases were adorned
with consummate perfection in dazzling underglaze blue. Meissen, despite Böttger's promises, could not hold a candle to such
skill.

Sensing the king's dissatisfaction and feeling once again mortified at his failure, Böttger wrote to him in an attempt to
explain the difficulties and beg for his patience: “Who knows how long India [he meant China] manufactured porcelain before
they were able to deliver those beautiful pieces to Your Majesty.”