“Any French peasant can do that. First he takes the grapes, then he crushes them for their juice. He takes a fruit—a solid thing, growing on a vine—and makes it into a liquid. That’s alchemy itself, making that change. Then he stores it and lets the life within it change that juice into wine. Another liquid but one with quite different properties from the juice. Now I can go further. I have done another change, right here. I can make an essence from wine that is a hundred times stronger than wine, which burns at the sight of a flame, which cures a man of melancholy and watery humors. It is a
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