hands, not only a defensive weapon, but still more frequently an
offensive one; the one serves against all their physical sufferings,
the other against all their enemies. With opium, belladonna, brucaea,
snake-wood, and the cherry-laurel, they put to sleep all who stand in
their way. There is not one of those women, Egyptian, Turkish, or
Greek, whom here you call 'good women,' who do not know how, by means of
chemistry, to stupefy a doctor, and in psychology to amaze a confessor."
"Really," said Madame de Villefort, whose eyes sparkled with strange
fire at this conversation.
"Oh, yes, indeed, madame," continued Monte Cristo, "the secret dramas
of the East begin with a love philtre and end with a death potion--begin
with paradise and end with--hell. There are as many elixirs of every
kind as there are caprices and peculiarities in the physical and moral
nature of humanity; and I will say further--the art of these chemists
is capable with the utmost precision to accommodate and proportion the
remedy and the bane to yearnings for love or desires for vengeance."
"But, sir," remarked the young woman, "these Eastern societies, in
the midst of which you have passed a portion of your existence, are
as fantastic as the tales that come from their strange land. A man can
easily be put out of the way there, then; it is, indeed, the Bagdad and
Bassora of the 'Thousand and One Nights.' The sultans and viziers who
rule over society there, and who constitute what in France we call the
government, are really Haroun-al-Raschids and Giaffars, who not only
pardon a poisoner, but even make him a prime minister, if his crime has
been an ingenious one, and who, under such circumstances, have the whole
story written in letters of gold, to divert their hours of idleness and
ennui."
"By no means, madame; the fanciful exists no longer in the East. There,
disguised under other names, and concealed under other costumes, are
police agents, magistrates, attorneys-general, and bailiffs. They
hang, behead, and impale their criminals in the most agreeable possible
manner; but some of these, like clever rogues, have contrived to escape
human justice, and succeed in their fraudulent enterprises by cunning
stratagems. Amongst us a simpleton, possessed by the demon of hate or
cupidity, who has an enemy to destroy, or some near relation to dispose
of, goes straight to the grocer's or druggist's, gives a false name,
which leads more easily to his detection than his real one, and under
the pretext that the rats prevent him from sleeping, purchases five or
six grammes of arsenic--if he is really a cunning fellow, he goes to
five or six different druggists or grocers, and thereby becomes only
five or six times more easily traced;--then, when he has acquired his
specific, he administers duly to his enemy, or near kinsman, a dose of
arsenic which would make a mammoth or mastodon burst, and which, without
rhyme or reason, makes his victim utter groans which alarm the entire
neighborhood. Then arrive a crowd of policemen and constables. They
fetch a doctor, who opens the dead body, and collects from the entrails
and stomach a quantity of arsenic in a spoon. Next day a hundred
newspapers relate the fact, with the names of the victim and the
murderer. The same evening the grocer or grocers, druggist or druggists,
come and say, 'It was I who sold the arsenic to the gentleman;' and
rather than not recognize the guilty purchaser, they will recognize
twenty. Then the foolish criminal is taken, imprisoned, interrogated,
confronted, confounded, condemned, and cut off by hemp or steel; or if
she be a woman of any consideration, they lock her up for life. This
is the way in which you Northerns understand chemistry, madame. Desrues
was, however, I must confess, more skilful."
"What would you have, sir?" said the lady, laughing; "we do what we can.
All the world has not the secret of the Medicis or the Borgias."
"Now," replied the count, shrugging his shoulders, "shall I tell you the
cause of all these stupidities? It is because, at your theatres, by what
at least I could judge by reading the pieces they play, they see persons
swallow the contents of a phial, or suck the button of a ring, and
fall dead instantly. Five minutes afterwards the curtain falls, and the
spectators depart. They are ignorant of the consequences of the murder;
they see neither the police commissary with his badge of office, nor the
corporal with his four men; and so the poor fools believe that the whole
thing is as easy as lying. But go a little way from France--go either
to Aleppo or Cairo, or only to Naples or Rome, and you will see people
passing by you in the streets--people erect, smiling, and fresh-colored,
of whom Asmodeus, if you were holding on by the skirt of his mantle,
would say, 'That man was poisoned three weeks ago; he will be a dead man
in a month.'"
"Then," remarked Madame de Villefort, "they have again discovered the
secret of the famous aquatofana that they said was lost at Perugia."
"Ah, but madame, does mankind ever lose anything? The arts change about
and make a tour of the world; things take a different name, and the
vulgar do not follow them--that is all; but there is always the same
result. Poisons act particularly on some organ or another--one on the
stomach, another on the brain, another on the intestines. Well, the
poison brings on a cough, the cough an inflammation of the lungs, or
some other complaint catalogued in the book of science, which, however,
by no means precludes it from being decidedly mortal; and if it were
not, would be sure to become so, thanks to the remedies applied by
foolish doctors, who are generally bad chemists, and which will act in
favor of or against the malady, as you please; and then there is a human
being killed according to all the rules of art and skill, and of
whom justice learns nothing, as was said by a terrible chemist of my
acquaintance, the worthy Abbe Adelmonte of Taormina, in Sicily, who has
studied these national phenomena very profoundly."
"It is quite frightful, but deeply interesting," said the young lady,
motionless with attention. "I thought, I must confess, that these tales,
were inventions of the Middle Ages."
"Yes, no doubt, but improved upon by ours. What is the use of time,
rewards of merit, medals, crosses, Monthyon prizes, if they do not lead
society towards more complete perfection? Yet man will never be perfect
until he learns to create and destroy; he does know how to destroy, and
that is half the battle."
"So," added Madame de Villefort, constantly returning to her object,
"the poisons of the Borgias, the Medicis, the Renes, the Ruggieris,
and later, probably, that of Baron de Trenck, whose story has been so
misused by modern drama and romance"--
"Were objects of art, madame, and nothing more," replied the count. "Do
you suppose that the real savant addresses himself stupidly to the mere
individual? By no means. Science loves eccentricities, leaps and bounds,
trials of strength, fancies, if I may be allowed so to term them. Thus,
for instance, the excellent Abbe Adelmonte, of whom I spoke just now,
made in this way some marvellous experiments."
"Really?"
"Yes; I will mention one to you. He had a remarkably fine garden, full
of vegetables, flowers, and fruit. From amongst these vegetables he
selected the most simple--a cabbage, for instance. For three days he
watered this cabbage with a distillation of arsenic; on the third, the
cabbage began to droop and turn yellow. At that moment he cut it. In the
eyes of everybody it seemed fit for table, and preserved its wholesome
appearance. It was only poisoned to the Abbe Adelmonte. He then took the
cabbage to the room where he had rabbits--for the Abbe Adelmonte had
a collection of rabbits, cats, and guinea-pigs, fully as fine as his
collection of vegetables, flowers, and fruit. Well, the Abbe Adelmonte
took a rabbit, and made it eat a leaf of the cabbage. The rabbit died.
What magistrate would find, or even venture to insinuate, anything
against this? What procureur has ever ventured to draw up an accusation
against M. Magendie or M. Flourens, in consequence of the rabbits, cats,
and guinea-pigs they have killed?--not one. So, then, the rabbit dies,
and justice takes no notice. This rabbit dead, the Abbe Adelmonte has
its entrails taken out by his cook and thrown on the dunghill; on this
dunghill is a hen, who, pecking these intestines, is in her turn taken
ill, and dies next day. At the moment when she is struggling in the
convulsions of death, a vulture is flying by (there are a good many
vultures in Adelmonte's country); this bird darts on the dead fowl,
and carries it away to a rock, where it dines off its prey. Three days
afterwards, this poor vulture, which has been very much indisposed since
that dinner, suddenly feels very giddy while flying aloft in the
clouds, and falls heavily into a fish-pond. The pike, eels, and carp eat
greedily always, as everybody knows--well, they feast on the vulture.
Now suppose that next day, one of these eels, or pike, or carp, poisoned
at the fourth remove, is served up at your table. Well, then, your guest
will be poisoned at the fifth remove, and die, at the end of eight
or ten days, of pains in the intestines, sickness, or abscess of the
pylorus. The doctors open the body and say with an air of profound
learning, 'The subject has died of a tumor on the liver, or of typhoid
fever!'"
"But," remarked Madame de Villefort, "all these circumstances which
you link thus to one another may be broken by the least accident; the
vulture may not see the fowl, or may fall a hundred yards from the
fish-pond."
"Ah, that is where the art comes in. To be a great chemist in the
East, one must direct chance; and this is to be achieved."--Madame de
Villefort was in deep thought, yet listened attentively. "But,"
she exclaimed, suddenly, "arsenic is indelible, indestructible; in
whatsoever way it is absorbed, it will be found again in the body of the
victim from the moment when it has been taken in sufficient quantity to
cause death."
"Precisely so," cried Monte Cristo--"precisely so; and this is what I
said to my worthy Adelmonte. He reflected, smiled, and replied to me by
a Sicilian proverb, which I believe is also a French proverb, 'My son,
the world was not made in a day--but in seven. Return on Sunday.' On
the Sunday following I did return to him. Instead of having watered his
cabbage with arsenic, he had watered it this time with a solution of
salts, having their basis in strychnine, strychnos colubrina, as the
learned term it. Now, the cabbage had not the slightest appearance of
disease in the world, and the rabbit had not the smallest distrust; yet,
five minutes afterwards, the rabbit was dead. The fowl pecked at the
rabbit, and the next day was a dead hen. This time we were the
vultures; so we opened the bird, and this time all special symptoms had
disappeared, there were only general symptoms. There was no peculiar
indication in any organ--an excitement of the nervous system--that was
it; a case of cerebral congestion--nothing more. The fowl had not been
poisoned--she had died of apoplexy. Apoplexy is a rare disease among
fowls, I believe, but very common among men." Madame de Villefort
appeared more and more thoughtful.
"It is very fortunate," she observed, "that such substances could only
be prepared by chemists; otherwise, all the world would be poisoning
each other."
"By chemists and persons who have a taste for chemistry," said Monte
Cristo carelessly.
"And then," said Madame de Villefort, endeavoring by a struggle, and
with effort, to get away from her thoughts, "however skilfully it is
prepared, crime is always crime, and if it avoid human scrutiny, it does
not escape the eye of God. The Orientals are stronger than we are in
cases of conscience, and, very prudently, have no hell--that is the
point."
"Really, madame, this is a scruple which naturally must occur to a pure
mind like yours, but which would easily yield before sound reasoning.
The bad side of human thought will always be defined by the paradox of
Jean Jacques Rousseau,--you remember,--the mandarin who is killed five
hundred leagues off by raising the tip of the finger. Man's whole
life passes in doing these things, and his intellect is exhausted by
reflecting on them. You will find very few persons who will go and
brutally thrust a knife in the heart of a fellow-creature, or will
administer to him, in order to remove him from the surface of the globe
on which we move with life and animation, that quantity of arsenic of
which we just now talked. Such a thing is really out of rule--eccentric
or stupid. To attain such a point, the blood must be heated to
thirty-six degrees, the pulse be, at least, at ninety, and the
feelings excited beyond the ordinary limit. But suppose one pass, as is
permissible in philology, from the word itself to its softened synonym,
then, instead of committing an ignoble assassination you make an
'elimination;' you merely and simply remove from your path the
individual who is in your way, and that without shock or violence,
without the display of the sufferings which, in the case of becoming a
punishment, make a martyr of the victim, and a butcher, in every sense
of the word, of him who inflicts them. Then there will be no blood, no
groans, no convulsions, and above all, no consciousness of that horrid
and compromising moment of accomplishing the act,--then one escapes the
clutch of the human law, which says, 'Do not disturb society!' This
is the mode in which they manage these things, and succeed in Eastern
climes, where there are grave and phlegmatic persons who care very
