tell me, madame, what you inquire of me, is not the result of a
chance query, for two years ago you asked me the same questions,
and said then, that for a very long time this history of
Mithridates had occupied your mind."
"True, sir. The two favorite studies of my youth were botany and
mineralogy, and subsequently, when I learned that the use of
simples frequently explained the whole history of a people, and the
entire life of individuals in the East, as flowers betoken and
symbolize a love affair, I have regretted that I was not a man,
that I might have been a Flamel, a Fontana, or a Cabanis."
"And the more, madame," said Monte Cristo, "as the Orientals do
not confine themselves, as did Mithridates, to make a cuirass of
his poisons, but they also made them a dagger. Science becomes, in
their 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,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 ofbody, 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