LII. Toxicologie.

LII

Toxicology.

It was indeed Monsieur the Count of Monte Cristo who had just entered the house of Madame de Villefort, with the intention of returning the visit which the King's Attorney had paid him; and at the name, as may well be understood, the whole household had been thrown into commotion.

Madame de Villefort, who was in the salon when the count was announced, immediately sent for her son, so that the child might repeat his thanks to the count; and Edward, who for two days had heard nothing but talk of the great personage, hastened to come running, not out of obedience to his mother, not to thank the count, but out of curiosity and to make some remark by which he might slip in one of those witticisms which made his mother say: "Oh, the naughty child! But I must forgive him, he has so much wit!"

After the first customary civilities, the count inquired after Monsieur de Villefort.

"My husband is dining with the Chancellor," answered the young woman; "he has just left this moment, and he will greatly regret, I am sure, having been deprived of the happiness of seeing you."

Two visitors who had preceded the count in the salon, and who were devouring him with their eyes, withdrew after the reasonable time demanded alike by politeness and curiosity.

"By the way, what is your sister Valentine doing?" said Madame de Villefort to Edward; "let her be told, so that I may have the honor of presenting her to the count."

"You have a daughter, madame?" asked the count; "but she must be a child?"

"She is Monsieur de Villefort's daughter," replied the young woman; "a daughter of a first marriage, a tall and beautiful person."

"But melancholy," interrupted young Edward, tearing, to make a plume for his hat, the tail feathers of a magnificent macaw which was crying with pain upon its gilded perch.

Madame de Villefort contented herself with saying:

"Silence, Edward!

"This young scatterbrain is almost right, and repeats what I have many times been heard to say with sorrow, for Mademoiselle de Villefort is, despite all we can do to divert her, of a sad character and a taciturn humor which often injure the effect of her beauty. But she does not come; Edward, see why that is."

"Because they are looking for her where she is not."

"Where are they looking for her?"

"At grandfather Noirtier's."

"And she is not there, you think?"

"No, no, no, no, no, she is not there," answered Edward, singing the words.

"And where is she? If you know, say so."

"She is under the great chestnut tree," continued the wicked boy, presenting, despite his mother's cries, live flies to the parrot, which appeared very fond of that sort of game.

Madame de Villefort was extending her hand to ring, and to indicate to the maid the place where she would find Valentine, when the latter entered. She seemed sad indeed, and in looking at her attentively one might even have seen traces of tears in her eyes.

Valentine, whom we have, carried away by the rapidity of our narrative, presented to our readers without making her known, was a tall and slender young girl of nineteen, with light chestnut hair, dark blue eyes, and a languid gait imprinted with that exquisite distinction which characterized her mother; her white and tapering hands, her pearly neck, her cheeks marbled with fugitive colors, gave her at first sight the air of one of those beautiful Englishwomen who have been compared, rather poetically, in their bearing to swans beholding themselves in the water.

She entered, then, and, seeing near her mother the stranger of whom she had already heard so much, she bowed without any girlish affectation and without lowering her eyes, with a grace which redoubled the count's attention.

The latter rose.

"Mademoiselle de Villefort, my stepdaughter," said Madame de Villefort to Monte Cristo, leaning over her sofa and pointing out Valentine with her hand.

"And Monsieur the Count of Monte Cristo, king of China, emperor of Cochinchina," said the young rogue, casting a sly glance at his sister.

This time Madame de Villefort grew pale, and almost grew angry with this domestic plague who answered to the name of Edward; but, quite on the contrary, the count smiled and appeared to regard the child with complacency, which carried to its height the joy and enthusiasm of his mother.

"But, madame," resumed the count, renewing the conversation and looking by turns at Madame de Villefort and Valentine, "is it not possible that I have already had the honor of seeing you somewhere, you and mademoiselle? Just now I was already thinking of it; and when mademoiselle entered, the sight of her was one more flash thrown upon a confused memory, pardon the expression."

"That is unlikely, monsieur; Mademoiselle de Villefort cares little for the world, and we seldom go out," said the young woman.

"Nor is it in the world that I saw mademoiselle, as well as you, madame, as well as this charming mischief-maker. Parisian society, moreover, is absolutely unknown to me, for, I believe I have had the honor of telling you, I have been in Paris but a few days. No, if you will allow me to recall... wait..."

The count placed his hand upon his forehead as if to concentrate all his memories:

"No, it is out of doors... it is... I know not... but it seems to me that this memory is inseparable from a bright sun and a kind of religious festival... mademoiselle held flowers in her hand; the child was chasing a fine peacock in a garden, and you, madame, were under a trellised arbor.... Help me then, madame; do these things I tell you recall nothing?"

"No, indeed," answered Madame de Villefort; "and yet it seems to me, monsieur, that if I had met you anywhere, your memory would have remained present to my mind."

"Monsieur the count may perhaps have seen us in Italy," said Valentine timidly.

"Indeed, in Italy... that is possible," said Monte Cristo. "You have traveled in Italy, mademoiselle?"

"Madame and I went there two years ago. The doctors feared for my chest and had recommended the air of Naples. We passed through Bologna, through Perugia, and through Rome."

"Ah! that is true, mademoiselle," cried Monte Cristo, as if this simple indication sufficed to fix all his memories. "It is at Perugia, on the day of Corpus Christi, in the garden of the Post Inn, where chance brought us together, you, mademoiselle, your son, and myself, that I remember having had the honor of seeing you."

"I remember Perugia perfectly, monsieur, and the Post Inn, and the festival of which you speak," said Madame de Villefort; "but though I question my recollections, and, I am ashamed of my poor memory, I do not remember having had the honor of seeing you."

"That is strange, nor I either," said Valentine, raising her beautiful eyes to Monte Cristo.

"Ah! I remember it," said Edward.

"I will help you, madame," resumed the count. "The day had been scorching; you were waiting for horses which did not arrive because of the solemnity. Mademoiselle wandered into the depths of the garden, and your son disappeared, running after the bird."

"I caught it, mamma; you know," said Edward, "I pulled three feathers from its tail."

"You, madame, remained under the vine arbor; do you not recall, while you were seated on a stone bench and while, as I told you, Mademoiselle de Villefort and your son were absent, having conversed rather long with someone?"

"Yes truly, yes," said the young woman, blushing, "I remember, with a man wrapped in a long woolen cloak... with a physician, I believe."

"Exactly, madame; that man was I; for a fortnight I had been living in that inn; I had cured my valet of fever and my host of jaundice, so that I was regarded as a great doctor. We conversed long, madame, of different things, of Perugino, of Raphael, of manners, of costumes, of that famous aqua tofana, of which some persons, you had been told, I believe, still kept the secret at Perugia."

"Ah! that is true," said Madame de Villefort quickly, with a certain uneasiness; "I recall it."

"I no longer know what you told me in detail, madame," resumed the count with perfect tranquility, "but I remember perfectly that, sharing the general error concerning me, you consulted me about the health of Mademoiselle de Villefort."

"But yet, monsieur, you were really a physician, since you cured the sick."

"Molière or Beaumarchais would answer you, madame, that it is precisely because I was not one that I did not, I repeat, cure my sick, but that my sick were cured; I shall content myself with telling you that I have studied chemistry and natural science rather thoroughly, but as an amateur only... you understand."

At that moment six o'clock struck.

"There is six o'clock," said Madame de Villefort, visibly agitated; "will you not go, Valentine, to see if your grandfather is ready to dine?"

Valentine rose, and, bowing to the count, she left the room without uttering a word.

"Oh! my God, madame, would it then be on my account that you dismissed Mademoiselle de Villefort?" said the count when Valentine had gone.

"Not in the least," replied the young woman quickly; "but it is the hour at which we have poor Monsieur Noirtier partake of the sad meal which sustains his sorry existence. You know, monsieur, in what lamentable state is the father of my husband?"

"Yes, madame, Monsieur de Villefort spoke to me of it; a paralysis, I believe."

"Alas! yes; in this poor old man there is complete absence of movement, the soul alone keeps watch in this human machine, and even pale and trembling, like a lamp about to go out. But pardon, monsieur, for speaking to you of our domestic misfortunes; I interrupted you at the moment when you were telling me that you were a skilled chemist."

"Oh! I did not say that, madame," answered the count with a smile; "quite the contrary, I studied chemistry because, determined to live particularly in the Orient, I wished to follow the example of King Mithridates."

"_Mithridates, rex Ponticus_," said the scatterbrain, cutting out silhouettes in a magnificent album, "the same who breakfasted every morning with a cup of poison and cream."

"Edward! naughty child!" cried Madame de Villefort, snatching the mutilated book from her son's hands; "you are insupportable, you deafen us. Leave us, and go rejoin your sister Valentine at grandfather Noirtier's."

"The album..." said Edward.

"What, the album?"

"Yes: I want the album...."

"Why have you cut out the drawings?"

"Because it amuses me."

"Be off! be off!"

"I shall not go if the album is not given to me," said the child, settling himself in a large armchair, faithful to his habit of never yielding.

"Here, and leave us in peace," said Madame de Villefort.

And she gave the album to Edward, who departed accompanied by his mother.

The count followed Madame de Villefort with his eyes.

"Let us see if she will close the door behind him," he murmured.

Madame de Villefort closed the door with the greatest care behind the child; the count did not appear to notice it.

Then, casting a last look around her, the young woman came back to sit upon her couch.

"Permit me to observe to you, madame," said the count with that simplicity we know in him, "that you are very severe with this charming mischief-maker."

"It must be so, monsieur," replied Madame de Villefort with a true mother's assurance.

"It was his Cornelius Nepos that Monsieur Edward was reciting in speaking of King Mithridates," said the count, "and you interrupted him in a quotation which proves that his tutor has not lost his time with him, and that your son is far advanced for his age."

"The fact is, Monsieur the Count," answered the mother, gently flattered, "that he has great facility and learns everything he wishes. He has but one fault, which is to be very willful; but, speaking of what he said, do you believe, for example, Monsieur the Count, that Mithridates used those precautions, and that those precautions could be efficacious?"

"I believe it so well, madame, that I, who speak to you, used them in order not to be poisoned at Naples, at Palermo, and at Smyrna, that is to say, on three occasions when, without that precaution, I might have lost my life."

"And the means succeeded with you?"

"Perfectly."

"Yes, it is true; I recall that you already told me something similar at Perugia."

"Indeed!" said the count with admirably feigned surprise; "I do not remember it, myself."

"I was asking you if poisons acted equally and with a like energy upon men of the North and upon men of the South, and you answered me even that the cold and lymphatic temperaments of the Northerners did not present the same aptitude as the rich and energetic nature of the people of the South."

"That is true," said Monte Cristo; "I have seen Russians devour, without being incommoded, vegetable substances which would have infallibly killed a Neapolitan or an Arab."

"Thus, you believe, the result would be still more certain among us than in the Orient, and amid our fogs and our rains, a man would accustom himself more easily than under a hot latitude to this progressive absorption of poison?"

"Certainly; understood, however, that one is protected only against the poison to which one has accustomed oneself."

"Yes, I understand; and how would you accustom yourself, you, for example, or rather how have you accustomed yourself?"

"That is very easy. Suppose that you knew in advance of what poison one intended to make use against you.... Suppose that this poison were... brucine, for example...."

"Brucine is extracted from false angostura, I believe," said Madame de Villefort.

"Exactly, madame," answered Monte Cristo; "but I think there remains little for me to teach you; accept my compliments: such knowledge is rare in women."

"Oh! I confess," said Madame de Villefort, "I have the most violent passion for the occult sciences which speak to the imagination like a poetry, and resolve themselves into figures like an algebraic equation; but continue, I pray you: what you tell me interests me to the highest degree."

"Well," resumed Monte Cristo, "suppose that this poison were brucine, for example, and that you took one milligram the first day, two milligrams the second, well, at the end of ten days you would have one centigram; at the end of twenty days, increasing by another milligram, you would have three centigrams, that is to say, a dose which you would support without inconvenience, and which would already be very dangerous for another person who had not taken the same precautions as you; finally, at the end of a month, in drinking water from the same carafe, you would kill the person who had drunk that water at the same time as you, without noticing otherwise than by a simple uneasiness that there had been some venomous substance mixed with that water."

"You know no other antidote?"

"I know none."

"I had often read and reread that story of Mithridates," said Madame de Villefort pensively; "and I had taken it for a fable."

"No, madame; contrary to the habit of history, it is a truth. But what you tell me there, madame, what you ask me, is not the result of a capricious question, since two years ago already you put similar questions to me, and you tell me that for a long time that story of Mithridates had preoccupied you."

"That is true, monsieur; the two favorite studies of my youth were botany and mineralogy; and then, when I learned later that the use of simples often explained the whole history of peoples and the whole life of individuals of the Orient, as flowers explain all their amorous thought, I regretted not being a man to become a Flamel, a Fontana, or a Cabanis."

"All the more, madame," resumed Monte Cristo, "that the Orientals do not confine themselves, like Mithridates, to making for themselves a cuirass of poisons, they also make for themselves a dagger; science becomes in their hands not only a defensive weapon, but very often an offensive one; the one serves against their physical sufferings, the other against their enemies; with opium, with belladonna, with false angostura, with snakewood, with cherry-laurel, they lull to sleep those who would awaken them. There is not one of those women, Egyptian, Turkish, or Greek, whom here you call good wives, who does not know, in matters of chemistry, enough to stupefy a physician, and in matters of psychology enough to terrify a confessor."

"Indeed!" said Madame de Villefort, whose eyes shone with a strange fire at this conversation.

"Eh! my God! yes, madame," continued Monte Cristo; "the secret dramas of the Orient are thus knit and unknit, from the plant which makes one love to the plant which makes one die; from the draught which opens heaven to the one which plunges a man into hell. There are as many nuances of all kinds as there are caprices and bizarreries in human nature, physical and moral; and I shall say more, the art of those chemists knows admirably how to adapt the remedy and the ill to its needs of love or to its desires of vengeance."

"But, monsieur," resumed the young woman, "those Oriental societies amid which you have passed a part of your existence are then fantastic like the tales which come to us from their beautiful country? a man may then be suppressed there with impunity? it is then in reality the Bagdad or the Bassora of Monsieur Galland? The sultans and the viziers who govern those societies, and who constitute what is called in France the government, are then seriously Haroun-al-Raschids and Giaffars who not only pardon a poisoner, but even make him first minister if the crime has been ingenious, and who, in that case, have its history engraved in letters of gold to amuse themselves in their hours of boredom?"

"No, madame, the fantastic no longer exists even in the Orient: there too, disguised under other names and hidden under other costumes, are police commissioners, examining magistrates, king's attorneys, and experts. They hang there, they behead there, and they impale there very agreeably the criminals; but these, as clever defrauders, have known how to elude human justice and assure the success of their enterprises by skillful combinations. With us, a ninny possessed by the demon of hatred or of cupidity, who has an enemy to destroy or a grandparent to annihilate, goes off to a grocer, gives him a false name which causes him to be discovered much better than his true name, and buys, under pretext that the rats keep him from sleeping, five or six grams of arsenic; if he is very clever, he goes to five or six grocers, and is only five or six times better recognized; then, when he possesses his specific, he administers to his enemy, to his grandparent, a dose of arsenic which would kill a mammoth or a mastodon, and which, without rhyme or reason, makes the victim utter howls that throw the whole neighborhood into commotion. Then arrives a swarm of police agents and gendarmes, they send for a physician who opens the dead man and gathers in his stomach and his bowels the arsenic by the spoonful. The next day, a hundred newspapers relate the fact with the name of the victim and of the murderer. From that very evening, the grocer or grocers comes or come to say: 'It is I who sold the arsenic to monsieur.' And rather than not recognize the buyer, they would recognize twenty; then the foolish criminal is taken, imprisoned, interrogated, confronted, confounded, condemned, and guillotined; or if it is a woman of some worth, she is shut up for life. That is how your Northerners understand chemistry, madame. Desrues, however, was stronger than that, I must confess."

"What would you have! monsieur," said the young woman, laughing, "one does what one can. Everyone has not the secret of the Medici or of the Borgia."

"Now," said the count, shrugging his shoulders, "will you that I tell you what causes all those ineptitudes? It is that on your stages, from what I could judge at least in reading the plays acted there, one always sees people swallow the contents of a vial or bite the bezel of a ring and fall stone dead: five minutes after, the curtain falls; the spectators are dispersed. One is ignorant of the consequences of the murder; one never sees either the police commissioner with his scarf, or the corporal with his four men, and that authorizes many a poor brain to believe that things pass thus. But go a little out of France, go either to Aleppo or to Cairo, or only to Naples and to Rome, and you will see pass in the street people upright, fresh, and rosy, of whom the Devil on Two Sticks, if he brushed you with his cloak, could tell you: 'This gentleman has been poisoned for three weeks, and he will be quite dead in a month.'"

"But then," said Madame de Villefort, "they have then rediscovered the secret of that famous aqua tofana which I was told was lost at Perugia."

"Eh! my God! madame, does anything get lost among men! The arts shift and go round the world; things change name, that is all, and the vulgar are deceived by it; but it is always the same result, the poison bears particularly upon such or such organ; one upon the stomach, another upon the brain, another upon the intestines. Well, the poison determines a cough, that cough a pleurisy or such other disease catalogued in the book of science, which does not prevent it from being perfectly mortal, and which, were it not so, would become so thanks to the remedies administered by the naive physicians, in general very poor chemists, and which will turn for or against the disease, as you please, and there is a man killed with art and in all the rules, upon whom justice has nothing to learn, as said a horrible chemist of my friends, the excellent Abbé Adelmonte of Taormina, in Sicily, who had much studied those national phenomena."

"It is frightful, but it is admirable," said the young woman, motionless with attention; "I believed, I confess, all those stories of the inventions of the Middle Ages?"

"Yes, no doubt, but which have still been perfected in our days. To what then would serve time, encouragements, medals, crosses, Montyon prizes, if not to lead society toward its greater perfection? Now, man will not be perfect until he knows how to create and destroy like God; he already knows how to destroy, that is half the way made."

"So," resumed Madame de Villefort, invariably returning to her aim, "the poisons of the Borgia, of the Medici, of René, of Ruggieri, and later probably of Baron de Trenck, of which modern drama and the novel have made such abuse...."

"Were objects of art, madame, nothing else," answered the count. "Do you believe that the true scholar addresses himself banally to the individual himself? Not at all. Science loves ricochets, feats of skill, fantasy, if one may say so. Thus, for example this excellent Abbé Adelmonte, of whom I spoke to you just now, had made, in that regard, astonishing experiments."

"Indeed!"

"Yes, I will cite you but one. He had a very fine garden full of vegetables, flowers, and fruits; among those vegetables, he chose the most honest of all, a cabbage, for example. For three days he watered this cabbage with a solution of arsenic; the third day, the cabbage fell sick and yellowed, it was the moment to cut it; to all it appeared ripe and retained its honest appearance: to Abbé Adelmonte alone it was poisoned. Then, he brought the cabbage home, took a rabbit—Abbé Adelmonte had a collection of rabbits, cats, and guinea pigs which yielded in nothing to his collection of vegetables, flowers, and fruits—Abbé Adelmonte therefore took a rabbit and made it eat a cabbage leaf, the rabbit died. What examining magistrate would dare to find fault with that, and what king's attorney has ever thought to draw up against Monsieur Magendie or Monsieur Flourens a bill of indictment on account of the rabbits, guinea pigs, and cats they have killed? None. So the rabbit is dead without justice troubling itself. This dead rabbit, Abbé Adelmonte had his cook gut, and threw the intestines upon a dungheap. Upon this dungheap there was a hen, she pecked at those intestines, fell sick in her turn, and died the next day. At the moment she was struggling in the convulsions of agony, a vulture passed (there are many vultures in Adelmonte's country), that one swooped upon the corpse, carried it off upon a rock, and dined on it. Three days after, the poor vulture, who since that meal had felt constantly indisposed, felt himself seized with a dizziness at the height of the clouds; he rolled in the void and came heavily falling into your fishpond; the pike, the eel, and the moray greedily ate—you know that—they bit the vulture.... Well, suppose that the next day there is served upon your table that eel, that pike, or that moray, poisoned at the fourth generation, your guest, he, will be poisoned at the fifth and die after eight or ten days of bowel pains, heart ailments, abscesses at the pylorus. They will perform the autopsy, and the physicians will say: 'The subject died of a tumor on the liver or of typhoid fever.'"

"But," said Madame de Villefort, "all those circumstances, which you link one to another, may be broken by the slightest accident; the vulture may not pass in time or fall a hundred paces from the fishpond."

"Ah! that is exactly where the art lies: to be a great chemist in the Orient, one must direct chance; one arrives there."

Madame de Villefort was thoughtful and listened.

"But," said she, "arsenic is indelible; however it is absorbed, it will be found again in the body of the man, from the moment it has entered in sufficient quantity to cause death."

"Good!" cried Monte Cristo; "good! that is exactly what I said to that good Adelmonte.

"He reflected, smiled, and answered me with a Sicilian proverb, which is also, I believe, a French proverb: 'My child, the world was not made in a day, but in seven; come back on Sunday.'

"The following Sunday, I returned; instead of having watered his cabbage with arsenic, he had watered it with a solution of salt based on strychnine, _strychnos colubrina_, as the learned say. This time the cabbage did not look the least bit sick; also the rabbit suspected nothing, also five minutes after the rabbit was dead; the hen ate the rabbit, and the next day she was deceased. Then we did the vultures, we carried off the hen and opened her. This time all the particular symptoms had disappeared, and there remained only the general symptoms. No particular indication in any organ; exasperation of the nervous system, that was all, and trace of cerebral congestion, no more; the hen had not been poisoned, she had died of apoplexy. It is a rare case among hens, I know well, but very common among men."

Madame de Villefort appeared more and more thoughtful.

"It is fortunate," said she, "that such substances can be prepared only by chemists, for, in truth, half the world would poison the other."

"By chemists or by persons occupied with chemistry," answered Monte Cristo negligently.

"And then," said Madame de Villefort, tearing herself, with effort, from her thoughts, "however skillfully prepared it may be, crime is still crime: and if it escapes human investigation, it does not escape the eye of God. The Orientals are stronger than we on questions of conscience, and have prudently suppressed hell; that is all."

"Eh! madame, this is a scruple which must naturally arise in an honest soul like yours, but which would soon be uprooted by reasoning. The bad side of human thought will always be summed up by that paradox of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, you know: 'The mandarin whom one kills five thousand leagues away by lifting the tip of one's finger.' Life passes in doing such things, and intelligence exhausts itself in dreaming them. You find very few people who go brutally to plant a knife in the heart of their fellow man or who administer, to make him disappear from the surface of the globe, that quantity of arsenic we spoke of just now. That is really an eccentricity or a stupidity. To arrive there, the blood must heat to thirty-six degrees, the pulse beat at ninety pulsations, and the soul leave its ordinary limits; but if, passing, as is practiced in philology, from the word to the mitigated synonym, you make a simple elimination; instead of committing an ignoble assassination, if you purely and simply remove from your path him who hinders you, and that without shock, without violence, without the apparatus of those sufferings which, becoming a torture, make of the victim a martyr, and of him who acts a carnifex in the full force of the word; if there is neither blood, nor howls, nor contortions, nor above all that horrible and compromising instantaneity of accomplishment, then you escape the blow of human law which says to you: 'Do not trouble society!' That is how proceed and succeed the people of the Orient, grave and phlegmatic personages, who trouble themselves little with questions of time in conjunctions of a certain importance."

"There remains conscience," said Madame de Villefort in an moved voice and with a stifled sigh.

"Yes," said Monte Cristo; "yes, happily, there remains conscience, without which one would be very unhappy. After every somewhat vigorous action, it is conscience which saves us, for it furnishes us a thousand good excuses of which we alone are judges; and those reasons, however excellent they may be to preserve us sleep, would perhaps be mediocre before a tribunal to preserve us life. Thus Richard III, for example, must have been marvelously served by conscience after the suppression of the two children of Edward IV, in effect, he could say to himself: 'Those two children of a cruel and persecuting king, and who had inherited the vices of their father, which I alone knew how to recognize in their juvenile inclinations; those two children hindered me from making the happiness of the English people, whose unhappiness they would infallibly have made.' Thus was served by her conscience Lady Macbeth, who wished, whatever Shakespeare may have said, to give a throne, not to her husband, but to her son. Ah! maternal love is so great a virtue, so powerful a motive, that it excuses many things; also, after the death of Duncan, Lady Macbeth would have been very unhappy without her conscience."

Madame de Villefort drank with avidity these frightful maxims and these horrible paradoxes uttered by the count with that naive irony which was peculiar to him.

Then, after a moment of silence:

"Do you know," said she, "Monsieur the Count, that you are a terrible arguer, and that you see the world under a somewhat livid light! Is it then by looking at humanity through alembics and retorts that you have judged it such? For you were right, you are a great chemist, and that elixir which you had this son of mine take, and which so rapidly recalled him to life...."

"Oh! do not trust to that, madame," said Monte Cristo; "one drop of that elixir sufficed to recall to life this child who was dying, but three drops would have driven the blood to his lungs in a way to give him heart palpitations; six would have cut off his breathing, and caused a syncope much graver than that in which he was; ten, finally, would have struck him dead. You know, madame, how I quickly drew him away from those flasks which he had the imprudence to touch?"

"It is then a terrible poison?"

"Oh! my God, no! First, admit this, that the word poison does not exist, since one makes use in medicine of the most violent poisons, which become, by the way they are administered, salutary remedies."

"What was it then?"

"It was a learned preparation of my friend, this excellent Abbé Adelmonte, and of which he taught me to make use."

"Oh!" said Madame de Villefort, "that must be an excellent antispasmodic."

"Sovereign, madame, you have seen it," answered the count; "and I make frequent use of it, with all possible prudence, of course," he added, laughing.

"I believe it," replied Madame de Villefort in the same tone; "as for me, so nervous and so apt to faint, I should need a Doctor Adelmonte to invent me means of breathing freely and reassuring me on the fear I feel of dying one fine day suffocated. Meanwhile, as the thing is difficult to find in France, and your abbé is probably not disposed to make the journey to Paris for me, I content myself with Monsieur Planche's antispasmodics, and mint and Hoffman's drops play a great role with me. See, here are pastilles which I have made up expressly; they are double dose."

Monte Cristo opened the tortoiseshell box which the young woman presented to him, and inhaled the odor of the pastilles like an amateur worthy of appreciating that preparation.

"They are exquisite," said he; "but subject to the necessity of swallowing, a function which is often impossible to accomplish on the part of the fainting person. I prefer my specific."

"But, certainly, I too should prefer it according to the effects I have seen, especially; but it is a secret no doubt, and I am not indiscreet enough to ask it of you."

"But I, madame," said Monte Cristo, rising, "am gallant enough to offer it to you."

"Oh! monsieur."

"Only remember one thing: that in small dose it is a remedy, in large dose it is a poison. One drop restores life, as you have seen; five or six would kill infallibly, and in a manner the more terrible in that, diluted in a glass of wine, they would not change its taste at all. But I stop, madame, I should almost have the air of advising you."

Half past six had just struck, they announced a friend of Madame de Villefort, who had come to dine with her.

"If I had the honor of seeing you for the third or fourth time, Monsieur the Count, instead of seeing you for the second," said Madame de Villefort; "if I had the honor of being your friend, instead of simply having the happiness of being your debtor, I should insist upon keeping you to dine, and I should not let myself be beaten by a first refusal."

"A thousand thanks, madame," answered Monte Cristo; "I myself have an engagement which I cannot miss. I have promised to take to the theater a Greek princess, a friend of mine, who has not yet seen the Grand Opera, and who counts on me to take her there."

"Go, monsieur, but do not forget my recipe."

"How so, madame! it would be necessary for that to forget the hour of conversation which I have just passed near you: which is quite impossible."

Monte Cristo bowed and went out.

Madame de Villefort remained thoughtful.

"There is a strange man," said she; "and he has all the air of being called, in his baptismal name, Adelmonte."

As for Monte Cristo, the result had surpassed his expectation.

"Come," said he, as he went away; "here is good soil, I am convinced that the grain one lets fall there does not miscarry."

And the next day, faithful to his promise, he sent the requested recipe.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”