The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (101 page)

‘That’s true, Monsieur. When I was young, my two favourite subjects were the study of botany and of mineralogy. Later, when I realized that one could often explain all the history of the nations and all the lives of individuals in the East by their use of herbs and simples, just as flowers explain all their concepts of love, I regretted
not being a man so that I could follow the example of Flamel, Fontana or Cabanis.’
²

‘All the more so, Madame,’ Monte Cristo continued, ‘since the Orientals are not content, like Mithridates, to make a shield of poison, but also use it as a dagger. In their hands, this science becomes not only a defensive weapon but often an offensive one. The one serves to protect them against physical suffering, the other against their enemies. With opium, belladonna, strychnine,
bois de couleuvre
or cherry-laurel, they put to sleep those who would rouse them. There is not one of those Egyptian, Turkish or Greek women whom you call here wise women or spaewives, who does not know enough of chemistry to astound a doctor and of psychology to appal a confessor.’

‘Really!’ Mme de Villefort exclaimed, her eyes shining with a strange light as she listened.

‘Yes, indeed, Madame!’ Monte Cristo continued. ‘This is how the secret dramas of the Orient are woven and unwoven, from the plant that induces love to the one that kills, from the draught that opens the heavens to the one that plunges a man into hell. There are as many subtle distinctions of all kinds as there are whims and peculiarities in the moral and physical nature of man. I would even say that the art of these chemists can admirably supply the ill and the cure to his need for love or desire for revenge.’

‘But, Monsieur, are these countries in which you have spent part of your life really as fantastic as the tales that come out of them? Can a person be disposed of there with impunity? Are Baghdad and Basra truly as Monsieur Galland
³
described them? Are you seriously telling me that the sultans and viziers who rule those peoples, making up what we here in France call the government, are like Haroun al-Rashid or Giaffar – men who not only forgive a poisoner, but will even appoint him prime minister if his crime is ingenious enough and, in that case, have the story set down in gold letters to amuse them in their idle moments?’

‘No, Madame, the marvellous no longer exists even in the East. There, too, disguised under other names and concealed in different costumes, they have police commissioners, investigating magistrates, crown prosecutors and other experts. Criminals there are very pleasantly hanged, decapitated or impaled; but, being clever fraudsters, they have managed to outwit human justice and ensure the success of their designs by skilful plotting. In our country, when
some fool is seized with the demon of hatred or greed, when he has an enemy to destroy or a grandparent to obliterate, he goes to a grocer, gives a false name (that will identify him more surely than his real one) and, pretending that the rats are keeping him awake, he buys five or six grammes of arsenic. If he is very clever, he goes to five or six grocers, so he will be five or six times more easily detected. Then, once he has his medicine, he administers a dose of arsenic to his enemy or his grandparent that would kill a mammoth or a mastodon, and this, without rhyme or reason, causes the victim to emit cries that put the whole district into a turmoil. At that, a crowd of policemen and gendarmes arrives. They send for a doctor who cuts the dead man open and takes arsenic by the spoonful out of his stomach and his entrails. The next day, a hundred newspapers report the matter with the name of the victim and the murderer. The very same evening, the grocer – or grocers – come and announce: “I sold this gentleman the arsenic.” They would identify twenty purchasers, rather than not identify this one. So the foolish criminal is caught, imprisoned, interrogated, confronted, confounded, condemned and guillotined. Or, if it is a woman of some status, then she is sentenced to life imprisonment. This is the understanding you northerners have of chemistry, Madame; though I must admit Desrues
⁴
was better than that.’

‘What do you expect, Monsieur!’ the young woman said with a laugh. ‘We do what we can. Not everyone knows the secrets of the Medici or the Borgias.’

The count shrugged his shoulders: ‘Would you like me now to tell you the cause of all this ineptitude? It is because in your theatres, as far as I can tell by reading the plays that they put on there, you always see people swallowing the contents of a flask or biting the bezel of a ring, then dropping, stone dead: five minutes later, the curtain falls and the audience leaves. No one knows the consequences of the murder, one never sees the police commissioner with his scarf, or the corporal of the guard with his four men, and as a result a lot of weak brains imagine that this is the way that things happen. But if you just go a step outside France, to Aleppo or Cairo, or even no further than Naples or Rome, you will see people walking along the street, upright, fresh-faced and ruddy with health, of whom the devil, were he to touch you with his cloak, could tell you: “This man has been poisoned for three weeks and he will be completely dead in a month.” ’

‘In that case,’ Mme de Villefort said, ‘they have rediscovered the secret of that famous
aqua tofana
which was said to have been lost in Perugia.’

‘Come, come, Madame, is anything ever lost to mankind? The arts and sciences travel around the world, things change their name, that’s all, and ordinary people are deceived by it; the outcome is always the same. Poisons will particularly affect one organ or another: the stomach, the brain, the intestines. Well, then: a poison can give rise to a cough and that cough, in turn, to a pneumonia or some other illness recognized by medical science – which does not prevent it from being quite deadly; or, if it was not already, from becoming so thanks to the remedies administered by ignorant doctors, who are generally very poor chemists, remedies that will favour the illness or impede it, as you wish. The result: a man artistically killed in accordance with the rules, about whose death the law has nothing to discover, in the words of one of my friends, that fearful and excellent chemist Abbé Adelmonte of Taormina, in Sicily, who had made an exhaustive study of these phenomena.’

‘That’s terrifying, but wonderful,’ said the young woman, riveted to the spot. ‘I must admit that I had always thought such things to be inventions from the Middle Ages.’

‘So they are, but perfected in our own time. What do you suppose is the point of time, encouragement, medals, awards and the Prix Montyon, except to bring society closer to perfection? Mankind will not be perfect until it can create and destroy like God. It can already destroy: that’s half the battle.’

‘What you mean,’ Mme de Villefort continued, always coming back to what interested her, ‘is that the poisons of the Borgias and the Medicis, the Renés, the Ruggieris and probably later the Baron de Trenk,
⁵
so badly treated in modern drama and novels…’

‘Were simply works of art, Madame, nothing more,’ said the count. ‘Do you think the true scientist is crudely concerned with the individual himself? Not so. Science loves the oblique approach,
tours de force
, imagination if you like. Take the worthy Abbé Adelmonte, whom I mentioned a moment ago: he made some astonishing experiments in this field.’

‘Really!’

‘Yes. Let me give you just one example. He had a splendid garden, full of vegetables, flowers and fruit. From among his vegetables he would choose the least exotic, most digestible of all: say, a cabbage.
For three days he would water this cabbage with a solution of arsenic. On the third day, the cabbage would fall sick and wither: this was the moment to cut it. Everyone saw it as ripe and healthy, only Abbé Adelmonte knew it was poisoned. So he took the cabbage home, got a rabbit – he had a collection of rabbits, cats and guineapigs as magnificent as his collection of vegetables, flowers and fruit – and made the rabbit eat a leaf of the cabbage. The rabbit died. What investigating magistrate would dare question this; what crown prosecutor would ever draw up a petition against Monsieur Magendie or Monsieur Flourens
⁶
for the rabbits, guinea-pigs and cats that they have killed? Not one. So the rabbit is now dead, and the law has no reason to ask questions about it. Abbé Adelmonte gets his cook to gut the rabbit and throws the intestines on a dungheap. On the dungheap there is a hen, which pecks at the intestines, falls ill in its turn and dies the following day. Just as it is in its final, convulsive agony, a vulture flies past – there are a lot of vultures in Adelmonte’s country – dives at the body and carries it off to a distant crag to eat it. Three days later the poor vulture, having felt constantly ill since its meal, is seized with a fainting fit several hundred feet up. It falls out of the sky and plummets into your fishpond. Pikes, eels and moray eels are greedy fish, as you know, so they bite the vulture. Well, suppose that on the following day this eel or this pike is served up at your table, poisoned at four removes, and your guest is poisoned at the fifth and dies after a week or ten days from a pain in the guts, vomiting and an abscess on the duodenum. There will be a post-mortem and the doctors will say: “The patient died of a tumour on the liver, or of typhoid fever.” ’

‘You link all these events together,’ said Mme de Villefort, ‘but the slightest accident might break the chain. The vulture might not fly over at the right moment, or it might fall a hundred yards away from the fishpond.’

‘That’s precisely where the art lies: to be a great chemist in the East, you must direct chance. It can be done.’

Mme de Villefort listened thoughtfully.

‘But arsenic is ineradicable,’ she said. ‘However it is absorbed, if there is enough to kill, it will remain in the man’s body.’

‘Just so!’ cried Monte Cristo. ‘Just so! That is precisely what I told my good friend Adelmonte. He thought a while, smiled and replied with a Sicilian proverb which, I believe, is also a French
one: “My child, the world was not made in a day, but in seven. Come back on Sunday.”

‘The following Sunday I returned. Instead of watering his cabbage with arsenic, he had watered it with a solution of salts of strychnine,
strychnos colubrina
, as scientists call it. This time, the cabbage seemed altogether healthy, so the rabbit had no suspicion of it. Five minutes later the rabbit died, the hen ate the rabbit, and the following day it was dead. So then we played the part of the vultures, took off the hen and opened it up. This time all specific symptoms had vanished and only general symptoms remained. There was no specific indication in any organ – irritation of the nervous system, that’s all, and evidence of cerebral congestion, nothing more. The hen had not been poisoned, it had died of apoplexy. This is a rare condition in hens, I know, but very common among human beings.’

Mme de Villefort seemed more and more preoccupied with her thoughts. ‘It’s fortunate,’ she said, ‘that such substances can only be prepared by chemists, or else one half of the world would be poisoning the other.’

‘By chemists, or people who are interested in chemistry,’ said Monte Cristo offhandedly.

‘But then,’ said Mme de Villefort, making an effort to rouse herself from her own thoughts, ‘however cleverly engineered it may be, crime is still crime. It may evade the human investigator, but it cannot escape from the eye of God. Orientals are less sensitive than we are on points of conscience and they have wisely got rid of hell, that’s all.’

‘Ah, Madame, such scruples would naturally arise in a soul as honest as yours, but might soon be eradicated by reasoning. The worse side of human thought will always be summed up in that paradox of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
⁷
– you know the one: “The mandarin whom one can kill from a distance of five hundred leagues just by raising a finger”. Man’s life is spent doing such things and his intelligence is exhausted in dreaming about them. You will find very few people who would go, brutally, and stick a knife in the heart of their fellow man or who, to make him disappear off the face of the earth, would administer the amount of arsenic that we mentioned a short time ago. That is really either eccentricity or stupidity. One can only reach that point if the blood is heated up to thirty-six degrees, the pulse is racing at ninety beats a minute
and the mind is driven outside its ordinary limits. But if, as though advancing like a philologist from a word to its near synonym, you make a mere “elimination”… Instead of committing a base murder, you purely and simply remove from your path the person who bothers you, without any clash, or violence, or all that paraphernalia of suffering which, becoming a torment, makes the victim into a martyr and the person responsible into a butcher, in the full force of the word… If there is no blood, no cries, no contortions and, above all, none of that horrible and compromising instantaneousness of the event, then you will evade the weight of the human law that tells you: “Don’t upset the social order!” This is what Orientals do and that is how they succeed: serious and phlegmatic people, they are little troubled by matters of time when something of any importance is to be resolved.’

‘There is still conscience,’ said Mme de Villefort in a strained voice, stifling a sigh.

‘Yes,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘Yes, fortunately there is still conscience, because without it we should be in a fine mess. After any slightly energetic action, conscience saves us, because it supplies us with a thousand good excuses, which we alone are left to judge: these excuses, effective as they may be in ensuring our sleep, might perhaps be rather less so before a court where they had to protect our lives. So Richard III, for example, was wonderfully well served by his conscience after the elimination of Edward IV’s two children. He could say to himself: “These two children, sons of a cruel tyrant, had inherited the vices of their father, though I alone was able to detect this in their juvenile dispositions. These two children stood in the way of my efforts to bring happiness to the English people, to whom they would certainly have brought misfortune.” In the same way, Lady Macbeth was served by her conscience: her desire, whatever Shakespeare says, was to give a throne to her son, not to her husband. Oh, maternal love is such a great virtue and powerful impulse that it can excuse many things. Hence, without her conscience, Lady Macbeth would have been a very unhappy woman after the death of Duncan.’