The Count of Monte Cristo
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.”
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“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
little for the questions of time in conjunctures of importance.”
“Yet conscience remains,” remarked Madame de Villefort in an agitated
voice, and with a stifled sigh.
“Yes,” answered Monte Cristo “happily, yes, conscience does remain; and
if it did not, how wretched we should be! After every action requiring
exertion, it is conscience that saves us, for it supplies us with a
thousand good excuses, of which we alone are judges; and these reasons,
howsoever excellent in producing sleep, would avail us but very little
before a tribunal, when we were tried for our lives. Thus Richard III.,
for instance, was marvellously served by his conscience after the
putting away of the two children of Edward IV.; in fact, he could say,
‘These two children of a cruel and persecuting king, who have inherited
the vices of their father, which I alone could perceive in their
juvenile propensities—these two children are impediments in my way of
promoting the happiness of the English people, whose unhappiness they
(the children) would infallibly have caused.’ Thus was Lady Macbeth
served by her conscience, when she sought to give her son, and not her
husband (whatever Shakespeare may say), a throne. Ah, maternal love is
a great virtue, a powerful motive—so powerful that it excuses a
multitude of things, even if, after Duncan’s death, Lady Macbeth had
been at all pricked by her conscience.”
Madame de Villefort listened with avidity to these appalling maxims and
horrible paradoxes, delivered by the count with that ironical
simplicity which was peculiar to him.
After a moment’s silence, the lady inquired:
“Do you know, my dear count,” she said, “that you are a very terrible
reasoner, and that you look at the world through a somewhat distempered
medium? Have you really measured the world by scrutinies, or through
alembics and crucibles? For you must indeed be a great chemist, and the
elixir you administered to my son, which recalled him to life almost
instantaneously——”
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“Oh, do not place any reliance on that, madame; _one_ drop of that
elixir sufficed to recall life to a dying child, but three drops would
have impelled the blood into his lungs in such a way as to have
produced most violent palpitations; six would have suspended his
respiration, and caused syncope more serious than that in which he was;
ten would have destroyed him. You know, madame, how suddenly I snatched
him from those phials which he so imprudently touched?”
“Is it then so terrible a poison?”
“Oh, no! In the first place, let us agree that the word poison does not
exist, because in medicine use is made of the most violent poisons,
which become, according as they are employed, most salutary remedies.”
“What, then, is it?”
“A skilful preparation of my friend’s the worthy Abbé Adelmonte, who
taught me the use of it.”
“Oh,” observed Madame de Villefort, “it must be an admirable
anti-spasmodic.”
“Perfect, madame, as you have seen,” replied the count; “and I
frequently make use of it—with all possible prudence though, be it
observed,” he added with a smile of intelligence.
“Most assuredly,” responded Madame de Villefort in the same tone. “As
for me, so nervous, and so subject to fainting fits, I should require a
Doctor Adelmonte to invent for me some means of breathing freely and
tranquillizing my mind, in the fear I have of dying some fine day of
suffocation. In the meanwhile, as the thing is difficult to find in
France, and your abbé is not probably disposed to make a journey to
Paris on my account, I must continue to use Monsieur Planche’s
anti-spasmodics; and mint and Hoffman’s drops are among my favorite
remedies. Here are some lozenges which I have made up on purpose; they
are compounded doubly strong.”
Monte Cristo opened the tortoise-shell box, which the lady presented to
him, and inhaled the odor of the lozenges with the air of an amateur
who thoroughly appreciated their composition.
“They are indeed exquisite,” he said; “but as they are necessarily
submitted to the process of deglutition—a function which it is
frequently impossible for a fainting person to accomplish—I prefer my
own specific.”
“Undoubtedly, and so should I prefer it, after the effects I have seen
produced; but of course it is a secret, and I am not so indiscreet as
to ask it of you.”
“But I,” said Monte Cristo, rising as he spoke—“I am gallant enough to
offer it you.”
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“How kind you are.”
“Only remember one thing—a small dose is a remedy, a large one is
poison. One drop will restore life, as you have seen; five or six will
inevitably kill, and in a way the more terrible inasmuch as, poured
into a glass of wine, it would not in the slightest degree affect its
flavor. But I say no more, madame; it is really as if I were
prescribing for you.”
The clock struck half-past six, and a lady was announced, a friend of
Madame de Villefort, who came to dine with her.
“If I had had the honor of seeing you for the third or fourth time,
count, instead of only for the second,” said Madame de Villefort; “if I
had had the honor of being your friend, instead of only having the
happiness of being under an obligation to you, I should insist on
detaining you to dinner, and not allow myself to be daunted by a first
refusal.”
“A thousand thanks, madame,” replied Monte Cristo “but I have an
engagement which I cannot break. I have promised to escort to the
Académie a Greek princess of my acquaintance who has never seen your
grand opera, and who relies on me to conduct her thither.”
“Adieu, then, sir, and do not forget the prescription.”
“Ah, in truth, madame, to do that I must forget the hour’s conversation
I have had with you, which is indeed impossible.”
Monte Cristo bowed, and left the house. Madame de Villefort remained
immersed in thought.
“He is a very strange man,” she said, “and in my opinion is himself the
Adelmonte he talks about.”
As to Monte Cristo the result had surpassed his utmost expectations.
“Good,” said he, as he went away; “this is a fruitful soil, and I feel
certain that the seed sown will not be cast on barren ground.”
Next morning, faithful to his promise, he sent the prescription
requested.
Chapter 53. Robert le Diable
The pretext of an opera engagement was so much the more feasible, as
there chanced to be on that very night a more than ordinary attraction
at the Académie Royale. Levasseur, who had been suffering under severe
illness, made his reappearance in the character of _Bertram_, and, as
usual, the announcement of the most admired production of the favorite
composer of the day had attracted a brilliant and fashionable audience.
Morcerf, like most other young men of rank and fortune, had his
orchestra stall, with the certainty of always finding a seat in at
least a dozen of the principal boxes occupied by persons of his
acquaintance; he had, moreover, his right of entry into the omnibus
box. Château-Renaud rented a stall beside his own, while Beauchamp, as
a journalist, had unlimited range all over the theatre. It happened
that on this particular night the minister’s box was placed at the
disposal of Lucien Debray, who offered it to the Comte de Morcerf, who
again, upon his rejection of it by Mercédès, sent it to Danglars, with
an intimation that he should probably do himself the honor of joining
the baroness and her daughter during the evening, in the event of their
accepting the box in question. The ladies received the offer with too
much pleasure to dream of a refusal. To no class of persons is the
presentation of a gratuitous opera-box more acceptable than to the
wealthy millionaire, who still hugs economy while boasting of carrying
a king’s ransom in his waistcoat pocket.
Danglars had, however, protested against showing himself in a
ministerial box, declaring that his political principles, and his
parliamentary position as member of the opposition party would not
permit him so to commit himself; the baroness had, therefore,
despatched a note to Lucien Debray, bidding him call for them, it being
wholly impossible for her to go alone with Eugénie to the opera.
There is no gainsaying the fact that a very unfavorable construction
would have been put upon the circumstance if the two women had gone
without escort, while the addition of a third, in the person of her
mother’s admitted lover, enabled Mademoiselle Danglars to defy malice
and ill-nature. One must take the world as one finds it.
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The curtain rose, as usual, to an almost empty house, it being one of
the absurdities of Parisian fashion never to appear at the opera until
after the beginning of the performance, so that the first act is