stance of the police or law, with whom, as he well knew,
his mother would counteract him by means of either corruption or fear.

It is certain that during the sixteenth century, and the years that
preceded and followed it, poisoning was brought to a perfection unknown
to modern chemistry, as history itself will prove. Italy, the cradle of
modern science, was, at this period, the inventor and mistress of these
secrets, many of which are now lost. Hence the reputation for that crime
which weighed for the two following centuries on Italy. Romance-writers
have so greatly abused it that wherever they have introduced Italians
into their tales they have almost always made them play the part of
assassins and poisoners.[*] If Italy then had the traffic in subtle
poisons which some historians attribute to her, we should remember her
supremacy in the art of toxicology, as we do her pre-eminence in all
other human knowledge and art in which she took the lead in Europe.
The crimes of that period were not her crimes specially. She served the
passions of the age, just as she built magnificent edifices, commanded
armies, painted noble frescos, sang romances, loved queens, delighted
kings, devised ballets and fetes, and ruled all policies. The horrible
art of poisoning reached to such a pitch in Florence that a woman,
dividing a peach with a duke, using a golden fruit-knife with one side
of its blade poisoned, ate one half of the peach herself and killed the
duke with the other half. A pair of perfumed gloves were known to have
infiltrated mortal illness through the pores of the skin. Poison
was instilled into bunches of natural roses, and the fragrance, when
inhaled, gave death. Don John of Austria was poisoned, it was said, by a
pair of boots.

[*] Written sixty-six years ago.--Tr.

Charles IX. had good reason to be curious in the matter; we know already
the dark suspicions and beliefs which now prompted him to surprise the
perfumer Rene at his work.

The old fountain at the corner of the rue de l'Arbre-See, which has
since been rebuilt, offered every facility for the royal vagabonds to
climb upon the roof of a house not far from that of Rene, which the king
wished to visit. Charles, followed by his companions, began to ramble
over the roofs, to the great terror of the burghers awakened by the
tramp of these false thieves, who called to them in saucy language,
listened to their talk, and even pretended to force an entrance. Wh