gramme, at the end of twenty days, increasing
another milligramme, you would have taken three hundred centigrammes;
that is to say, a dose which you would support without inconvenience,
and which would be very dangerous for any other person who had not taken
the same precautions as yourself. Well, then, at the end of a month,
when drinking water from the same carafe, you would kill the person
who drank with you, without your perceiving, otherwise than from slight
inconvenience, that there was any poisonous substance mingled with this
water."

"Do you know any other counter-poisons?"

"I do not."

"I have often read, and read again, the history of Mithridates," said
Madame de Villefort in a tone of reflection, "and had always considered
it a fable."

"No, madame, contrary to most history, it is true; but what you 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