the grocer or grocers, druggist or druggists,
come and say, 'It was I who sold the arsenic to the gentleman;' and
rather than not recognize the guilty purchaser, they will recognize
twenty. Then the foolish criminal is taken, imprisoned, interrogated,
confronted, confounded, condemned, and cut off by hemp or steel; or if
she be a woman of any consideration, they lock her up for life. This
is the way in which you Northerns understand chemistry, madame. Desrues
was, however, I must confess, more skilful."

"What would you have, sir?" said the lady, laughing; "we do what we can.
All the world has not the secret of the Medicis or the Borgias."

"Now," replied the count, shrugging his shoulders, "shall I tell you the
cause of all these stupidities? It is because, at your theatres, by what
at least I could judge by reading the pieces they play, they see persons
swallow the contents of a phial, or suck the button of a ring, and
fall dead instantly. Five minutes afterwards the curtain falls, and the
spectators depart. They are ignorant of the consequences of the murder;
they see neither the police commissary with his badge of office, nor the
corporal with his four men; and so the poor fools believe that the whole
thing is as easy as lying. But go a little way from France--go either
to Aleppo or Cairo, or only to Naples or Rome, and you will see people
passing by you in the streets--people erect, smiling, and fresh-colored,
of whom Asmodeus, if you were holding on by the skirt of his mantle,
would say, 'That man was poisoned three weeks ago; he will be a dead man
in a month.'"

"Then," remarked Madame de Villefort, "they have again discovered the
secret of the famous aquatofana that they said was lost at Perugia."

"Ah, but madame, does mankind ever lose anything? The arts change about
and make a tour of the world; things take a different name, and the
vulgar do not follow them--that is all; but there is always the same
result. Poisons act particularly on some organ or another--one on the
stomach, another on the brain, another on the intestines. Well, the
poison brings on a cough, the cough an inflammation of the lungs, or
some other complaint catalogued in the book of science, which, however,
by no means precludes it from being decidedly mortal; and if it were
not, would be sure to become so, thanks to the remedies applied by
foolish doctors, who are generally bad chemists, and which will act in
favor of or against the malad