nce of
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."

"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