Page:The Count of Monte-Cristo (1887 Volume 3).djvu/70

50 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 had drunk this water as well as yourself, 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 as a fable."

"No, madame, contrary to most history, it is a truth; but what you tell me, madame, what your require of me, is not the result of a chance question; for two years since you asked me the same questions, and said, too, that for a very long time this history of Mithridates 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 I was not a man, that I might have been a FlanieL, 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 make 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, with belladonna, with brucea, snake-wood, the cherry-laurel, they put to sleep all those who would arouse them. There is not one of those women, Egyptian, Turk, 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.

"Eh, indeed! Yes, madame," continued Monte-Cristo, "the secret dramas of the East begin and end thus, from the plant which can create love, to the plant that can cause death; from the draught which opens heaven before your eyes, to that which plunges a man in hell! There are as many shades of every kind as there are caprices and peculiarities in human, physical, and moral nature; and I will say further the art of these chemists knows excellently well how to accommodate and proportion the remedy and the ill to its yearnings of love or its desires for vengeance."