"Yes; I will mention one to you.He had a remarkably fine garden, full of vegetables, flowers, and fruit.From amongst these vegetables he selected the most simple -- a cabbage, for instance.For three days he watered this cabbage with a distillation of arsenic; on the third, the cabbage began to droop and turn yellow.At that moment he cut it.In the eyes of everybody it seemed fit for table, and preserved its wholesome appearance.It was only poisoned to the Abbe Adelmonte.He then took the cabbage to the room where he had rabbits -- for the Abbe Adelmonte had a collection of rabbits, cats, and guinea-pigs, fully as fine as his collection of vegetables, flowers, and fruit.Well, the Abbe Adelmonte took a rabbit, and made it eat a leaf of the cabbage.The rabbit died.What magistrate would find, or even venture to insinuate, anything against this? What procureur has ever ventured to draw up an accusation against M.Magendie or M.Flourens, in consequence of the rabbits, cats, and guinea-pigs they have killed? -- not one.So, then, the rabbit dies, and justice takes no notice.This rabbit dead, the Abbe Adelmonte has its entrails taken out by his cook and thrown on the dunghill; on this dunghill is a hen, who, pecking these intestines, is in her turn taken ill, and dies next day.At the moment when she is struggling in the convulsions of death, a vulture is flying by (there are a good many vultures in Adelmonte's country); this bird darts on the dead fowl, and carries it away to a rock, where it dines off its prey.Three days afterwards, this poor vulture, which has been very much indisposed since that dinner, suddenly feels very giddy while flying aloft in the clouds, and falls heavily into a fish-pond.The pike, eels, and carp eat greedily always, as everybody knows -- well, they feast on the vulture.Now suppose that next day, one of these eels, or pike, or carp, poisoned at the fourth remove, is served up at your table.Well, then, your guest will be poisoned at the fifth remove, and die, at the end of eight or ten days, of pains in the intestines, sickness, or abscess of the pylorus.The doctors open the body and say with an air of profound learning, `The subject his died of a tumor on the liver, or of typhoid fever!'""But," remarked Madame de Villefort, "all these circumstances which you link thus to one another may be broken by the least accident; the vulture may not see the fowl, or may fall a hundred yards from the fish-pond.""Ah, that is where the art comes in.To be a great chemist in the East, one must direct chance; and this is to be achieved." -- Madame de Villefort was in deep thought, yet listened attentively."But," she exclaimed, suddenly, "arsenic is indelible, indestructible; in whatsoever way it is absorbed, it will be found again in the body of the victim from the moment when it has been taken in sufficient quantity to cause death.""Precisely so," cried Monte Cristo -- "precisely so; and this is what I said to my worthy Adelmonte.He reflected, smiled, and replied to me by a Sicilian proverb, which Ibelieve is also a French proverb, `My son, the world was not made in a day -- but in seven.Return on Sunday.' On the Sunday following I did return to him.Instead of having watered his cabbage with arsenic, he had watered it this time with a solution of salts, having their basis in strychnine, strychnos colubrina, as the learned term it.
Now, the cabbage had not the slightest appearance 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.
