基督山伯爵 英文版 The Count of Monte Cristo
大仲马 Alexandre Dumas père
Chapter 52 Page 2
"What would you have, sir?" said the lady, laughing; "we dowhat we can. All the world has not the secret of the Medicisor the Borgias."
"Now," replied the count, shrugging his shoulders, "shall Itell you the cause of all these stupidities? It is because,at your theatres, by what at least I could judge by readingthe pieces they play, they see persons swallow the contentsof a phial, or suck the button of a ring, and fall deadinstantly. Five minutes afterwards the curtain falls, andthe spectators depart. They are ignorant of the consequencesof the murder; they see neither the police commissary withhis badge of office, nor the corporal with his four men; andso the poor fools believe that the whole thing is as easy aslying. But go a little way from France -- go either toAleppo or Cairo, or only to Naples or Rome, and you will seepeople passing by you in the streets -- people erect,smiling, and fresh-colored, of whom Asmodeus, if you wereholding on by the skirt of his mantle, would say, `That manwas poisoned three weeks ago; he will be a dead man in amonth.'"
"Then," remarked Madame de Villefort, "they have againdiscovered the secret of the famous aquatofana that theysaid was lost at Perugia."
"Ah, but madame, does mankind ever lose anything? The artschange about and make a tour of the world; things take adifferent name, and the vulgar do not follow them -- that isall; but there is always the same result. Poisons actparticularly on some organ or another -- one on the stomach,another on the brain, another on the intestines. Well, thepoison brings on a cough, the cough an inflammation of thelungs, or some other complaint catalogued in the book ofscience, which, however, by no means precludes it from beingdecidedly mortal; and if it were not, would be sure tobecome so, thanks to the remedies applied by foolishdoctors, who are generally bad chemists, and which will actin favor of or against the malady, as you please; and thenthere is a human being killed according to all the rules ofart and skill, and of whom justice learns nothing, as wassaid by a terrible chemist of my acquaintance, the worthyAbbe Adelmonte of Taormina, in Sicily, who has studied thesenational phenomena very profoundly."
"It is quite frightful, but deeply interesting," said theyoung lady, motionless with attention. "I thought, I mustconfess, that these tales, were inventions of the MiddleAges."
"Yes, no doubt, but improved upon by ours. What is the useof time, rewards of merit, medals, crosses, Monthyon prizes,if they do not lead society towards more completeperfection? Yet man will never be perfect until he learns tocreate and destroy; he does know how to destroy, and that ishalf the battle."
"So," added Madame de Villefort, constantly returning to herobject, "the poisons of the Borgias, the Medicis, the Renes,the Ruggieris, and later, probably, that of Baron de Trenck,whose story has been so misused by modern drama and romance"--
"Were objects of art, madame, and nothing more," replied thecount. "Do you suppose that the real savant addresseshimself stupidly to the mere individual? By no means.Science loves eccentricities, leaps and bounds, trials ofstrength, fancies, if I may be allowed so to term them.Thus, for instance, the excellent Abbe Adelmonte, of whom Ispoke just now, made in this way some marvellousexperiments."
"Really?"
"Yes; I will mention one to you. He had a remarkably finegarden, full of vegetables, flowers, and fruit. From amongstthese vegetables he selected the most simple -- a cabbage,for instance. For three days he watered this cabbage with adistillation of arsenic; on the third, the cabbage began todroop and turn yellow. At that moment he cut it. In the eyesof everybody it seemed fit for table, and preserved itswholesome appearance. It was only poisoned to the AbbeAdelmonte. He then took the cabbage to the room where he hadrabbits -- for the Abbe Adelmonte had a collection ofrabbits, cats, and guinea-pigs, fully as fine as hiscollection of vegetables, flowers, and fruit. Well, the AbbeAdelmonte took a rabbit, and made it eat a leaf of thecabbage. The rabbit died. What magistrate would find, oreven venture to insinuate, anything against this? Whatprocureur has ever ventured to draw up an accusation againstM. 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. Thisrabbit dead, the Abbe Adelmonte has its entrails taken outby his cook and thrown on the dunghill; on this dunghill isa hen, who, pecking these intestines, is in her turn takenill, and dies next day. At the moment when she is strugglingin the convulsions of death, a vulture is flying by (thereare a good many vultures in Adelmonte's country); this birddarts on the dead fowl, and carries it away to a rock, whereit dines off its prey. Three days afterwards, this poorvulture, which has been very much indisposed since thatdinner, suddenly feels very giddy while flying aloft in theclouds, 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 ofthese eels, or pike, or carp, poisoned at the fourth remove,is served up at your table. Well, then, your guest will bepoisoned at the fifth remove, and die, at the end of eightor ten days, of pains in the intestines, sickness, orabscess of the pylorus. The doctors open the body and saywith an air of profound learning, `The subject has died of atumor on the liver, or of typhoid fever!'"
"But," remarked Madame de Villefort, "all thesecircumstances which you link thus to one another may bebroken by the least accident; the vulture may not see thefowl, or may fall a hundred yards from the fish-pond."
"Ah, that is where the art comes in. To be a great chemistin the East, one must direct chance; and this is to beachieved." -- Madame de Villefort was in deep thought, yetlistened attentively. "But," she exclaimed, suddenly,"arsenic is indelible, indestructible; in whatsoever way itis absorbed, it will be found again in the body of thevictim from the moment when it has been taken in sufficientquantity to cause death."
"Precisely so," cried Monte Cristo -- "precisely so; andthis 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 notmade in a day -- but in seven. Return on Sunday.' On theSunday following I did return to him. Instead of havingwatered his cabbage with arsenic, he had watered it thistime with a solution of salts, having their basis instrychnine, strychnos colubrina, as the learned term it.Now, the cabbage had not the slightest appearance of diseasein the world, and the rabbit had not the smallest distrust;yet, five minutes afterwards, the rabbit was dead. The fowlpecked at the rabbit, and the next day was a dead hen. Thistime we were the vultures; so we opened the bird, and thistime all special symptoms had disappeared, there were onlygeneral symptoms. There was no peculiar indication in anyorgan -- an excitement of the nervous system -- that was it;a case of cerebral congestion -- nothing more. The fowl hadnot been poisoned -- she had died of apoplexy. Apoplexy is arare disease among fowls, I believe, but very common amongmen." Madame de Villefort appeared more and more thoughtful.
"It is very fortunate," she observed, "that such substancescould only be prepared by chemists; otherwise, all the worldwould 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 astruggle, 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 eyeof God. The Orientals are stronger than we are in cases ofconscience, and, very prudently, have no hell -- that is thepoint."
"Really, madame, this is a scruple which naturally mustoccur to a pure mind like yours, but which would easilyyield before sound reasoning. The bad side of human thoughtwill always be defined by the paradox of Jean JacquesRousseau, -- you remember, -- the mandarin who is killedfive hundred leagues off by raising the tip of the finger.Man's whole life passes in doing these things, and hisintellect is exhausted by reflecting on them. You will findvery few persons who will go and brutally thrust a knife inthe heart of a fellow-creature, or will administer to him,in order to remove him from the surface of the globe onwhich we move with life and animation, that quantity ofarsenic of which we just now talked. Such a thing is reallyout of rule -- eccentric or stupid. To attain such a point,the blood must be heated to thirty-six degrees, the pulsebe, at least, at ninety, and the feelings excited beyond theordinary limit. But suppose one pass, as is permissible inphilology, from the word itself to its softened synonym,then, instead of committing an ignoble assassination youmake an `elimination;' you merely and simply remove fromyour path the individual who is in your way, and thatwithout shock or violence, without the display of thesufferings which, in the case of becoming a punishment, makea martyr of the victim, and a butcher, in every sense of theword, of him who inflicts them. Then there will be no blood,no groans, no convulsions, and above all, no consciousnessof that horrid and compromising moment of accomplishing theact, -- then one escapes the clutch of the human law, whichsays, `Do not disturb society!' This is the mode in whichthey manage these things, and succeed in Eastern climes,where there are grave and phlegmatic persons who care verylittle for the questions of time in conjunctures ofimportance."
"Yet conscience remains," remarked Madame de Villefort in anagitated voice, and with a stifled sigh.
"Yes," answered Monte Cristo "happily, yes, conscience doesremain; and if it did not, how wretched we should be! Afterevery action requiring exertion, it is conscience that savesus, for it supplies us with a thousand good excuses, ofwhich we alone are judges; and these reasons, howsoeverexcellent in producing sleep, would avail us but very littlebefore a tribunal, when we were tried for our lives. ThusRichard III., for instance, was marvellously served by hisconscience after the putting away of the two children ofEdward IV.; in fact, he could say, `These two children of acruel and persecuting king, who have inherited the vices oftheir father, which I alone could perceive in their juvenilepropensities -- these two children are impediments in my wayof promoting the happiness of the English people, whoseunhappiness they (the children) would infallibly havecaused.' Thus was Lady Macbeth served by her conscience,when she sought to give her son, and not her husband(whatever Shakespeare may say), a throne. Ah, maternal loveis a great virtue, a powerful motive -- so powerful that itexcuses a multitude of things, even if, after Duncan'sdeath, Lady Macbeth had been at all pricked by herconscience."
Madame de Villefort listened with avidity to these appallingmaxims and horrible paradoxes, delivered by the count withthat ironical simplicity which was peculiar to him. After amoment's silence, the lady inquired, "Do you know, my dearcount," she said, "that you are a very terrible reasoner,and that you look at the world through a somewhatdistempered medium? Have you really measured the world byscrutinies, or through alembics and crucibles? For you mustindeed be a great chemist, and the elixir you administeredto my son, which recalled him to life almostinstantaneously" --
"Is it then so terrible a poison?"
"Oh, no. In the first place, let us agree that the wordpoison does not exist, because in medicine use is made ofthe most violent poisons, which become, according as theyare employed, most salutary remedies."
"What, then, is it?"
"A skilful preparation of my friend's the worthy AbbeAdelmonte, who taught me the use of it."
"Oh," observed Madame de Villefort, "it must be an admirableanti-spasmodic."
-- "I amgallant enough to offer it you."meanwhile, as the thing is difficult to find in France,and your abbe.
"Perfect, madame, as you have seen," replied the count; "andI frequently make use of it -- with all possible prudencethough, be it observed," he added with a smile ofintelligence.
corporal with his four men; andso the poor fools believe that !
"Most assuredly," responded Madame de Villefort in the sametone. "As for me, so nervous, and so subject to faintingfits, I should require a Doctor Adelmonte to invent for mesome means of breathing freely and tranquillizing my mind,in the fear I have of dying some fine day of suffocation. Inthe meanwhile, as the thing is difficult to find in France,and your abbe is not probably disposed to make a journey toParis on my account, I must continue to use MonsieurPlanche's anti-spasmodics; and mint and Hoffman's drops areamong my favorite remedies. Here are some lozenges which Ihave made up on purpose; they are compounded doubly strong."Monte Cristo opened the tortoise-shell box, which the ladypresented to him, and inhaled the odor of the lozenges withthe air of an amateur who thoroughly appreciated theircomposition. "They are indeed exquisite," he said; "but asthey are necessarily submitted to the process of deglutition-- a function which it is frequently impossible for afainting person to accomplish -- I prefer my own specific."
"Undoubtedly, and so should I prefer it, after the effects Ihave seen produced; but of course it is a secret, and I amnot so indiscreet as to ask it of you."
"But I," said Monte Cristo, rising as he spoke -- "I amgallant enough to offer it you."
"How kind you are."
"Only remember one thing -- a small dose is a remedy, alarge one is poison. One drop will restore life, as you haveseen; five or six will inevitably kill, and in a way themore terrible inasmuch as, poured into a glass of wine, itwould not in the slightest degree affect its flavor. But Isay no more, madame; it is really as if I were prescribingfor you." The clock struck half-past six, and a lady wasannounced, a friend of Madame de Villefort, who came to dinewith her.
"If I had had the honor of seeing you for the third orfourth time, count, instead of only for the second," saidMadame de Villefort; "if I had had the honor of being yourfriend, instead of only having the happiness of being underan obligation to you, I should insist on detaining you todinner, and not allow myself to be daunted by a firstrefusal."
"A thousand thanks, madame," replied Monte Cristo "but Ihave an engagement which I cannot break. I have promised toescort to the Academie a Greek princess of my acquaintancewho has never seen your grand opera, and who relies on me toconduct her thither."
"Adieu, then, sir, and do not forget the prescription."
"Ah, in truth, madame, to do that I must forget the hour'sconversation I have had with you, which is indeedimpossible." Monte Cristo bowed, and left the house. Madamede Villefort remained immersed in thought. "He is a verystrange man," she said, "and in my opinion is himself theAdelmonte he talks about." As to Monte Cristo the result hadsurpassed his utmost expectations. "Good," said he, as hewent away; "this is a fruitful soil, and I feel certain thatthe seed sown will not be cast on barren ground." Nextmorning, faithful to his promise, he sent the prescriptionrequested.