‘It is I, Lachaussée,’ cried the superintendent, for it was he. ‘I—I came to see what you wanted. You have been moaning bitterly in your sleep; I knew not what might happen to you.’
‘It was nothing,’ returned Gaudin. ‘I have drunk deeply this evening, and my sleep is fevered and troubled. Get you to bed yourself, and do not enter this room again except I summon you.’
Lachaussée departed without a word; and, as soon as he was gone, Sainte-Croix moved the bed from the wall and placed its foot against the door; he then once more lay down, but not for sleep. Every night-noise caused him to start up and listen anxiously for some minutes, in the apprehension that the treachery of Lachaussée might once more bring him to the room.
Daylight came slowly through the window, and the sound of the early artisans assembling in the court-yards for their work was heard below, when he at last sank into a deep and unbroken morning slumber.
CHAPTER VI.
MAÎTRE GLAZER, THE APOTHECARY, AND HIS MAN, PANURGE, DISCOURSE WITH THE PEOPLE ON POISONS—THE VISIT OF THE MARCHIONESS
There was plenty to occupy the gossips the morning after the events of the preceding chapters, in the good city of Paris. The capture of Exili, with all the additions and exaggerations that word of mouth could promulgate, formed the only topic of conversation; nothing else was canvassed by the little knots of idlers who collected at the corners of the Pont Neuf and on the quays.
There were few newspapers then to spread their simultaneous intelligence over the city. The first important journal, established under the auspices of Colbert, as yet appealed to a very limited number of the citizens beyond the scientific, and those interested in manufacturing and commercial improvements. There was a weekly paper, to be sure, from which the eager populace might have gained some news, had the occurrences come within the range of its time of publication; and the subject would have been dilated upon with especial care, for its originator was a physician. Le Docteur Renaudot had found, as the medical men of the present day are aware, that a knowledge of the current events of the time was thought as much of in a physician, by his patients, as a knowledge of his profession; and so he cultivated its acquisition to his great profit. But when a healthy season came, and he had less to do and talk about, it struck him that some advantage might accrue from distributing his news generally, in a printed form. He did so; the plan succeeded; and to this circumstance is the origin of the French press to be traced.
But all news connected with assaults and offences found a loquacious Mercury in every member of the Garde Bourgeois. Not one who had assisted, on the antecedent evening, at the capture of Exili omitted to take all the credit to himself, as he babbled to a crowd of gasping auditors from his shop-window. Maître Picard, who had arrived, boiling over with indignation, at the office of the Prévôt in the Châtelet, found even his complaint against the scholars overlooked, in the more important excitement. The exposition of the horrible means, so long suspected, by which the Italian gained his living, and the strange death of the chevalier du guet by the poisoned atmosphere of the chamber, absorbed all other attention.
And well indeed it might. The frightful effects of the ‘Acquetta di Napoli,’ to which rumour had assigned the power of causing death at any determinate period, after weeks, months, or even years of atrophy and wasting agony,—this terrible fluid, tasteless, inodorous, colourless,—so facile in its administration, and so impossible to be detected, had been for half a century the dread of southern Europe. Once administered, there was no hope for the sufferer, except in a few antidotes, the secret of which appeared to rest with the poisoners alone. A certain indescribable change crept on; a nameless feeling of indisposition, as the powers of life gradually sank beneath the influence of its venom, but one that offered no clue whereby the most perceptive physician could ascertain the seat of evil or the principal organ affected. Then came anxiety and weariness; the spirits broke down, hope departed, and a constant gnawing pain, that appeared to run in liquid torment through all the arteries of the body, passing even by the capillaries, to bring fresh pain and poisoned vital fluid to the heart, left the helpless victim without ease or slumber; and as time advanced, in misery and anguish that evaded every remedy, so did the poison fasten itself deeper and deadlier on the system, until the last stage of its effects arrived, and life departed in a manner too horrible to describe.
Respecting this fearful scourge little technical information that is left can be relied upon. It appears to have been a preparation of arsenic; and, if this be true, the ignorance of the age might have allowed the deadly metal to pass undetected by analysis; but, as we have before stated, toxicology is now more certain in its researches after hidden poison, and in this deadly drug especially. The merest trace of it, in whatever form it may be administered, even when to the eye of the vulgar affording no more attributes than pure water for analysis, can be reduced to its mineral state. The grave itself refuses to conceal the crime; and the poison has the remarkable property of embalming the body, as it were, and by its antiseptic virtue giving back the vital organs to the light of day, should exhumation be required, in such a state as to place all matter of detecting its presence beyond the slightest doubt, even in the quantity of the most minute atom.