"A Pyrrhic one—another such and we are lost. I am very ill of it. Oh, doctor, tell me of something, not to keep me alive but to give me force while I do live."
"How can I advise for a constitution like yours," said the physician, after feeling the nobleman's pulse: "you do not heed my advice. I told you not to have flowers in the room as they spoil the air, and you are smothered in them. As for the ladies, I bade you beware and you answer that you would rather die than be reft of their society."
"Never mind that. I suffer too much to think of aught but myself. I sometimes think that as I am slandered so that the Queen hesitated to trust me, so have I been physically done to death. Do you believe in the famous poisons which slay without knowing they are used until too late?"
"Yes; I believe," for Gilbert frowned as he remembered that his secret brotherhood was allowed to use the Aqua Tofana where an enemy could not be otherwise reached: "but in your case it is the sword wearing out its sheath. The electric spark will explode the crystal chamber in which it is confined. Still I can help you."
He drew from his pocket a phial holding about a couple of thimblefuls of a green liquid.
"One of my friends—whom I would were yours—deeply versed in natural and occult sciences, gave me the recipe of this brew as a sovereign elixir of life. I have often taken it to cure what the English call the blue devils. And I am bound to say that the effect was instant and salutary. Will you taste it?"
"I will take anything from your hand, my dear doctor."
A servant was rung up, who brought a spoon and a little brandy in a glass.
"Brandy to mollify it," said Mirabeau: "it must be liquid fire, then!"
Gilbert added the same quantity of his elixir to the half-dozen drops of eau-de-vie and the two fluids mixed to the color of wormwood bitters, which the exhausted man drank off.