One of the best remedies, and one which it is to be hoped will eventually come to pass is, that the Legislature should render poisons less easy of purchase, by restricting the sale of every drug or compound in the nature of a poison to the properly qualified chemist, who, by his training and special knowledge, is alone competent to sell these substances. Incalculable harm is done by habits such as we have alluded to, and it is better often to endure pain and torment, than to fly constantly to what in the end will only inflict worse punishment.
CHAPTER XX
POISONS IN FICTION
From a very early period poisoning mysteries have been woven into romance and story, and in later times have been a favourite theme for both novelist and dramatist. But unfortunately, the scientific knowledge of writers of fiction, as a rule, is of a very limited description, and the effects attributed by them to certain drugs are usually as fabulous as the romances of the olden times. They tell us of mysterious poisons of untold power, an infinitesimal quantity of which will cause instantaneous death without leaving a trace behind. They describe anæsthetics so powerful, that a whiff from a bottle is sufficient to produce immediate insensibility for any period desired. In fact, the novelist has a pharmacopœia of his own. After all, why should we question or cavil, and wish to analyse it in the prosaic test tube of modern science; for take away the marvels and mysteries and you kill the romance. The novel performs its mission if it succeeds in interesting and amusing us, and the story-teller has accomplished the object of his art when he is successful in weaving the possible with the impossible, so that we can scarce perceive it.
That master of fiction, Dumas, gives us an instance of this, in his wonderfully fascinating adventures of the Count Monte Christo. Nothing seems impossible to this extraordinary individual, and incident after incident of the most romantic and exciting nature crowd one upon another throughout the story; yet so beautifully blended by the wonderful imagination of the author, that it enthrals us to the end. The Count, who is supposed to have studied the art of medicine in the East, has always a remedy at hand for every emergency, from hashish, in which he is a profound believer, to his mysterious stimulating elixir, described as "of the colour of blood, preserved in a phial of Bohemian glass." A single drop of this marvellous fluid, if allowed to fall on the lips, will, almost before it reaches them, restore the marble and inanimate form to life. His pill boxes were composed of emeralds and precious stones of huge size, and their contents consisted of drugs, whose effects were beyond conception. His knowledge of chemistry and toxicology is equally astonishing, as instanced in the conversation he holds with Madame de Villefort, who, for nefarious purposes, desires to improve her knowledge of poisons. Monte Christo discourses on the poisonous properties of brucine, a drug rarely used in England, but largely used in France. "Suppose," says the Count, "you were to take a millegramme of this poison the first day, two millegrammes the second day, and so on. Well, at the end of ten days you would have taken a centigramme: at the end of twenty days, increasing another millegramme, you would have taken three hundred centigrammes; that is to say, a dose you would support without inconvenience, and which would be very dangerous for any other person who 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, without your perceiving otherwise than from slight inconvenience that there was any poisonous substance mingled with the water." The Count thus explains the doctrine of immunity from a poison, by accustoming the system to its effect in small doses for a length of time, a process which is actually possible with some drugs, but not with all. His satirical description of the bungling of the common poisoner, as compared to the fine subtlety and cunning he advocates, is also worth quoting: "Amongst us a simpleton, possessed by the demon of hate or cupidity, who has an enemy to destroy, or some near relation to dispose of, goes straight to the grocer's or druggist's, gives a false name, which leads more easily to his detection than his real one, and purchases, under a pretext that the rats prevent him from sleeping, five or six pennyworth of arsenic. If he is really a cunning fellow he goes to five or six different druggists or grocers, and thereby becomes only five or six times more easily traced; then, when he has acquired his specific, he administers duly to his enemy or near kinsman a dose of arsenic which would make a mammoth or mastodon burst, and which, without rhyme or reason, makes his victim utter groans which alarm the whole neighbourhood. Then arrive a crowd of policemen and constables. They fetch a doctor, who opens the dead body, and collects from the entrails and stomach a quantity of arsenic in a spoon. Next day a hundred newspapers relate the fact, with the names of the victim and the murderer. The same evening the grocer or grocers, druggist or druggists, come and say, 'It was I who sold the arsenic to the gentleman accused'; and rather than not recognize the guilty purchaser, they will recognize twenty. Then the foolish criminal is taken, imprisoned, interrogated, confronted, confounded, condemned, and cut off by hemp or steel; or, if she be a woman of any consideration, they lock her up for life. This is the way in which you northerners understand chemistry." And so he endeavours to incite a woman, who is already anxiously contemplating a series of terrible crimes.
The recital of the ingenious experiments of the Abbé Adelmonte is a piece of clever construction, as the quotation will show. "The Abbé," said Monte Christo, "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 Abbé Adelmonte. He then took the cabbage to the room where he had rabbits, for the Abbé Adelmonte had a collection of rabbits, cats, and guinea-pigs, equally fine as his collection of vegetables, flowers, and fruit. Well, the Abbé 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 du roi 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 Abbé Adelmonte has its entrails taken out by his cook and thrown on the dunghill; on this dunghill was a hen, who, pecking these intestines, was, in her turn, taken ill, and dies next day. At the moment when she was struggling in the convulsions of death, a vulture was flying by (there are a good many vultures in Adelmonte's country); this bird darts on the dead bird and carries it away to a rock, where it dines off its prey. Three days afterwards this poor vulture, who has been very much indisposed since that dinner, feels very giddy, suddenly, whilst 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. Well, suppose the next day, one of these eels, or pike, or carp is served at your table, poisoned, as they are to the third generation. Well, then, your guest will be poisoned in the fifth generation, 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 has died of a tumour on the liver, or typhoid fever.'"
After attempting to kill half the household with brucine, Madame de Villefort changes her particular poison for a simple narcotic, recognized by Monte Christo (who in this instance frustrates the murderer) as being dissolved in alcohol. The name of the latter poison is not told us by the novelist, but on the doctor's examination of the suspected liquid we read, "He took from its silver case a small bottle of nitric acid, dropped a little of it into the liquor, which immediately changed to a blood-red colour."