There are few characters in the realm of romantic fiction more fascinating than the Count Monte Christo. As a work of imaginative power and absorbing interest, this masterpiece of Dumas stands unique. Nothing is impossible to this extraordinary individual, and incident after incident of the most dramatic and exciting nature crowd one upon another.
The count, who is supposed to have studied the art of medicine in the East, has always a remedy ready for every ill; from his hashis, in which he is a profound believer, to his mysterious stimulating elixir, a liquid, we are told, of the colour of blood, which he always kept in a phial composed of Bohemian glass.
A single drop of this vital fluid, if allowed to fall on the lips, almost before it reaches them, restores the marble and inanimate form to life. His pill-boxes were composed of emeralds and precious stones of huge size, and their contents were composed of drugs whose effect was almost beyond comprehension.
In the Memoirs of a Physician, Dumas describes an alchemist of the last century, a time when the seekers after the philosopher’s stone and the elixir vitæ had almost died out. Joseph Balsamo, the hero of the story, drawn from the life of the notorious Cagliostro, is a necromancer of the modern kind, who works his marvels by what is now known as hypnotism or mesmerism, a condition little understood in those days. Althotas, an alchemist of renown, lives with Balsamo, and aids him in his researches.
He is described as “an old man of over a hundred years, with grey eyes, hooked nose, and trembling bony hands, and he sits half-buried in his chair. Clad in a long silk robe, now nothing but a shapeless, colourless ragged covering, he grumbled as he drew over his ears his cap of velvet, from under which a few locks of silver hair peeped out.
“The dwelling of the alchemist,” says the novelist, “might be about eight or nine feet high and sixteen in diameter; it was lighted from the top like a well, and hermetically closed on the four sides.”
“Besides the phials, boxes, books, and papers strewed around, copper pincers were seen, and pieces of charcoal which had been dipped in various liquids; there was also a large vase half full of water, and from the roof, hung by threads, were bundles of herbs, some apparently gathered the night before, others a hundred years ago. A keen odour prevailed in this laboratory, which in one less strange would have been called a perfume.
“The old man was seated in his armchair on wheels, in the centre of a marble table formed like a horseshoe, and heaped up with a whole world, or rather whole chaos, of plants, phials, tools, books, instruments, and papers covered with cabalistic characters.
“He was so absorbed that he never raised his head when Balsamo appeared.
“The light of an astral lamp, suspended from the culminating point of the window in the roof, fell on his bald, shining head.