CHAPTER VI
THE LABORATORY
AT twelve o’clock, Lavenne, slipping from the bed, felt in his pockets to make sure that the crochet, the tinder-box and steel and the three special candles which he had brought with him, short and thick like modern night-lights, were to hand. Then he opened his door.
The passage was in black darkness, yet he felt sure of finding his way. He had noted the length of the passage, the position of the doors, and the position of the staircase leading to the upper floor; he had counted the number of steps in the stairs, the form of the landing to which they led was mapped in his mind, and also the point in the landing from which opened the passage leading to the dining-room corridor and to the laboratory of Camus.
He closed the door of the bedroom carefully, and groping his way, passed down the passage to the stairs. The stairs creaked under his foot, some stairways seem to creak the louder the more softly they are trodden on. Lavenne knew this idiosyncrasy and went boldly, reached the landing, found the passage to the dining-room corridor, and in a moment more was spreading his fingers on the door of Camus’ private room in search of the key-hole.
Then, taking the crochet from his pocket, he inserted it in the lock.
Lavenne possessed a vast fund of special knowledge without which, despite his genius and fertility of resource, he would have been lost a hundred times in the course of a year. Not only had he a quick mind to receive knowledge, he had also a memory to retain it. Again, that kindness and rectitude of spirit which made so many men his friends, opened for him a living library in the Hôtel de Sartines. For instance, he had learned much of the science of Cryptography from Fremin. Jondret, who would certainly have been hanged some day as a housebreaker, had not de Sartines recognized his genius and drawn him into the police, had taught him the science of picking locks, whilst Cabuchon, a little old man, who in the year 1767 had placed his dirty forefinger on the poisoner of M. Terell, the haberdasher of the Rue St. Honoré, had taught him many of the tricks of poisoners.
The art of poisoning, first studied in Europe seriously by the Italians, had been imported into France in the days of the infamous Catherine de Medicis. The Revolution put its heel definitely on the last remnants of this fine product of the Middle Ages, but in the time of the fifteenth Louis there were still a few practitioners of the business, as witness the case of M. Terell poisoned by a candle.
Cabuchon had disclosed many of the secrets of this horrible science to the eager Lavenne. He had not only given him considerable knowledge of the methods used by the practitioners of the Italian art, such as the poisoning of gloves and flowers, but he had also given his pupil an insight into the psychology of the poisoner who uses recondite means, showing clearly and by instance that these people develop a passion for the business, and are sometimes held under the sway and fascination of the demon who presides over it so firmly that they will poison their fellow men and women for the slightest reason, and sometimes for no perceptible reason at all.