CHAPTER VIII.

DUMAS. Pharmacy, pure and simple, occupies but a small space in literature, although the disciples of the sister arts of medicine and alchemy have often formed interesting studies for many great writers of fiction. Unfortunately the scientific knowledge of the average novelist is, as a rule, extremely limited, and the effects they attribute to certain drugs are usually as fabulous as those believed in the dark ages. They tell us of mysterious poisons of untold power, an infinitesimal quantity of which will cause instantaneous death without leaving a trace behind. They also describe anæsthetics so powerful that a whiff from a bottle or the wave of a handkerchief will at once produce insensibility for any period desired. In fact the writer of romance has a _pharmacopœia_ of his own. But why should we cavil at it or try to analyse it in the prosaic test-tube of modern science. Exclude the marvellous and mysterious, and you kill romance. It performs its mission if it succeeds in interesting and amusing us, so we should be lenient if it errs in mere matters of science. The art of the romancer reaches its height when it succeeds in mixing the possible with the impossible so that we can scarce perceive it. 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. “He was turning to and fro in his fingers a small white bottle, the transparency of which he was trying before his eye, as a good housekeeper tries the eggs which she buys at market. “Balsamo gazed on him at first in silence; then, after a moment’s pause:— “‘Well,’ said he, ‘have you any news?’ “‘Yes, yes; come hither, Acharat, you see me enchanted—transported with joy! I have found—I have found——’ “‘What?’ “‘Pardieu! what I sought.’ “‘Gold?’ “‘Gold, indeed! I am surprised at you!’ “‘The diamond?’ “‘Gold? diamonds? The man raves! A fine discovery, forsooth, to be rejoiced at!’ “‘Then what you have found is your elixir?’ “‘Yes, my son, yes!—the elixir of life! Life?—what do I say?—the eternity of life!’ “‘Oh!’ said Balsamo in a dejected voice (for he looked on this pursuit as mere insanity), ‘so it is that dream which occupies you still?’ “But Althotas, without listening, continued to gaze delightedly at his phial. “‘At last,’ said he, ‘the combination is complete: the elixir of Aristæus, twenty grains; balm of mercury, fifteen grains; precipitate of gold, fifteen grains; essence of the cedar of Lebanon, twenty-five grains.’ “‘But it seems to me that, with the exception of the elixir of Aristæus, this is precisely your last combination, master?’ “‘Yes, but I had not then discovered one more ingredient, without which all the rest are as nothing.’ “‘And have you discovered it now?’ “‘Yes.’ “‘Can you procure it?’ “‘I should think so!’ “‘What is it?’ “‘We must add to the several ingredients already combined in this phial, the three last drops of the life-blood of an infant.’ “‘Well, but where will you procure this infant?’ said Balsamo horror-struck. “‘I trust to you for that.’ “‘To me? You are mad, master!’ “‘Mad? And why?’ asked the old man, perfectly unmoved at this charge, and licking with the utmost delight a drop of the fluid which had escaped from the cork of the phial and was trickling down the side. “‘Why, for that purpose you must kill the child.’ “‘Of course we must kill him; and the handsomer he is the better.’” But in the end the old man falls a victim to his own infatuation, and at length dies incontinently without discovering the long-looked-for arcana.