"Oh, yes, indeed, madame," continued Monte Cristo, "the secret dramas of the East begin with a love philtre and end with a death potion -- begin with paradise and end with --hell.There are as many elixirs of every kind as there are caprices and peculiarities in the physical and moral nature of humanity; and I will say further -- the art of these chemists is capable with the utmost precision to accommodate and proportion the remedy and the bane to yearnings for love or desires for vengeance.""But, sir," remarked the young woman, "these Eastern societies, in the midst of which you have passed a portion of your existence, are as fantastic as the tales that come from their strange land.A man can easily be put out of the way there, then; it is, indeed, the Bagdad and Bassora of the `Thousand and One Nights.' The sultans and viziers who rule over society there, and who constitute what in France we call the government, are really Haroun-al-Raschids and Giaffars, who not only pardon a poisoner, but even make him a prime minister, if his crime has been an ingenious one, and who, under such circumstances, have the whole story written in letters of gold, to divert their hours of idleness and ennui.""By no means, madame; the fanciful exists no longer in the East.There, disguised under other names, and concealed under other costumes, are police agents, magistrates, attorneys-general, and bailiffs.They hang, behead, and impale their criminals in the most agreeable possible manner; but some of these, like clever rogues, have contrived to escape human justice, and succeed in their fraudulent enterprises by cunning stratagems.Amongst us a ******ton, 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 under the pretext that the rats prevent him from sleeping, purchases five or six grammes 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 entire neighborhood.
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;' and rather than not recognize the guilty purchaser, they will recognize twenty.