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 pharmacopoeia 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."
Perhaps the most curious method of poisoning ever used in fiction is
that introduced by the late Mr. James Payn in his novel, "Halves."
The poisoner uses finely chopped horse-hair as a medium for getting
rid of her niece. In this way she brings on a disease which puzzles
the doctor, until one day he comes across the would-be murderess
pulling the horse-hair out of the drawing-room sofa, which causes him
to suspect her at once. This ingenious lady introduced the chopped
horse-hair into the pepper-pot used by her victim. The inimitable Count
Fosco, whom Wilkie Collins introduces into "The Woman in White," was
supposed to possess a remarkable knowledge of chemistry, although he
says, "Only twice did I call science to my aid," in working out his
plot to abduct Lady Glyde. His media were simple: "A medicated glass
of water and a medicated bottle of smelling-salts relieved her of all
further embarrassment and alarm." This genial villain waxes eloquent on
the science of chemistry in his confession. "Chemistry!" he exclaims,
"has always had irresistible attractions for me from the enormous,
the illimitable power which the knowledge of it confers. Chemists--I
assert it emphatically--might sway, if they pleased, the destinies
of humanity. Mind, they say, rules the world. But what rules the
mind? The body (follow me closely here) lies at the mercy of the most
omnipotent of all potentates--the chemist. Give me--Fosco--chemistry;
and when Shakespeare has conceived Hamlet, and sits down to execute
the conception--with a few grains of powder dropped into his daily
food, I will reduce his mind, by the action of his body, till his pen
pours out the most abject drivel that has ever degraded paper. Under
similar circumstances revive me the illustrious Newton. I guarantee
that when he sees the apple fall he shall _eat it_, instead of
discovering the principle of gravitation. Nero's dinner shall transform
Nero into the mildest of men before he has done digesting it, and the
morning draught of Alexander the Great shall make Alexander run for
his life at the first sight of the enemy the same afternoon. On my
sacred word of honour it is lucky for Society that modern chemists
are, by incomprehensible good fortune, the most harmless of mankind.
The mass are worthy fathers of families, who keep shops. The few are
philosophers besotted with admiration for the sound of their own
lecturing voices, visionaries who waste their lives on fantastic
impossibilities, or quacks whose ambition soars no higher than our
corns."
In "Armadale," the same novelist introduces us to a poisoner of the
deepest dye in the person of Miss Gwilt. This fair damsel, whose auburn
locks seemed to have possessed an irresistible attraction for the
opposite sex, was addicted to taking laudanum to soothe her troubled
nerves, and first tried to mix a dose with some lemonade she had
prepared for her husband's namesake and friend, whom she wished out of
the way. This attempt failing, and a second one, to scuttle a yacht
in which he was sailing, proving futile also, he was finally lured to
a sanatorium in London, where she had arranged for him to be placed
to sleep in a room into which a poisonous gas (presumably carbonic
acid) was to be passed. At the last moment she discovers her husband
has taken the place of her victim, and in a revulsion of feeling she
rescues him, and ends her own life instead in the poisoned chamber.
According to the story, the medical investigation which followed this
tragedy ended in discovering that she had died of apoplexy; a fact
which had it occurred in real life would not have redounded to the
credit of the medical men who conducted it.
The heroine of Mr. Benson's novel, "The Rubicon," poisons herself with
prussic acid of unheard of strength, which she discovers _among some
photographic chemicals_.
On the stage, "poisoning" has gone somewhat out of fashion with modern
dramatists, although it was a common thing in years gone by for the
villain of the play to swallow a cup of cold poison in the last act,
and after several dying speeches to fall suddenly flat on his back and
die to slow music. The death of Cleopatra, described by Shakespeare
as resulting from the bite of a venomous snake, is like no clinical
description of the final effects of death from the bite of any known
snake. Beverley, in "The Gamester," takes a dose of strong poison in
the fifth act, and afterwards makes several fairly long speeches before
he apparently feels the effects, and finally succumbs. The description
of the death of Juliet, which Shakespeare, in all probability,
conceived from reading the effects that followed the drinking of morion
or mandragora wine, is an accurate description of death from that
drug. The use of this anodyne preparation to deaden pain dates from
ancient times, and it is stated it was a common practice for women to
administer it to those about to suffer the penalty of the law by being
crucified. We have another instance of the fabulous effects ascribed
to poisons by the early playwrights, in Massinger's play, "The Duke of
Milan." Francisco dusts over a plant some poisonous powder and hands it
to Eugenia. Ludovico approaches, and kisses the lady's hand but twice,
and then dies from the effects of the poison.
Miss Helen Mathers, in one of her recent works, viz., "The Sin of
Hagar," a story warranted to thrill the soul of "Sweet Seventeen,"
makes some extraordinary discoveries which will be new to chemists.
For instance, she tells us of strychnine that actually _discolours_ a
glass of whisky and water. One of the characters, a frisky old dowager,
professes to be an _amateur_ chemist, and this lady, we are gravely
informed by the novelist, "detects the presence of the strychnine in
the glass of whisky and water _at a glance_."
But Miss Mathers has still another poison, whose properties will
doubtless be a revelation to scientists, and it is with this
marvellous body the "double-dyed villainess" of the story puts an end
to her woes. For convenience she carries it about with her concealed in
a ring, and when at last she decides on committing suicide, we are told
"she simply placed the ring to her lips, a strange odour spread through
the room, and she instantly lay dead."
Sufficient eccentricities of this kind in fiction might be enumerated
to fill a volume, but we must forbear. It is perhaps hardly necessary
to state that the lady novelist is the greatest sinner in this respect,
and stranger poisons are evolved from her fertile brain than were ever
known to man.