"Eh, Hugo, mon ami," he said, settling himself comfortably in his chair, "this would be a charming story for M. Bourget, that modern Balzac, who analyses the hearts of the ladies of this generation in so masterly a fashion. Dame! I would like to give him Madame Morone's to dissect--he'd find some strange things there. Yet--would you believe it?--this woman, worthy to be a sister of Lucrezia Borgia, came out of a convent to marry my poor friend Morone." "You knew him then?" "Ma foi! I should think so, for many years. People said he was mad, but the only mad action he committed, to my mind, was in marrying Giulietta Rossana." "Yet you propose to do the same thing?" "True, but I possess a means of taming this tigress of which the unfortunate Giorgio Morone knew nothing. He was a great chemist, this poor Count, and particularly fond of toxicology, a dangerous science with such a wife, as he found out to his cost. Cospetto! I would not care myself about forging weapons for another to use against me, but that is exactly what Morone did." "She poisoned him?" "Eh! nobody says so, yet everybody thinks so. For my part, I believe the Contessa capable of anything. At all events, Morone died very suddenly, and was duly buried in that old ancestral vault to which his devoted wife, a year after his death, paid a visit. Well, before he died, Morone grew suspicious of the Contessa, and as he had just invented or rediscovered a poison which left no trace of having been used, and also an antidote to the same, he determined not to give the Signora an opportunity of exercising it on him, so this toxicological secret was buried with him." "Ah! I see now why she went to the graveyard. It was to get this poison." "Exactly! Whether it was put in the coffin of the dead man, or merely hidden in the vault, I don't know, but we will go and see." "To what end? She has the poison!" "Certainly! I believe that, after seeing it exercised upon Pallanza; but she has not got the antidote." "How do you know that, Beltrami." "Because the Contessa knows nothing of the existence of the antidote. Morone talked enough about the poison itself, but he only mentioned the antidote to one man, and that was myself. You see, Hugo, he thought madame might try a little of his own poison on himself, in which case I would be able to give him the antidote." "Couldn't he have taken it himself?" "No! this poison does not kill unless given in a large quantity; five drops make you feel chill and listless; ten drops take away your senses and converts you into what I may paradoxically call a breathing corpse; but fifteen drops kill. So, if madame had given her husband fifteen drops he would have lapsed into a stupor and died, unless the antidote was given, so that is why he bestowed it on me." "Well, but she killed him after all?"