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At the sound of the breaking windows and these cries of distress, the passers-by, of whom the greater number believed in the stories about the poisoners, rushed into the shop to aid in securing Goliath.
Middleton paused, spoke and paused: he stammered. Ladies, he said, were famous poisoners in the Middle Ages. His opinion was, that we had a class of manufacturing wine merchants on the watch for widows in this country. But he was bound to state the fact of his waking at his usual hour to the minute unassailed by headache.
They were bandits, counterfeiters, poisoners, incendiaries, murderers, parricides. What had these women done? They had done nothing whatever. On the one hand, highway robbery, fraud, deceit, violence, sensuality, homicide, all sorts of sacrilege, every variety of crime; on the other, one thing only, innocence.
But as yet the poisoners had forborne those ingredients which invade the springs of life, resorting only to such as undermine the health and prepare the way to unsuspected graves.
All authentic, gentlemen and ladies. You will see the poisoners of Marseilles, Grosjon who killed his father, Madame Cottin who ate her baby. Come in, come in, gentlemen and ladies! Fifteen centimes! 'Tis given away! You enter and go out when you like. Come in! It is educational: you see vice and crime depicted on the faces of the criminals!"
Thus he begins in his "Nigrinus" his picture of the degraded corruption of Rome at that time in this way: "Wretch, why didst thou quit Greece, the sunlight, and that free and happy life? Why didst thou come here into this turmoil of splendid slavery, of service and festivals, of sycophants, flatterers, poisoners, orphan-robbers, and false friends?"
'O God of Abraham, how shall I live without my Leah? On the other side of the bars the children released for the dinner-interval were clamouring equally, shouting, weeping, trying to get to their mothers. Some howled, with their sleeves rolled up, to exhibit the upper arm. 'See, the women cried, 'the red marks! Oh, the poisoners! A light began to break upon Bloomah's brain.
This Italian gusto for the smell of blood, appears to have been introduced into the palaces of France from those of Italy by alliance with the Medici those ennobled pawnbrokers of the middle ages, whose parvenu taste engendered the fantastic gilding of the renaissance, which they naturalized in the Tuileries and at Fontainbleau, in common with the stiletto and acqua tofana of their poisoners, and the fatalism of their judicial astrology.
"Well, there are brutal men who commit murder out of sheer brutality the ruffians of the slums; and there are sordid men who commit murder for sordid money the insurers who want to forestall their policies, the poisoners who want to inherit property; but have you ever realised that there are also murderers who become so by accident, through their victims' idiosyncrasy?
We talk with wondering execration of the great poisoners of past ages, the Borgias, the inventor of aqua tofana, and the amiable Marchioness de Brinvilliers; but Pinto was of opinion that there were more social poisoners about in the present day than in the darkest, and the most demoralized periods, and then none of them are punished; which is so strange, he would add, as they are all found out.
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