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Cultured members, on drinking it, were wont to say things about Locusta and Borgia. The commoner sort swore like hell at Freddy Parker. It made you feel squiffy after the sixth glass argumentative, magisterial, maudlin, taciturn, erotic, sentimental, sea-sick, ecstatic, paralysed, lachrymose, hilarious, pugilistic according to your temperament.
Locusta in ancient Rome, Madame Brinvilliers in Paris, were people of original genius: not in any new artifice of toxicology, not in the mere management of poisons, was the audacity of their genius displayed. No; but in profiting by domestic openings for murder, unsuspected through their very atrocity.
And with this fearful injunction the count disappeared through the door, which noiselessly closed after him. Locusta. Valentine was alone; two other clocks, slower than that of Saint-Philippe du Roule, struck the hour of midnight from different directions, and excepting the rumbling of a few carriages all was silent.
This colossus of cunning and corruption had employed all his powers of mind, and all the resources of mimicry, to affect the surprise and anility of an innocent man, while giving the lawyers the spectacle of his sufferings. As has been told, Asie, that skilled Locusta, had given him a dose of poison so qualified as to produce the effects of a dreadful illness.
There was, however, a serious difficulty in the way of administering it, since a potion so sudden and violent in its character as this was intended to be, might be expected to take immediate effect upon the taster, and so produce an alarm which would prevent Britannicus from receiving it. To obviate this difficulty, Pollio and Locusta cunningly contrived the following plan.
But I understood that it could not be taken in any other direction, particularly as you did not wish it to go through the property of Locusta or Varro. The latter alone had made the road very well where it skirted his own property.
Messalina, Locusta, Lucretia, Theodora, they step aside in this particular review of peccant women. Cleopatra, supposed to have poisoned slaves in the spirit of scientific research, or perhaps as punishment for having handed her the wrong lipstick, also is set aside.
In the fifth, that she had tried to poison her sister, a Carmelite nun. The two other articles were concerned with the description of strange and unnatural sins. In this woman there was something of Locusta and something of Messalina as well: antiquity could go no further. M. de Palluau, fortified by his knowledge of this important document, began his examination forthwith.
Any tendency of this kind which might exist would be greatly favored, he knew, by the excitement of a public funeral. He determined, therefore, that the body should be immediately buried. There was another reason still for this dispatch. It seems that one of the effects of the species of poison which Locusta had administered was that the body of the victim was turned black by it soon after death.
Locusta hadn't touched it; but I will call on him at Rome, and think I shall be able to stir him up, and at the same time I shall ask M. Taurus, who is now at Rome, and whom I am told promised to allow you to do so, about making a watercourse through his property.
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