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Updated: June 5, 2025
'It will be great fun. I shall pick up copy about the habits of the middle classes in the Midlands. 'They won't recognise you as the author of your more criminal romances? 'How can they? I sign them "Passion Flower" and "Nightshade," and "La Tofana," and so on. 'You will dress as in your photograph in The Young Girl? 'I will, and take a fichu to wear in the evening.
The word miracle was echoed through the whole country, and the transmigration of the Pandour Trenck, from earth to heaven, by St. Francis, proclaimed. The clue to this labyrinth of miracles, known only to me, is truly as follows: He possessed the secret of what is called the aqua tofana, and had determined on death.
But all was well with her now; not in the sense of the last joyous syllables she spoke in life, but in a higher, holier sense, as when God interprets our words, and not men, all was well with her now. The gaunt, iron-visaged woman knelt down upon her knees, gazing with unshrinking eyes upon the face of her victim, as if curiously marking the effect of a successful experiment of the aqua tofana.
This graveyard, with its ruinous walls, its mangy riot of unwholesome weeds, its corpses festering in slime beneath neglected slabs in hollow chambers, and the mephitic wash of poisoned waters that surround it, inspires the horror of disgust. The morning has not lost its freshness. Antelao and Tofana, guarding the vale above Cortina, show faint streaks of snow upon their amethyst.
In Paraguay the Jesuits instigated the natives to rebel against Spain and Portugal; and the holy fathers, taking the field in person, proved themselves excellent leaders. Pope Clement XIV was poisoned by the Jesuits. He had signed a Bull to suppress the order, which Bull was to "be forever and to all eternity valid." The result of it was "acqua tofana of Perugia," a slow and torturing poison.
A sort of internal bubbling seemed to work in its centre, and curious specks and lines of crimson and gold flashed through it from time to time. "What is it?" I asked; adding with a half-smile, "Are you the possessor of a specimen of the far-famed Aqua Tofana?"
Death was not less sure because deferred, and it could be made to assume the appearance of dumb paralysis, wasting atrophy, or burning fever, at the discretion of the compounder of the fatal poison. The ordinary effect of the aqua tofana was immediate death. The poudre de succession was more slow in killing.
She gave Angelique a graphic, minute, and not untrue account of all she had done at Beaumanoir, dwelling with fierce unction on the marvellous and sudden effects of the aqua tofana, not sparing one detail of the beauty and innocent looks of her victim; and repeating, with a mocking laugh, the deceit she had practised upon her with regard to the bouquet as a gift from the Intendant.
Cellini placed the decanter carefully on a shelf, and I noticed that he chose a particular spot for it, where the rays of the sun could fall perpendicularly upon the vessel containing it. Then turning to me, he replied: "Aqua Tofana, mademoiselle, is a deadly poison, known to the ancients and also to many learned chemists of our day.
On one side we looked down upon the Five Towers; on the other, a thousand feet below, the Alps, dotted with the huts of the herdsmen, sloped down into the deep-cut vale of Agordo. Opposite to us was the enormous mass of Tofana, a pile of gray and pink and saffron rock.
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