it to me.”
“But,” said Beauchamp, who, as became a journalist, was very incredulous, “you always carry this drug about you?”
“Always.”
“Would it be an indiscretion to ask to see those precious pills?” continued Beauchamp, hoping to take him at a disadvantage.
“No, monsieur,” returned the count; and he drew from his pocket a marvellous casket, formed out of a single emerald and closed by a golden lid which unscrewed and gave passage to a small greenish colored pellet about the size of a pea.
This ball had an acrid and penetrating odor. There were four or five more in the emerald, which would contain about a dozen. The casket passed around the table, but it was more to examine the admirable emerald than to see the pills that it passed from hand to hand.
“And is it your cook who prepares these pills?” asked Beauchamp.
“Oh, no, monsieur,” replied Monte Cristo; “I do not thus betray my enjoyments to the vulgar. I am a tolerable chemist, and prepare my pills myself.”
“This is a magnificent emerald, and the largest I have ever seen,” said Château-Renaud, “although my mother has some remarkable family jewels.”
“I had three similar ones,” returned Monte Cristo. “I gave one to the Sultan, who mounted it in his sabre; another to our holy father the Pope, who had it set in his tiara, opposite to one nearly as large, though not so fine, given by the Emperor Napoleon to his predecessor, Pius VII . I kept the third for myself, and I had it hollowed out, which reduced its value, but