de Villefort.
“Precisely, madame,” replied Monte Cristo; “but I perceive I have not much to teach you. Allow me to compliment you on your knowledge; such learning is very rare among ladies.”
“Oh, I am aware of that,” said Madame de Villefort; “but I have a passion for the occult sciences, which speak to the imagination like poetry, and are reducible to figures, like an algebraic equation; but go on, I beg of you; what you say interests me to the greatest degree.”
“Well,” replied Monte Cristo “suppose, then, that this poison was brucine, and you were to take a milligramme the first day, two milligrammes the second day, and so on. Well, at the end of ten days you would have taken a centigramme, at the end of twenty days, increasing another milligramme, you would have taken three hundred centigrammes; that is