ght open the doors for him, perhaps, or at least avenge his
fate should he be incarcerated for life.

The repugnance felt by Sainte-Croix for his fellow-prisoner did not last
long, and the clever master found his pupil apt. Sainte-Croix, a strange
mixture of qualities good and evil, had reached the supreme crisis
of his life, when the powers of darkness or of light were to prevail.
Maybe, if he had met some angelic soul at this point, he would have been
led to God; he encountered a demon, who conducted him to Satan.

Exili was no vulgar poisoner: he was a great artist in poisons,
comparable with the Medici or the Borgias. For him murder was a fine
art, and he had reduced it to fixed and rigid rules: he had arrived at a
point when he was guided not by his personal interest but by a taste for
experiment. God has reserved the act of creation for Himself, but
has suffered destruction to be within the scope of man: man therefore
supposes that in destroying life he is God's equal. Such was the nature
of Exili's pride: he was the dark, pale alchemist of death: others
might seek the mighty secret of life, but he had found the secret of
destruction.

For a time Sainte-Croix hesitated: at last he yielded to the taunts of
his companion, who accused Frenchmen of showing too much honour in
their crimes, of allowing themselves to be involved in the ruin of their
enemies, whereas they might easily survive them and triumph over
their destruction. In opposition to this French gallantry, which often
involves the murderer in a death more cruel than that he has given, he
pointed to the Florentine traitor with his amiable smile and his deadly
poison. He indicated certain powders and potions, some of them of
dull action, wearing out the victim so slowly that he dies after long
suffering; others violent and so quick, that they kill like a flash
of lightning, leaving not even time for a single cry. Little by little
Sainte-Croix became interested in the ghastly science that puts the
lives of all men in the hand of one. He joined in Exili's experiments;
then he grew clever enough to make them for himself; and when, at the
year's end, he left the Bastille, the pupil was almost as accomplished
as his master.

Sainte-Croix returned into that society which had banished him,
fortified by a fatal secret by whose aid he could repay all the evil he
had received. Soon afterwards Exili was set free--how it happened is not
known--and sought out Sainte-