This perfumer was strongly suspected of curing rich uncles who thought themselves ill.  The court laid at his door the famous “Elixir of Inheritance,” and even accused him of poisoning Jeanne d’Albret, mother of Henri of Navarre, who was buried (in spite of Charles IX.’s positive order) without her head being opened.  For the last two months the king had sought some way of sending a spy into Rene’s laboratory, where, as he was well aware, Cosmo Ruggiero spent much time.  The king intended, if anything suspicious were discovered, to proceed in the matter alone, without the assistance of the police or law, with whom, as he well knew, his mother would counteract him by means of either corruption or fear.

It is certain that during the sixteenth century, and the years that preceded and followed it, poisoning was brought to a perfection unknown to modern chemistry, as history itself will prove.  Italy, the cradle of modern science, was, at this period, the inventor and mistress of these secrets, many of which are now lost.  Hence the reputation for that crime which weighed for the two following centuries on Italy.  Romance-writers have so greatly abused it that wherever they have introduced Italians into their tales they have almost always made them play the part of assassins and poisoners.[*] If Italy then had the traffic in subtle poisons which some historians attribute to her, we should remember her supremacy in the art of toxicology, as we do her pre-eminence in all other human knowledge and art in which she took the lead in Europe.  The crimes of that period were not her crimes specially.  She served the passions of the age, just as she built magnificent edifices, commanded armies, painted noble frescos, sang romances, loved queens, delighted kings, devised ballets and fetes, and ruled all policies.  The horrible art of poisoning reached to such a pitch in Florence that a woman, dividing a peach with a duke, using a golden fruit-knife with one side of its blade poisoned, ate one half of the peach herself and killed the duke with the other half.  A pair of perfumed gloves were known to have infiltrated mortal illness through the pores of the skin.  Poison was instilled into bunches of natural roses, and the fragrance, when inhaled, gave death.  Don John of Austria was poisoned, it was said, by a pair of boots.

[*] Written sixty-six years ago.—­Tr.

Charles IX. had good reason to be curious in the matter; we know already the dark suspicions and beliefs which now prompted him to surprise the perfumer Rene at his work.

The old fountain at the corner of the rue de l’Arbre-See, which has since been rebuilt, offered every facility for the royal vagabonds to climb upon the roof of a house not far from that of Rene, which the king wished to visit.  Charles, followed by his companions, began to ramble over the roofs, to the great terror of the burghers awakened by the tramp of these false thieves, who called to them in saucy language, listened to their talk, and even pretended to force an entrance.  When the Italians saw the king and Tavannes threading their way among the roofs of the house next to that of Rene, Albert de Gondi sat down, declaring that he was tired, and his brother followed his example.