convicted of guilt.  All the same, though proof was wanting, his enormities were so well accredited that there was no scruple as to having him arrested.  A warrant was out against him:  Exili was taken up, and was lodged in the Bastille.  He had been there about six months when Sainte-Croix was brought to the same place.  The prisoners were numerous just then, so the governor had his new guest put up in the same room as the old one, mating Exili and Sainte-Croix, not knowing that they were a pair of demons.  Our readers now understand the rest.  Sainte-Croix was put into an unlighted room by the gaoler, and in the dark had failed to see his companion:  he had abandoned himself to his rage, his imprecations had revealed his state of mind to Exili, who at once seized the occasion for gaining a devoted and powerful disciple, who once out of prison might 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.