His vain experiments to transmute the baser metals
into gold reduced him to poverty and want. His quest after these
secrets had led him to study deeply the nature and composition of
poisons and their antidotes. He had visited the great universities
and other schools of the continent, finishing his scientific studies
under a famous German chemist named Glaser. But the terrible secret
of the agua tofana and of the poudre de succession, Exili learned
from Beatrice Spara, a Sicilian, with whom he had a liaison, one of
those inscrutable beings of the gentle sex whose lust for pleasure
or power is only equalled by the atrocities they are willing to
perpetrate upon all who stand in the way of their desires or their
ambition.
To Beatrice Spara, the secret of this subtle preparation had come
down like an evil inheritance from the ancient Candidas and Saganas
of imperial Rome. In the proud palaces of the Borgias, of the
Orsinis, the Scaligers, the Borromeos, the art of poisoning was
preserved among the last resorts of Machiavellian statecraft; and
not only in palaces, but in streets of Italian cities, in solitary
towers and dark recesses of the Apennines, were still to be found
the lost children of science, skilful compounders of poisons, at
once fatal and subtle in their operation,--poisons which left not
the least trace of their presence in the bodies of their victims,
but put on the appearance of other and more natural causes of death.
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