Chapitre 14. A Propos of Herbs and Stewed Poetasters

“I pray you excuse me, fair sister and brother-in-law,” said Meurtrier.  “I must leave you for a

time to see someone in regard to a wombat.”


“Sans doute!” said Bilbette.  “Au revoir, Meurtrier, and recommend that the wombat use a less

fragrant perfume.” Meurtrier blushed, collected his handkerchief, and wended to the secret smiau

that led to a courtyard outside the apartments of one he loved dearer than cognac.


“Oh, Meurtrier!” said Valartine de Villefaramir.  “I loveth thou!”


”And I-eth thou, beloved!” said Meurtier.  “Couldeth I butteth clasp thee to my bosometh!  Ah,

thou art cruel!  O cease to torment me, and accept my hand, my heart, and my fish!  Or else tell

me that my life and death mean nothing to you, that my happiness is but a game or a

hobbite-piquenique in your eyes.”


“Were but I, I wouldeth,” said Valartine.  “But alack! My cruel father hath destined me for

Arafrantz d’Imrahil, who is like unto an abomination of the cuisine of the Snowmen unto me.  It

is true that my grandfather favoureth thou, but what can he do, paralysed as he is by the Valards

for the sin of supporting the faction of Sharcoléon, and unable to communicate but through-eth

smoke-rings?”


“Alas! Letteth us sing a love duet!”


“We shall! For thy tenor hath enthralled me!”


They sang “Addio, speranza ed anima” from Troliata until the sound of footsteps warned them

that they had better stop.  The chipmunks applauded wildly.


As Meurtrier slid back into his secret smiau, a voice called out, “Mademoiselle, mademoiselle!  

Mme. de Villefaramir searches for you everywhere; there is a visitor in the salon.  A great lord,

who calls himself the Count of Monte Fato.”


“How does the Count know M. de Villefaramir?” wondered Meurtrier, who had paused to gaze once

more on the one he lovedethed.


“I come,” said Valartine.

~~~


It was indeed the Count of Monte Fato who had just entered chez Mme. Béruthielle de Villefaramir,

in the intention of returning the visit made him by the steuard du roi, and at his name the

entire house, as you will easily understand, was in turmoil; for the sudden flowering of the

white weed in their garden heralded the arrival of a great one, more marvellous even than the

rumoured fidelity of Angélique de Coton.


Mme. de Villefaramir summoned her cat, that the feline might reiterate his thanks to the Count,

and Thibaut had made haste to be present, not indeed to thank the Count or, still less, to obey

Mme. de Villefaramir, but out of curiosity, and that he might utter one of those lazzi or jeux

d’esprit that made her say, “Oh, the naughty cat!  But I must forgive him, for he is subtle and

quick to make me laugh with practical jokes, such as when he replaced the prime minister’s

tobacco with lembasagna.”


After the initial courtesies, the Count inquired about M. de Villefaramir.


“My husband dines with the Chancellor tonight,” replied the young woman.  “He has just left, and

I do not doubt will regret being deprived of the pleasure of seeing you.”


“Your husband is quite right to keep to the company of his equals,” said Monte Fato.  “He is not

yet ready to face my full éclat, if indeed he ever will be. For I am far more dangerous than any

he will encounter, should he be brought before the presence of the Dark Banker.  Agh

bourzoum-ichy crimpatoul! » As he delivered himself of this aperçu, the Count’s tone became

menacing, powerful, harsh as a Forodois attempt at absinthe; a shadow seemed to pass over the

meridian sun.  Some of the other guests plugged their ears.


“Plaît-il?” inquired Mme. de Villefaramir with a nervous laugh.


“Pardon, I was speaking to myself; a bad habit of les hommes supérieurs.”


It is at this point that Valartine arrove.  She seemed sad and, regarding her attentively, one

would have even seen traces of tears.  Valartine, whom we have, dragged along by the rapidity of

a narration that began in the ballet intermission of the Aïnoulindalée and continues yet today,

for the hisses of a fickle public led to Morgot’s fall from grace and the consequent banalisation

of Arda, was a tall and svelte girl of nineteen (or thirty according to the chronology of the

Shiré), with bright chestnut hair, deep blue eyes, and a languid and exquisite gait or rather

carriage inherited from her deceased mother, Finduilette d’Imrahil; her white manicured hands,

her pearly neck, her cheeks emmarbled with fugacious colours, tinged with a soupçon of the

immortal ennui of elfinesse, gave her at first glance the aspect of one of those Snowwomen in

whom the blood of Frosty runs pure, and who have been compared in their allure to swans.


Apperceiving the presence of a stranger, she greeted him without the least of girlish simperings

and without lowering her eyes, but with the grace of a Lutienna di Lammermoor, redoubling the

attention of the Count.


“Mlle. de Villefaramir, my stepdaughter,” said Mme. de Villefaramir.


“And monsieur le comte de Monte Fato, Lord of the Rings and Imbiber of Enormous Quantities of

Pipe-weed,” said the cat Thibaut, looking up from scratching one of Villefaramir’s precious

Aragon XVI chairs.


For once, Mme. de Villefaramir became pale and seemed almost irritated at this scourge of the

steuard’s household that answered (sometimes) to the name of Thibaut.  The Count, on the other

hand, smiled and seemed to regard the feline with complaisance, which brought the joy of Mme. de

Villefaramir to its height.


“But, madame,” said the Count, resuming the conversation he had inadvertently interrupted by

causing a solar eclipse, “have I not seen you and mademoiselle somewhere?  Not, bien entendu, in

Annuminas, for the annuminasian monde is absolutely unknown to me.”  The Count’s hand

imperceptibly moved towards the ring he wore around his neck as if he sought by its aid to

refresh his memory.  “It seems to me this memory is inseparable from a beautiful sun …

mademoiselle held some niphrédile in her hand … some religious feast … the fragrance of cedars

and cypresses … Orkish graffiti …”


“Monsieur le comte may have seen us in Ithiliande,” said Valartine timidly.


“Ah, c’est vrai,” cried Monte Fato.  “It was at the Fête-Yavanne, and we were dressed as Ents

disguised as Orcs disguised as students at a snobbish forodois secondary school …”


“I remember Ithiliande perfectly, monsieur,” said Mme. de Villefaramir.  “But I am ashamed to say

that I in vain to interrogate my memory, but I do not remember having the honour of seeing you.”


“I will aid you, madame,” said the Count.  “The day was of a burning heat; you were awaiting some

eagles that had been delayed because of the festivities and the associated inebriation …

mademoiselle sang the jewel song from Féanoir, and your cat went running after a bird.”


“I trapped it, too, and scattered its feathers all over the hotel,” said Thibaut  “But alas! I

still couldn’t get the Touiti-bird.”


“And while mademoiselle and the cat were absent, do you not remember talking with someone for

quite a long time?” concluded the Count.


“Ah yes, now I remember, I talked with a man cloaked in grey, in the style of Lottaloria – a

physician, I think, who had some unusual medical theory about the hands of the Count being the

hands of a healer …”


“Precisely, madame,” said the Count.  “That man was I. In the course of a few days, I healed a

hobbite smuggler, a warrior maiden who contributed blogues to the local newspapers, and a

dysenteric dragon, so that I became known as a great doctor.  We talked for quite some time,

madame, about various things: about Lugnardo da Vinyamar, dwarvish marriage customs, cabbages,

kings, kitty litter; and at length, sharing the common opinion of me, you consulted me about the

health of your daughter.”


“But the common opinion was correct.  You do not, perhaps, realise your own skill at healing.”


“Au contraire, Riddermarchais or Mordière would reply, it is precisely because I am not a

physician that my hands were the hands of a healer, rather than dealing death on the uninsured.  

For my part, I will content myself to say that I have studied chemingole and the natural sciences

in depth, though only as an amateur.”


A clock in the shape of Luthienne sounded six times.  “It is six o’clock,” said Mme. de

Villefaramir.  “Were you not going to see, Valartine, if your grandfather is ready for dinner?”

Valartine rose, curtseyed to the Count, and left without uttering a word.


“Oh, mon Érou, would it be on my account that you dismiss Mlle. de Villefaramir?” said the Count.


“Not the least in the world,” replied Mme. de Villefaramir vivaciously.  “This is the hour in

which we feed M. de Dénéthoirtier the sad repast that sustains his sad existence.  For he denied

the legitimacy of the Crown, upholding instead the cause of the usurper, and for this reason the

eagles of Manvre cursed him, so that he became a potato, that can no longer move or speak, and

communicates solely through the means of smoke rings.  But pardon, monsieur, for vexing you with

our domestic misfortunes; I believe you were alluding to your expertise in chemistry.”


“I would not put it quite so, madame,” said Monte Fato.  “Au contraire, I studied chemingole in

order that, living particularly in the regions of Harade, I might follow the example of

Trolquien.”


“Trolkianus rex Uesenettiae …” said the heedless one, etching an exquisite chef d’oeuvre on the

bust of Isildour that he had knocked off a coffee table.  


“Thibaut! Naughty child!” cried Mme. De Villefaramir, seizing the bust from her cat’s claws.  

“You are intolerable, you are out of your senses.  Go and join Valartine with grandfather

Dénéthoirtier.”


“I want the bust,” said the feline, curling itself up in an armchair with the air of one who

never yields.  Would that Rohan had had the like when assailed by Saroumand!


“Take it, and leave us in peace,” said Mme. de Villefaramir, giving Thibaut the bust and leading

him out of the room.


“Let us see if she shuts the door behind him,” murmured the Count.  And indeed, she carefully

closed the door and looked around her.  The Count appeared not to notice.


“It is Caranthir Nepos that the charming rascal, to whom you are far too severe, was citing,”

said the Count.  “Which indicates that his preceptor has not wasted time on him, and that your

pet is well advanced for his age.”


“The truth is,” replied the lady, somewhat flattered, “that he has a great facility and learns

whatever he wishes.  He has but one great defect, that of being too wilful; but à propos of what

he was saying, do you believe that Trolquien took precautions and that these precautions were

efficacious?”


“Sans doute, Trolquien became an expert at chemingole that he might avoid being poisoned by the

dwargue Nouveau-Ligne-Cinéma; and so he was able to outlive even the Ents.  But I believe the

account of Caranthir so firmly that I have used the same recipe to avoid being poisoned in

Pelargigolo, at Umbari, and at Morgai, that is, in three cases where, without it, I had lost my

life.”


“Oui, c’est vrai, I remember that you said something similar in Ithiliande.”


“Vraiment!” said the Count with admirably feigned surprise.  “I don’t recall that subject

arising.”


“Yes, and you said something about the different effects that poisons have on people of different

nationalities, so that Dwarves can ingest materials that would infallibly kill a Sudron; and in

our clime of fogs and rain, a hobbite or a Dunédain would habituate himself to poison more

readily than in warmer regions where the moumaque flies?”


“Certainement, provided that he were forewarned.  Fortunately, it is easy so to habituate

oneself.  Suppose, for example, that the poison be touinquies …”


“Touinquies were called éalah englah beorhtât by the ancients.”


“Justement,” replied Monte Fato.  “Receive my compliments; such knowledge is rare among women.  

Eh bien, if you take a milligram the first day, two the second, and three the third, at the end

of twenty days you will support without harm three centigrams, which would be highly dangerous to

another person who had not taken the same precautions – which is how Bilbon survived in the

caravanserais of Mirquewoude.”


“I have often read and reread the journals of Bilbon,” said Mme. de Villefaramir.  “But I had

taken that for a fable.”


“Non, madame; against the habitude of history, it is the truth.  But what you have just said and

what you inquire of me are not at all the results of a sudden caprice; for there are already two

years that you asked similar questions.”

“It is true, monsieur; minerangole and botaningole fascinate me; would I were a man, that I might

be an Elessard or a Durin.”


“All the more, madame, since the Haradrins do not limit themselves to using potions as a defense;

they use them also as a weapon; in their hands, science becomes not only defensive, but very

often offensive.  There is not one of those women, haradrique or arachnide or even gondorienne,

who does not know enough of chemingole to stupefy a physician, and of psychology to terrify a

wizard.”


“But monsieur,” said Mme. de Villefaramir, whose eyes glowed with a strange light, whether

reflecting the damage Thibaut had done to the candles, or kindled by a mood within that responded

to the words of the Count.  “Are the societies wherein you have passed a part of your existence

as fantastic as in the tales of the 1001 pipe-weeds?  Can a man really be suppressed with

impunity?  Are the sultans who constitute the government of those realms really like Harid

al-Faq, who not only forgave a poisoner, but made him grand vizier because he answered a riddle

about Balrogues?”


“Non, madame, the fantastic no longer exists even in Harade; there too are found, disguised under

other names and costumes, shirrifes, éthains, steuards, and even cherrystone clams.  One hangs,

decapitates, and makes stew out of criminals very agreeably; but the latter are adroit at

deflecting human, or even orkish justice, and assuring the success of their enterprises.  Here, a

fool who wants to destroy an enemy goes to a grocer and gives a false name that only makes him

the easier to track down (as in the famous Sous-colline case, also called the mystery of the

poisoned Brie), and demands sunni-délit to deal with the gollons that infest his pantry; or if he

is very adroit, visits several grocers and is all the more easily recognised.  Then, when he has

obtained his specific, he administers to his intended victim a dose that would annihilate a

moumaque or the ego of an usenettier, and the resulting yells drive the entire neighbourhood into

turmoil.  The shirrifes arrive; a physician is summoned, and conducts a post-mortem; the

sunni-délit is discovered; the grocers testify to having sold the sunni-délit to monsieur; and

the stupid criminal is caught, interrogated, confounded, condemned, and guillotined.  Voilà how

you hobbites understand chemingole, madame.”


“Oh, what do you expect, monsieur!” said the young woman, laughing.  “Not everyone can be an

Elrond or an Ungolianne, or knows the lost recipe for touinquies, by which the exact day and hour

of death could be foretold as surely as the rising of the phaeton of Arienne at dawn.”


“Oh mon Érou, madame,” said the Count.  “Is any art ever lost!  The arts are displaced or take

turns in lighting the fashionable world with their éclat, just as did the Two Cheeses in the day

before days; things change their names, voilà tout; but the poison always has the same result,

particularly when aided by physicians, who are generally as little at ease with chemingole, as

Sharcoléon in a boat.  And behold a man killed by art, that no human justice may discover, save

if possessed of the palantirs that were lost in the Flame Wars that preceded the ascension of the

Telbourbons.”


“How terrifying, and yet how admirable!  Then the poisons of the Elronds, the Balroggieri, even

the Brandiboucques …”


“Are nothing more than objects of art, madame.  Do you think a true savant would be so banal as

to address directly the individual he wishes to eliminate?  The science loves ricochets, tours de

force, fantasy … I will cite only one example:  my friend Ecthélion of Gondor watered a mushroom

with sunni-délit.  He then fed it to a smurreau (Ecthélion had a collection of smurreaux,

tribbles, and green hamsters with purple polka-dots, which yielded in nothing to his collections

of legumes, tobaccos, and autographs of Galadriella); and the smurreau died.  What judge would

dare find aught to condemn therein, and what steuard du roi has ever prosecuted a killer of

smurreaux? None.  Now the smurreau having died, a badger arrived and ate it, and writhed in

convulsions.  The badger duly expired and its remains were consigned by its kin to the river,

with its épées, and the épées of its vanquished foes.  A blond eel found the remains and dined on

them and died, and was in turn fished up by Bombadil and eaten; and Bombadil fell, last as he was

worst.  Thus were the Muses rid of an appalling scourge.  And the physicians all attributed it to

his consumption of Benzedrine.”


“But,” said Mme. de Villefaramir, “all these circumstances, that you enchain together, can be

broken by the least accident; Bombadil might not be in the mood for eels; the eel may belong to

one of the Hindou sects of the remoter reaches of Harade, and consequently vegetarian …”


“Ah! Voilà precisely where lies the art; to be a great chemist in the East, one must direct the

workings of chance.  A skilled poisoner is very little different from a skilled roleplayer, save

in being more imaginative.”


“And yet,” said Mme. de Villefaramir, extracting herself with difficulty from her rêverie,

“however cunningly prepared, evil remains evil, and if it escape human investigation, it can

never flee that of the good Érou and the Valards, nor the punishments of the halls of Mandaux,

before whose appallingly suburban décor even the most hardened criminals may rightly quail.”


“Eh! Madame, voilà a scruple that naturally arises in a soul as decent as yours, but would be as

utterly overcome by reasoning.  It is true that you find very few people who go brutally planting

a knife in the heart of their neighbour or who, in order to make him disappear from the globe as

thoroughly as the beavers of Narnie, administer the dose of sunni-délit that we mentioned tout à

l’heure.  To reach that point, the blood must pulse in the veins hotter than the flames of the

balrogues of usenet; but if you pass, as in philology, from the word to the mitigated synonym

(hypocro lumbule it called the Eldards), if, instead of committing an ignoble murder, you

simply remove from your path him who inconveniences you, as Elrond very elegantly did with the

Kings of l’Arthédain, without shock or violence or any of those appurtenances of suffering that

make the victim a martyr, and especially without the suddenness that compromised Morgot on so

many occasions – then you escape the human law that says, Do not interrupt me when I smoke

pipe—weed!”


“There remains the conscience,” said Mme. de Villefaramir, in a strangled voice.


“Oui,” said Monte Fato.  “Happily, there remains the conscience, without which one would be

highly unhappy.  After every action a little vigorous, it is the conscience that saves us,

furnishing a thousand good excuses whereof we alone can judge; and these reasons, as excellent as

they may be to ensure our repose, would perhaps be quite mediocre for the purpose of preserving

our life from a tribunal.  So Saroumand betrayed Gandault, that he might, lamenting this

incidental evil done along the way, direct the course of the pipe-weed trade to a high and noble

purpose; so Méguelin convinced himself that the architectural improvement of Gondolino required

the breaking of a few eggs; so the high and lonely destiny of Féanoir could not be restrained by

the inconvenient presence of the Télères at Alqualonde.”


Mme. de Villefaramir absorbed with avidity these terrifying maxims and horrible paradoxes that

the Count enunciated with the naïve irony that was peculiar to him.  “Do you know, monsieur le

comte, that you see the world under a light that is just a little livid, like the corpse-lights

in Minas-Morgoule where, I suppose, you gained this tenebrous and yet marvellous knowledge?  For

you were right; you prepared the elixir that saved the life of my cat, so that the hands of the

Count were indeed the hands of a healer.”


“Trust not in secret recipes, madame,” said the Count.  “One drop of belladonna-touc saved your

pet; three would have brought him half-way into the spirit-world, and had an extraordinary, but

hardly salubrious effect on his photo-aesthetic qualities; six must have reduced him to the

status of a wraith under the dominion of the Bank, easily destroyed by passing a bad cheque.”


“And yet is an excellent antispasmodic, far better than the modest feuil-du-roi with which I must

content myself.  But the recipe is doubtless a terrible secret, like the poems of Sauron, which

none today durst read for fear that the hexameters might drive their minds to madness and

horror.”


“But I, madame, am gallant enough to offer you it.  Only remember: no more than one drop, or an

unusually unpleasing death shall be your lot.”


“If I had the honour of being your friend, monsieur le comte, instead of quite simply the

happiness of being greatly obliged to you, I would beg you to stay for dinner, and would accept

no refusal, though you called upon the Valards in witness.”


“A thousand thanks, madame,” said Monte Fato.  “But I myself have an obligation I must not

violate, for faithless is he who invites a lady to the Opéra, and fails to arrive by at least the

second act.”


After taking a cordial leave of Mme. de Villefaramir, the Count murmured to himself, “Voilà a

good soil, like that of the Shiré itself.  The seed I have planted will exceed that of Nimrot in

fertility, and the exploits of Morgot in elegance.”

Faithful to his promise, he sent her the recipe for belladonna-touc the next day.