My Ten Years Imprisonment | Page 8

and too much was already known. Patience! it was
fated to be thus.
I was here recalled to be examined anew. The process continued
through the day, and was again and again repeated, allowing me only a
brief interval during dinner. While this lasted, the time seemed to pass
rapidly; the excitement of mind produced by the endless series of
questions put to me, and by going over them at dinner and at night,
digesting all that had been asked and replied to, reflecting on what was
likely to come, kept me in a state of incessant activity. At the end of the
first week I had to endure a most vexatious affair. My poor friend Piero,
eager as myself to have some communication, sent me a note, not by
one of the jailers, but by an unfortunate prisoner who assisted them. He
was an old man from sixty to seventy, and condemned to I know not

how long a period of captivity. With a pin I had by me I pricked my
finger, and scrawled with my blood a few lines in reply, which I
committed to the same messenger. He was unluckily suspected, caught
with the note upon him, and from the horrible cries that were soon
heard, I conjectured that he was severely bastinadoed. At all events I
never saw him more.
On my next examination I was greatly irritated to see my note
presented to me (luckily containing nothing but a simple salutation),
traced in my blood. I was asked how I had contrived to draw the blood;
was next deprived of my pin, and a great laugh was raised at the idea
and detection of the attempt. Ah, I did not laugh, for the image of the
poor old messenger rose before my eyes. I would gladly have
undergone any punishment to spare the old man. I could not repress my
tears when those piercing cries fell upon my ear. Vainly did I inquire of
the jailers respecting his fate. They shook their heads, observing, "He
has paid dearly for it, he will never do such like things again; he has a
little more rest now." Nor would they speak more fully. Most probably
they spoke thus on account of his having died under, or in consequence
of, the punishment he had suffered; yet one day I thought I caught a
glimpse of him at the further end of the court-yard, carrying a bundle of
wood on his shoulders. I felt a beating of the heart as if I had suddenly
recognised a brother.
CHAPTER VI.

When I ceased to be persecuted with examinations, and had no longer
anything to fill up my time, I felt bitterly the increasing weight of
solitude. I had permission to retain a bible, and my Dante; the governor
also placed his library at my disposal, consisting of some romances of
Scuderi, Piazzi, and worse books still; but my mind was too deeply
agitated to apply to any kind of reading whatever. Every day, indeed, I
committed a canto of Dante to memory, an exercise so merely
mechanical, that I thought more of my own affairs than the lines during
their acquisition. The same sort of abstraction attended my perusal of
other things, except, occasionally, a few passages of scripture. I had

always felt attached to this divine production, even when I had not
believed myself one of its avowed followers. I now studied it with far
greater respect than before; yet my mind was often almost involuntarily
bent upon other matters; and I knew not what I read. By degrees I
surmounted this difficulty, and was able to reflect upon its great truths
with higher relish than I had ever before done. This, in me, did not give
rise to the least tendency to moroseness or superstition, nothing being
more apt than misdirected devotion to weaken and distort the mind.
With the love of God and mankind, it inspired me also with a
veneration for justice, and an abhorrence of wickedness, along with a
desire of pardoning the wicked. Christianity, instead of militating
against anything good, which I had derived from Philosophy,
strengthened it by the aid of logical deductions, at once more powerful
and profound.
Reading one day that it was necessary to pray without ceasing, and that
prayer did not consist in many words uttered after the manner of the
Pharisees, but in making every word and action accord with the will of
God, I determined to commence with earnestness, to pray in the spirit
with unceasing effort: in other words, to permit no one thought which
should not be inspired by a wish to conform my whole life to the
decrees of God.
The forms I adopted were simple and few; not from contempt of them
(I