, and that he opens them, or not, at his discretion.'

'Among the tortures,' said Ampere, 'which Continental despots delight to
inflict on their state prisoners the privation of correspondence is one.'

'In ordinary life,' I said, 'the educated endure inaction worse than the
ignorant. A coachman sits for hours on his box without feeling _ennui_.
If his master had to sit quiet all that time, inside the carriage, he
would tear his hair from impatience.

'But the educated seem to tolerate the inactivity of imprisonment better
than their inferiors. We find that our ordinary malefactors cannot endure
solitary imprisonment for more than a year--seldom indeed so long. The
Italian prisoners whom I have known, Zucchi, Borsieri, Poerio,
Gonfalonieri, and Pellico, endured imprisonment lasting from ten to
seventeen years without much injury to mind or body.'

'The spirit of Pellico,' said Madame de Beaumont, 'was broken. When
released, he gave himself up to devotion and works of charity. Perhaps
the humility, resignation, and submission of his book made it still
more mischievous to the Austrian Government. The reader's indignation
against those who could so trample on so unresisting a victim becomes
fierce.'

'If the Austrians,' I said, 'had been wise, they would have shot instead
of imprisoning them. Their deaths would have been forgotten--their
imprisonment has contributed much to the general odium which is
destroying the Austrian Empire.'

'It would have been wiser,' said Beaumont, 'but it would have been more
merciful, and therefore it was not done. But you talk of all these men as
solitarily imprisoned. Some of them had companions.'

'Yes,' I said, 'but they complained that one permanent companion was
worse than solitude. Gonfalonieri said, that one could not be in the same
room, with the same man, a year without hating him.

'One of the Neapolitan prisoners was chained for some time to a brigand.
Afterwards the brigand was replaced by a gentleman. He complained
bitterly of the change.

'The brigand,' said Minnie, 'was his slave, the gentleman had a will of
his own.'

'How did M. de La Fayette,'[2] I asked Madame de Beaumont, 'bear his five
years' imprisonment at Olmutz?'

'His health,' said Madame de Beaumont, 'was good, but the miseries of his
country and the sufferings of his wife made him very unhappy. When my
grandmother came to him, it was two days before she had strength to tell
him that all his and her fam