I went up to the first floor, and found a score of wretched prisoners sitting on the ground roaring an obscene song in chorus.
Such gaiety is the last resource of men condemned to imprisonment on the galleys; it is nature giving her children some relief.
One of the prisoners came up to me and greeted me as “gossip.” He would have embraced me, but I stepped back. He told me his name, and I recognized in him that Gaetano who had married a pretty woman under my auspices as her godfather. The reader may remember that I afterwards helped her to escape from him.
“I am sorry to see you here, but what can I do for you?”
“You can pay me the hundred crowns you owe me, for the goods supplied to you at Paris by me.”
This was a lie, so I turned my back on him, saying I supposed imprisonment had driven him mad.
As I went away I asked an official why he had been imprisoned, and was told it was for forgery, and that he would have been hanged if it had not been for a legal flaw. He was sentenced to imprisonment for life.
I dismissed him from my mind, but in the afternoon I had a visit from an advocate who demanded a hundred crowns on Gaetano’s behalf, supporting his claim by the production of an immense ledger, where my name appeared as debtor on several pages.
“Sir,” said I, “the man is mad; I don’t owe him anything, and the evidence of this book is utterly worthless.
“You make a mistake, sir,” he replied; “this ledger is good evidence, and our laws deal very favorably with imprisoned creditors. I am retained for them, and if you do not settle the matter by to-morrow I shall serve you with a summons.”