I HAD now to confront the terrors of a state trial. What was my dread of
implicating others by my answers! What difficulty to contend against so
many strange accusations, so many suspicions of all kinds! How
impossible, almost, not to become implicated by these incessant
examinations, by daily new arrests, and the imprudence of other parties,
perhaps not known to you, yet belonging to the same movement! I have
decided not to speak on politics; and I must suppress every detail
connected with the state trials. I shall merely observe that, after
being subjected for successive hours to the harassing process, I retired
in a frame of mind so excited, and so enraged, that I should assuredly
have taken my own life, had not the voice of religion, and the
recollection of my parents restrained my hand. I lost the tranquillity
of mind I had acquired at Milan; during many days, I despaired of
regaining it, and I cannot even allude to this interval without feelings
of horror. It was vain to attempt it, I could not pray; I questioned the
justice of God; I cursed mankind, and all the world, revolving in my mind
all the possible sophisms and satires I could think of, respecting the
hollowness and vanity of virtue. The disappointed and the exasperated
are always ingenious in finding accusations against their
fellow-creatures, and even the Creator himself. Anger is of a more
universal and injurious tendency than is generally supposed. As we
cannot rage and storm from morning till night, and as the most ferocious
animal has necessarily its intervals of repose, these intervals in man
are greatly influenced by the immoral character of the conduct which may
have preceded them. He appears to be at peace, indeed, but it is an
irreligious, malignant peace; a savage sardonic smile, destitute of all
charity or dignity; a love of confusion, intoxication, and sarcasm.
In this state I was accustomed to sing—anything but hymns—with a kind of
mad, ferocious joy. I spoke to all who approached my dungeon, jeering
and bitter things; and I tried to look upon the whole creation through
the medium of that commonplace wisdom, the wisdom of the cynics. This
degrading period, on which I hate to reflect, lasted happily only for six
or seven days, during which my Bible had become covered with dust. One
of the jailer’s boys, thinking to please me, as he cast his eye upon it,
observed, “Since you left off reading that great, ugly book, you don’t
seem half so melancholy, sir.” “Do you think so?” said I. Taking the
Bible in my hands, I wiped off the dust, and opening it hastily, my eyes
fell upon the following words:—“And he said unto his disciples, it must
needs be that offences come; but woe unto him by whom they come; for
better had it been for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck,
and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little
ones.”
I was affected upon reading this passage, and I felt ashamed when I
thought that this little boy had perceived, from the dust with which it
was covered, that I no longer read my Bible, and had even supposed that I
had acquired a better temper by want of attention to my religious duties,
and become less wretched by forgetting my God. “You little graceless
fellow,” I exclaimed, though reproaching him in a gentle tone, and
grieved at having afforded him a subject of scandal; “this is not a
great, ugly book, and for the few days that I have left off reading it, I
find myself much worse. If your mother would let you stay with me a
little while, you would see that I know how to get rid of my ill-humour.
If you knew how hard it was to be in good humour, when left so long
alone, and when you hear me singing and talking like a madman, you would
not call this a great ugly book.”