It is our duty to pity all men. It is our duty to pity those who are
in prison. It is our duty to pity those who are not in prison. How
much more is it the duty of a Christian man to pity the rich who
cannot ever get into prison? These indeed I do now specially pity, and
extend to them my commiseration.
What! Never even to have felt the grip of the policeman; to have
watched his bold suspicious eye; to have tried to make a good show
under examination ... never to have heard the bolt grinding in the
lock, and never to have looked round at the cleanly simplicity of a
cell? Then what emotions have you had, unimprisonable rich; or what do
you know of active living and of adventure?
It was after drinking some wine and eating macaroni and bread at a
poor inn, the only one in the place, and after having to shout at the
ill-natured hostess (and to try twenty guesses before I made her
understand that I wanted cheese), it was when I had thus eaten and
shouted, and had gone over the way to drink coffee and to smoke in a
little cafe, that my adventure befell me.
In the inn there had been a fat jolly-looking man and two
official-looking people with white caps dining at another table. I had
taken no notice of them at the time. But as I sat smoking and thinking
in the little cafe, which was bright and full of people, I noticed a
first danger-signal when I was told sullenly that 'they had no bed;
they thought I could get none in the town': then, suddenly, these two
men in white caps came in, and they arrested me with as much ease as
you or I would hold a horse.
A moment later there came in two magnificent fellows, gendarmes, with
swords and cocked hats, and moustaches _a l'Abd el Kader,_ as we used
to say in the old days; these four, the two gendarmes and two
policemen, sat down opposite me on chairs and began cross-questioning
me in Italian, a language in which I was not proficient. I so far
understood them as to know that they were asking for my papers.
'Niente!' said I, and poured out on the table a card-case, a
sketch-book, two pencils, a bottle of wine, a cup, a piece of bread, a
scrap of French newspaper, an old _Secolo,_ a needle, some thread, and
a flute - but no passport.
They looked in the card-case and found 73 lira; that is, not quite
three pounds. They examined the sketch-book critically, as behoved
southerners who are mostly of an artistic bent: but they found no
passport.
