Silvio Pellico, having no suspicion of danger, was easily captured in his house and was carried at once to the prison of Santa Margherita in Milan, where he lay side by side with ordinary criminals, and also made the acquaintance of the “false” Dauphin commonly called the Duke of Normandy, the pretended heir of Louis XVI. It may be remembered that a fiction long survived of the escape of the little dauphin from the Temple prison, to which he had been sent by the French revolutionaries, and that an idiot boy had been substituted to send to the guillotine. The real dauphin--so runs the story--was spirited out of France and safely across the Atlantic to the United States and afterward to Brazil, where he passed through many dire adventures until the restoration in France. A serious illness at that time prevented him from vindicating his right to the throne, and thenceforth he became a wanderer in Europe, vainly endeavouring to win recognition and support from the various courts. The assassination of this inconvenient claimant had been more than once attempted, and his persistence ended in his arrest by the Austrian governor at the instance of the French government, and resulted in his being held a close prisoner in Milan. The warders of the Santa Margherita assured Silvio Pellico that they were certain his fellow prisoner was the real king of France, and they hoped that some day when he came to his own he would reward them handsomely for their devoted attention to him when in gaol. Pellico was not imposed upon by this pretender, but he noticed a strong family likeness to the Bourbons and very reasonably supposed that herein was the secret of the preposterous claim. This curious encounter no doubt served to occupy Pellico’s thoughts during his long trial which was conducted by methods abhorrent to all ideas of justice. No indictments were made public and no depositions of witnesses, who were always invisible. Conviction was a foregone conclusion, and the sentence was death, on the ground that Pellico had been concerned in a conspiracy against the state, that he had been guilty of correspondence with a Carbonaro and that he had written articles in favour of Carbonarism. His fate was communicated to him at Venice, to which he had been removed and where he occupied a portion of the Piombi, or prison under the “leads” of the ducal palace.