"It is enough to have opened any single description of a voyage among the savages of North America," says one of the most delightful philosophers of France,[8] "to know that the ordinary fate of prisoners of war is not only to be burnt alive and eaten, but first to be bound to a stake near a flaming bonfire and to be tortured there for several hours, by all the most ferocious and refined devices that fury can imagine. Read what travellers, who have witnessed these fearful scenes, tell of the cannibal joy of the assistants, above all, of the fury of the women and children, and of their gruesome delight in this competition of cruelty. See also what they add about the heroic firmness and immutable self-possession of the prisoner, who not only gives no sign of pain, but taunts and defies his torturers, by all that pride can make most haughty, irony most bitter, and sarcasm most insulting--singing his own glorious deeds, going through the number of the relations and friends of the onlookers whom he has killed, detailing the sufferings he has inflicted on them, and accusing all that stand around him of cowardice, timidity and ignorance of the methods of torture; until falling limb from limb, devoured alive [Pg 140] under his own eyes by enemies drunk with fury, he gasps out his last whisper and his last insult together with his life's breath.[9] All this would be beyond belief in civilised nations, will look like fable to the most fearless captains of our grenadiers, and will one day be brought into doubt by posterity." This physiological phenomenon is closely connected with a particular moral state in the prisoner, which constitutes, between him on the one side and all his torturers on the other, a combat of self-esteem--of vanity against vanity, as to who can hold out longer. Our brave military doctors have often observed that wounded soldiers, who, in a calm state of mind and senses, would have shrieked out, during certain operations, display, on the contrary, only calmness and heroism, if they are prepared for it in a certain manner. It is a matter of piquing their sense of honour; you have to pretend, first in a roundabout way, and then with irritating persistence, that it is beyond their present power to bear the operation without shrieking. [1] In Italian _puntiglio_(20). [2] Three-quarters of the great French noblemen about 1778 would have been on the high road to prison in a country where the laws were executed without respect of persons. [3] As the one keeps strict watch on the other in all that touches love, there is less love and more immorality in provincial towns. Italy is luckier. [4] Every year there is more than one example of women abandoned just as vilely, and so I can pardon suspiciousness in respectable women. Mirabeau, _Lettres à Sophie_(21). Opinion is powerless in despotic countries: there is nothing solid but the friendship of the pasha. [5] Leghorn, 1819.