“Of course I do. It was you who so often preached good morals to me. It is a long time ago, and, as you see, God has worked a miracle in my soul. Evil example and a kind of fatal attraction towards vice dragged me down; I was young then. But do not let us talk of that horrible time, which I look upon as an incurable wound in my life.” An invitation to dinner followed the interview, and the visitor noticed that his host was no anchorite in the matter of food and drink. As he warmed with wine he became more confidential, and even a little scandalous, though he took occasion more than once to remind his guest that if in his youth his life had been shameful, at least he had the consolation of remembering that it was never criminal. Nevertheless, in the later stages of the repast, there seemed to be a faint afterglow of the volcanic eruption of his youth when he lived in the “Capitole.” This man had been one of those who had received regular remittances from his friends in France, and who, after a brief orgy at the gaming-tables, had rooted his way back to the swine-pen in the cockloft. His parishioners affirmed him to be a man of great piety and open-handed charity. They knew nothing of his past, and his guest was careful to respect his secret. In August 1846 one of the highest administrative posts under Louis Philippe was filled by a man of great ability, one of those officials who are selected by the Press for flattering eulogium. Yet he, too, had been a Roman, and there must have been many in France who knew that the breast then plastered with decorations had once been bare to the icy winds of Dartmoor. In 1844 there was in Paris a merchant who had amassed a large fortune in trade. His little circle of vulgar plutocrats was wearied with the stories of his war service and the leading part he had taken in the internal affairs of the war prison at Dartmoor. He seemed quite to have forgotten that the “leading part” was an unerring nose for fish offal in the garbage heap, wherein he excelled all the other naked inmates of the “Capitole.” As they grew in numbers, from being objects of commiseration the Romans became to be a terror to the community. Theft, pillage, stabbings, and the darkest form of vice were practised among them almost openly. Unwashed and swarming with vermin, they stalked from prison to prison begging, scavenging, quarrelling, pilfering from the provision carts, throwing stones at any that interfered with them. It was this formidable body whose condition so shocked the Americans on their first arrival. They were the analogues of the “Rough Alleys” in the American prison, but they were more bestial and less aggressive.