"When the wet weather began, or when it thawed in the winter, water streamed from all parts of my cell. I was crippled with rheumatism, and the pains I had from it were such that I was sometimes whole weeks without getting up.... In cold weather it was even worse. The 'window' of the cell, protected by an iron grating, gave on the corridor, the wall of which was pierced exactly opposite at the height of ten feet. Through this aperture (garnished, like my own window, with iron bars), I received a little air and a glimmer of light, but the same aperture let in both snow and rain. I had neither fire nor artificial light, and the rags of the prison were my only clothing. I had to break with my wooden shoe the ice in my pail, and then to suck morsels of ice to quench my thirst. I stopped up the window, but the stench from the sewers and the tunnels came nigh to choke me; I was stung in the eyes, and had a loathsome savour in the mouth, and was horribly oppressed in the lungs. The eight and thirty months they kept me in that noisome cell, I endured the miseries of hunger, cold, and damp.... The scurvy that had attacked me showed itself in a lassitude which spread through all my members; I was presently unable either to sit or to rise. In ten days my legs and thighs were twice their proper size; my body was black; my teeth, loosened in their sockets, were no longer able to masticate. Three full days I fasted; they saw me dying, and cared not a jot. Neighbours in the prison did this and that to have me speak to them; I could not utter a word. At length they thought me dead, and called out that I should be removed. I was in sooth at death's gate when the surgeon looked in on me and had me fetched to the infirmary."[15] Footnote 15: _Mémoires._