"I asked Léonard what had become of his wife. 'Oh,' he said, 'poor Jeanne has gone back to Auvergne; otherwise they'd have had her too, for they made Jeanne a "merchant" also' (_elle était aussi négociante_). "I gave Léonard a trifle, and he went off to drink it. It is the commonest recreation, when it can be indulged; and the majority of the debtors, when their day of liberation comes, return to their homes with the two incurable habits of idleness and liquor." Another who came to touch his allowance was a tradesman whose clerk had robbed him of one thousand crowns. "The tradesman being unable in consequence to meet his engagements is condemned to spend five years in Sainte-Pélagie, and from the grating of his cell he can see in the penal wing the scoundrelly clerk, who gets off with six months' imprisonment!" Another comes "tripping cheerfully through the crowd; he is receiving his last payment; in a few days he will be a free man. An anonymous letter has loosed his bonds with the happy tidings that his creditor has been dead a year, and that a speculative bailiff has been prolonging his captivity on the chance of the debt being paid into his own pocket." To this victim of a negligent law succeeded two who had made the law their dupe. One was an officer who had had himself arrested for debt to escape joining an expedition to Morea. The other was a tradesman "who was nobody's prisoner but his own, and who had arranged with a friend to deposit the monthly allowance for food. He was speculating on the article of the code which gave a general exemption from arrest for debt to all who had passed five consecutive years in the gaol." A new-comer, "with his face all slashed," was "recounting the details of the siege he had sustained in his house against the bailiff's men. He had wanted to give himself up without fuss, but was told when he presented himself at the office that a person condemned for debt must be forcibly arrested (_doit être appréhendé au corps avec brutalité_), and pitched into a cab under the eyes of all the loungers on the foot-way,—who no doubt often imagine that they are assisting at the capture of some eminent criminal. This enterprise on the part of the bailiff and his men is charged to the unfortunate debtor, and the field of battle is as often as not some public thoroughfare." But by far the most interesting and sympathetic personality on the debtor's side of Sainte-Pélagie at this date was the American Colonel Swan. The nature and amount of the colonel's debt are not set out, but the interest seems to have been the main cause of offence, and he had made it a matter of conscience to refuse payment.