I thank the men of letters, those great partisans of the liberty of the press, who formerly had taken me for their leader and fought under my orders: but for them, I should have left this life without knowing what prison was, and I should have missed this ordeal. I recognise in this delicate attention the genius, the goodness, the generosity, the honour, the courage of the placed penmen. But, after all, what was this short trial? Tasso spent years in a dungeon; and shall I complain? No; I have not the mad pride to measure my vexation of a few hours with the prolonged sacrifices of the immortal victims whose names history has preserved. Moreover, I was not at all unhappy; the genius of my past grandeurs and of my thirty-year-old "glory" did not appear to me; but my Muse of former days, very poor, very unknown, came all radiant to kiss me through my window: she was charmed with my lodging and quite inspired; she found me again as she had seen me in my wretchedness in London, when the first visions of René were wafting in my head. What were we going to compose, the solitary of Mount Pindus and I? A song, in imitation of that poor poet Lovelace[413], who, in the gaols of the English Commons, sang King Charles I., his master? No; the voice of a prisoner would have seemed to me to be of ill-omen for my little King Henry V.: it is from the foot of the altar that hymns should be addressed to misfortune. I did not therefore sing the crown fallen from an innocent brow; I contented myself with telling of another crown, white also, laid on a young girl's bier: I remembered Eliza Frisell, whom I had seen buried the day before in the cemetery at Passy. I began a few elegiac verses of a Latin epitaph; but suddenly I was in doubt as to the quantity of a word: I quickly sprang from the table on which I was perched, leaning against the bars of the window, and ran to the door, on which I rained blows with my fist. The neighbouring dens rang out; the gaoler came up in dismay, followed by two gendarmes; he opened my wicket, and I cried, as Santeuil[414] would have done: "A _Gradus!_ A _Gradus!_" [Sidenote: My life in prison.] The gaoler opened his eyes, the gendarmes thought that I was revealing the name of one of my accomplices; they were quite ready to handcuff me; I explained; I gave them money to buy the book, and they went off to ask the astonished police for a _Gradus._