Any letters may
be legally opened, under an order from a Secretary of State.'
'Are prisoners in England,' asked Beaumont, 'allowed to correspond with
their friends?'
'I believe,' I answered, 'that their letters pass through the Governor's
hands, and that he opens them, or not, at his discretion.'
'Among the tortures,' said Ampere, 'which Continental despots delight to
inflict on their state prisoners the privation of correspondence is one.'
'In ordinary life,' I said, 'the educated endure inaction worse than the
ignorant. A coachman sits for hours on his box without feeling _ennui_.
If his master had to sit quiet all that time, inside the carriage, he
would tear his hair from impatience.
'But the educated seem to tolerate the inactivity of imprisonment better
than their inferiors. We find that our ordinary malefactors cannot endure
solitary imprisonment for more than a year--seldom indeed so long. The
Italian prisoners whom I have known, Zucchi, Borsieri, Poerio,
Gonfalonieri, and Pellico, endured imprisonment lasting from ten to
seventeen years without much injury to mind or body.'
'The spirit of Pellico,' said Madame de Beaumont, 'was broken.
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