I had now to confront the terrors of a state trial. What was my dread of implicating others by my answers! What difficulty to contend against so many strange accusations, so many suspicions of all kinds! How impossible, almost, not to become implicated by these incessant examinations, by daily new arrests, and the imprudence of other parties, perhaps not known to you, yet belonging to the same movement! I have decided not to speak on politics; and I must suppress every detail connected with the state trials. I shall merely observe that, after being subjected for successive hours to the harassing process, I retired in a frame of mind so excited, and so enraged, that I should assuredly have taken my own life, had not the voice of religion, and the recollection of my parents restrained my hand. I lost the tranquillity of mind I had acquired at Milan; during many days, I despaired of regaining it, and I cannot even allude to this interval without feelings of horror. It was vain to attempt it, I could not pray; I questioned the justice of God; I cursed mankind, and all the world, revolving in my mind all the possible sophisms and satires I could think of, respecting the hollowness and vanity of virtue. The disappointed and the exasperated are always ingenious in finding accusations against their fellow-creatures, and even the Creator himself. Anger is of a more universal and injurious tendency than is generally supposed. As we cannot rage and storm from morning till night, and as the most ferocious animal has necessarily its intervals of repose, these intervals in man are greatly influenced by the immoral character of the conduct which may have preceded them. He appears to be at peace, indeed, but it is an irreligious, malignant peace; a savage sardonic smile, destitute of all charity or dignity; a love of confusion, intoxication, and sarcasm.

In this state I was accustomed to sing—anything but hymns—with a kind of mad, ferocious joy. I spoke to all who approached my dungeon, jeering and bitter things; and I tried to look upon the whole creation through the medium of that commonplace wisdom, the wisdom of the cynics. This degrading period, on which I hate to reflect, lasted happily only for six or seven days, during which my Bible had become covered with dust. One of the jailer’s boys, thinking to please me, as he cast his eye upon it, observed, “Since you left off reading that great, ugly book, you don’t seem half so melancholy, sir.” “Do you think so?” said I. Taking the Bible in my hands, I wiped off the dust, and opening it hastily, my eyes fell upon the following words:—“And he said unto his disciples, it must needs be that offences come; but woe unto him by whom they come; for better had it been for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.”

I was affected upon reading this passage, and I felt ashamed when I thought that this little boy had perceived, from the dust with which it was covered, that I no longer read my Bible, and had even supposed that I had acquired a better temper by want of attention to my religious duties, and become less wretched by forgetting my God. “You little graceless fellow,” I exclaimed, though reproaching him in a gentle tone, and grieved at having afforded him a subject of scandal; “this is not a great, ugly book, and for the few days that I have left off reading it, I find myself much worse. If your mother would let you stay with me a little while, you would see that I know how to get rid of my ill-humour. If you knew how hard it was to be in good humour, when left so long alone, and when you hear me singing and talking like a madman, you would not call this a great ugly book.”