‘The husband of an acquaintance of mine,’ said Madame de Beaumont, ’used to disappear for two or three hours every day.  He would not tell her for what purpose.  At last she found out that he was employed in the chambre noire, the department of the police by which letters passing through the post are opened.  The duties were well paid, and she could not persuade him to give them up.  They were on uneasy terms, when an accident threw a list of all the names of the employes in the chambre noire, into the hands of an opposition editor, who published them in his newspaper.

‘She then separated from him.’

‘If the Post-office,’ I said, ’were not a Government monopoly, if everyone had a right to send his letters in the way that he liked best, there would be some excuse.  But the State compels you, under severe penalties, to use its couriers, undertaking, not tacitly but expressly, to respect the secrecy of your correspondence, and then systematically violates it.’

‘I should have said,’ answered Ampere, ‘not expressly but tacitly.’

‘No,’ I replied; ’expressly.  Guizot, when Minister for Foreign Affairs, proclaimed from the tribune, that in France the secrecy of correspondence was, under all circumstances, inviolable.  This has never been officially contradicted.

’The English Post-office enters into no such engagements.  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.  When released, he gave himself up to devotion and works of charity.  Perhaps the humility, resignation, and submission of his book made it still more mischievous to the Austrian Government.  The reader’s indignation against those who could so trample on so unresisting a victim becomes fierce.’

‘If the Austrians,’ I said, ’had been wise, they would have shot instead of imprisoning them.  Their deaths would have been forgotten—­their imprisonment has contributed much to the general odium which is destroying the Austrian Empire.’