“Capital punishment and life-imprisonment are equally immoral; but if I were offered the choice between them, I would certainly choose the second.  It’s better to live somehow than not to live at all.”

There ensued a lively discussion.  The banker who was then younger and more nervous suddenly lost his temper, banged his fist on the table, and turning to the young lawyer, cried out: 

“It’s a lie.  I bet you two millions you wouldn’t stick in a cell even for five years.”

“If you mean it seriously,” replied the lawyer, “then I bet I’ll stay not five but fifteen.”

“Fifteen!  Done!” cried the banker.  “Gentlemen, I stake two millions.”

“Agreed.  You stake two millions, I my freedom,” said the lawyer.

So this wild, ridiculous bet came to pass.  The banker, who at that time had too many millions to count, spoiled and capricious, was beside himself with rapture.  During supper he said to the lawyer jokingly: 

“Come to your senses, young roan, before it’s too late.  Two millions are nothing to me, but you stand to lose three or four of the best years of your life.  I say three or four, because you’ll never stick it out any longer.  Don’t forget either, you unhappy man, that voluntary is much heavier than enforced imprisonment.  The idea that you have the right to free yourself at any moment will poison the whole of your life in the cell.  I pity you.”

And now the banker, pacing from corner to corner, recalled all this and asked himself: 

“Why did I make this bet?  What’s the good?  The lawyer loses fifteen years of his life and I throw away two millions.  Will it convince people that capital punishment is worse or better than imprisonment for life?  No, no! all stuff and rubbish.  On my part, it was the caprice of a well-fed man; on the lawyer’s pure greed of gold.”

He recollected further what happened after the evening party.  It was decided that the lawyer must undergo his imprisonment under the strictest observation, in a garden wing of the banker’s house.  It was agreed that during the period he would be deprived of the right to cross the threshold, to see living people, to hear human voices, and to receive letters and newspapers.  He was permitted to have a musical instrument, to read books, to write letters, to drink wine and smoke tobacco.  By the agreement he could communicate, but only in silence, with the outside world through a little window specially constructed for this purpose.  Everything necessary, books, music, wine, he could receive in any quantity by sending a note through the window.  The agreement provided for all the minutest details, which made the confinement strictly solitary, and it obliged the lawyer to remain exactly fifteen years from twelve o’clock of November 14th, 1870, to twelve o’clock of November 14th, 1885.  The least attempt on his part to violate the conditions, to escape if only for two minutes before the time freed the banker from the obligation to pay him the two millions.