During the first year of imprisonment, the lawyer, as far as it was possible to judge from his short notes, suffered terribly from loneliness and boredom.  From his wing day and night came the sound of the piano.  He rejected wine and tobacco.  “Wine,” he wrote, “excites desires, and desires are the chief foes of a prisoner; besides, nothing is more boring than to drink good wine alone,” and tobacco spoils the air in his room.  During the first year the lawyer was sent books of a light character; novels with a complicated love interest, stories of crime and fantasy, comedies, and so on.

In the second year the piano was heard no longer and the lawyer asked only for classics.  In the fifth year, music was heard again, and the prisoner asked for wine.  Those who watched him said that during the whole of that year he was only eating, drinking, and lying on his bed.  He yawned often and talked angrily to himself.  Books he did not read.  Sometimes at nights he would sit down to write.  He would write for a long time and tear it all up in the morning.  More than once he was heard to weep.

In the second half of the sixth year, the prisoner began zealously to study languages, philosophy, and history.  He fell on these subjects so hungrily that the banker hardly had time to get books enough for him.  In the space of four years about six hundred volumes were bought at his request.  It was while that passion lasted that the banker received the following letter from the prisoner:  “My dear gaoler, I am writing these lines in six languages.  Show them to experts.  Let them read them.  If they do not find one single mistake, I beg you to give orders to have a gun fired off in the garden.  By the noise I shall know that my efforts have not been in vain.  The geniuses of all ages and countries speak in different languages; but in them all burns the same flame.  Oh, if you knew my heavenly happiness now that I can understand them!” The prisoner’s desire was fulfilled.  Two shots were fired in the garden by the banker’s order.

Later on, after the tenth year, the lawyer sat immovable before his table and read only the New Testament.  The banker found it strange that a man who in four years had mastered six hundred erudite volumes, should have spent nearly a year in reading one book, easy to understand and by no means thick.  The New Testament was then replaced by the history of religions and theology.

During the last two years of his confinement the prisoner read an extraordinary amount, quite haphazard.  Now he would apply himself to the natural sciences, then he would read Byron or Shakespeare.  Notes used to come from him in which he asked to be sent at the same time a book on chemistry, a text-book of medicine, a novel, and some treatise on philosophy or theology.  He read as though he were swimming in the sea among broken pieces of wreckage, and in his desire to save his life was eagerly grasping one piece after another.