Poor fellow! he has but a few months to live. As for the last one, with
the stern looks and bushy black hair, he appears to bear his fate in
such a manner as ought to make us resigned to our own." "That,"
whispered a fellow-prisoner, "is Foresti, who, like Ajax, doubtless
mutters between his teeth, 'I will foil them yet, though even the gods
oppose me!'" [Footnote: "_Memoires d'un Prisonnier d'Etat_." Par
ALEXANDRE ANDRYANE. Paris.]
This observation was sagacious. It was by calm resolution and
philosophic self-possession, through faith in the ultimate triumph of
justice and freedom, that Foresti kept at bay the corrosive despair
which irritated less noble characters into melancholy or wasted spirits
of gentler mould to insanity. Yet his physical torture was extreme. Of
robust frame and in the plenitude of youthful vigor when arrested, the
want of food during the earlier years of his captivity made serious and
permanent inroads upon a naturally powerful constitution. We have heard
him relate, with a humorous emphasis indicative of brave endurance, yet
suggestive of the keenest pangs, how eagerly he one day seized a
pudding, thrust under his dress, as he passed the lodge of an official
in the court, by a compassionate woman,--how ingeniously he concealed
it from the sentinels, at the risk of burning his hands,--with what
triumph he unfolded and with what voracity he devoured it in the
solitude of his cell.
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