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Tuscany passed alternately from the hands of the Austrians into those of the French. Charles, suspected by the first, was seized with sixteen other inhabitants of Pescia, and thrown into prison, where he passed the summer of 1796.

It was a hard trial for one who enjoyed rural pleasures so much, and who had taken his share in the feasts, as well as in the labours of the peasantry. How often, with his mother, whose arstocratic tendencies did not lessen her familiar goodness, he had taken his place in the harvest feasts, those of the Battitura, and of the vintage! Now it was, behind bars, that he thought of those enjoyments of the people, of which he has drawn such winning pictures, and for whom to the last, he alone, among all economists, has pleaded, repeating that “Man does not live by bread alone.”

From the terrace of Madame Forti (his sister) they could see the prison; soon the mother and the son spoke by signs, and the songs of the prisoner reached his family. A less vague correspondence was opened by means of their bailiff, Gian Antonio Spiccioni, whose business it was to take Charles his food. The Austrian habitually refuses to his captives pen, ink, and paper; he pretends to famish the soul as well as the body. Bits of paper, ends of pencil, were hidden in the candlestick, in the bread, in the meat, even in the bottles of wine; and the letters of Madame de Sismondi, safely received, were every day answered. The necessity of cheering and consoling his mother, and a lively attachment to those principles from which he never deviated are apparent in all these little notes, in which Sismondi continually repeats— “Love me; do not afflict yourself; when I converse with you, and when I read, I feel myself really out of prison.”

During the days of suffocating heat, so difficult to bear when air and space are meted out, a simple mark of the attachment and goodness of his bailiff cheered the solitude of Charles. Every evening ices were brought, as from Madame de Sismondi. The thanks of the prisoner, and the astonishment of the mother, discovered the affectionate fraud of Antonio to lighten, in his way, the captivity of his young master: in his simplicity he did not suspect that the notes he carried might betray his generous imposition.

A second time the suspicions of the Austrian government snatched Sismondi from his peaceful labours. He was confined ill an airy convent at Pescia, and the means of writing were not denied him; he had permission to search the library of the monks, and with this condition, imprisonment would not have appeared hard, if the health of his mother had not failed from vexations and anxiety. Examinations had not been able to produce a single charge against him, but still his promised enlargement was deferred from day to day, from month to month; this feverish expectation wore out the strength of Madame de Sismondi. With gay and gentle chat her son endeavoured to divert her grief.

“You do not know the history,” wrote he, “of one of your English notes, found when they took away my pens and ink, and carried to the commandant, then to the vicar, who each did their utmost to find some learned philologist who could explain it. At last an abbé presented himself; but in vain had he recourse to the dictionary: understanding nothing of this conjuring book, he ended by declaring himself too orthodox to decipher the writing of a woman. Then they sent to Pistoia; the gentlemen translators could not understand how writing in English could only be about my dinner and my supper; in short, they understood nothing about it, because they wished to understand too much.”

Sismondi also endeavoured to take advantage of the measures of an absolute government to destroy the aristocratic prejudices of his mother. She could not forget that it was the inroad of new ideas which had exiled her from her country, that a republican soldier had nearly killed her son before her eyes, that it was in the name of liberty that her guest, her friend, had been shot, almost in her presence. It will be always difficult to teach women to distinguish principles from their effects.

“If you could say—these are tyrants, monsters, Frenchmen,—they only do what it is their business to do; injustice triumphs, it is the lot of human kind; virtue will have its turn,—you would console yourself,” wrote Charles to his mother. “But no, these are the favourites of your heart, those whom you so ardently wished for, those from whom you expected so many benefits, who deceive you with so much cruelty. You do not know how to reconcile your opinions, your feelings, and your sufferings; and till you are convinced that there is neither honour, justice, virtue, or happiness for a country except in freedom, and that a counter-revolution is a hundred times worse than a revolution, you will doubly suffer.

“Do not blaspheme philosophy,” he again writes, “for she is gentle and consoling, and religion still more so. The sermon I read to-day enchanted me; the text was, ‘The works of the wicked are deceitful.’ I read it in Italian to my priest, and I do not think the words have lost any thing of their eloquence, it is become so easy to me to translate as I read.”

“I forget men,” says he in another note; “I hate only parties. These moral bodies are alone guilty; before every thing the motives of those who compose them have a right to be examined. And then the hatred with which a party inspires you, is not nearly so painful as that which is nourished against an individual.”