Chapter 16. Speeches and Journalism, November 1880 — January 1882

I stayed in Lagny with my mother for almost two weeks, and then I returned to Paris to my first formal meeting. When I had come back to France the Social Revolution had been strangled. It was a France whose rulers mendaciously called themselves republicans, and they betrayed our every dream through their “opportunism.”

It had begun ten years before in the drawing rooms of the Elys6e, when Foutriquet [President Adolphe Thiers] went in front with the Duke de Nemours. In the course of the evening the Count and Countess of Paris, the Duke of Alengon, and the Prince and Princess of Saxe-Co- burg-Gotha all came. The presence of these princes of Orleans was the occasion for that reception, the third dinner party that M. Thiers, the Orleanist President of the Republic, had given. After him as president came MacMahon, Marshal of the Empire. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

That was the situation after my return, when I made my first speech. I gave it in the early afternoon of November 21 at the Elysee-Montmartre.

Today at one o’clock, the first meeting in honor of Louise Michel took place.

At one-thirty, Louise Michel went to the rostrum and cried out: “Long live the Social Revolution!” Then she added: “The Revolution was killed, but now it is reborn.” The audience responded with “Long live Louise Michel!” and “Long live the Revolution!” and people brought several bouquets to the heroine.

Citizen Gambon declared that the Commune was more alive today than ever, and that France would always be at the head of revolutions. Joan of Arc, he said, was a victim of the ingratitude of a king, and Louise Michel had been the victim of the ingratitude of the Republic.

Louise Michel then spoke again. “Let us hope that we will never again see Paris transformed into a river of blood. When all those people who maligned the Commune are no longer here, we will have been avenged. When the Gallifets and all the others have fallen from power, we will have served the people well. No longer do we wish vengeance through blood.

To shame those men will suffice.

“Religions vanish in the blowing wind, and when they do we become masters of our own destinies. We accept the ovations given us, but not for ourselves. We accept these ovations for the Commune and those who

DEFENDED IT. . . .

“So that the Revolution will triumph, we will accept into our ranks all those people who want to march with us, even if they opposed us in the past.

“Long live the Social Revolution!

“Long live the nihilists!”

Those cries were repeated by the audience, and people added:

“Long live Trinquet!”

“Long live Pyat!”

“Long live the Commune!”

I remained, and will always remain, faithful to my principles. Here is the report of another speech ten days later.

1 December 1880. Yesterday a private lecture to benefit those persons who had received amnesty took place in the Graffard hall.

Citizen Gerard thanked Louise Michel for the assistance she had given in organizing this meeting. He saluted the “principle of hate” in her “which alone makes great revolutionaries and great events,” and presented her with two bouquets.

Louise Michel responded that she accepted the bouquets in the name of the Social Revolution and for the women who had fought for their freedom. “It is the people that I salute here,” continued Citizen Michel, “and in the people, the Social Revolution.”

Applause and cries of “Long live the Commune!” interrupted her.

“The time when they machine-gunned people at Satory is now in front of our eyes. We still see the men who judged us, as well as the murderer of Transnonain, the Bazaines, and the Cisseys.

“At the end of the road those men whom we believed lost forever are now coming back, holding their heads higher than ever. The Reaction is no more than a corpse the government lifts up, and we will crush it like a snake when it tries to pass among us.

“Today it is destiny that is advancing. It is the people, still convicts dragging their chains, who will deliver us from the men who have been corrupting us, and the people themselves will win their liberty.”

In 1881 a general election took place. Paule Mink and I were pro¬ posed as candidates, though as mere women we were forbidden to vote or hold office. Even if men had voted for us, we would have been ineligible to take office and our candidacy, therefore, was a dead candidacy. I wrote about that subject.

The Illegal Candidacy

Citizens, you ask Paule Mink and me what we think of dead candidacies. Here is my answer, and I think Citizen Mink will agree with me.

Dead candidacies are both a flag and a demand. They are pure idea, the idea of the Social Revolution soaring without individuality, an idea that can be neither struck at nor destroyed, an idea as invincible and implacable as death.

Illegal candidacies are just. Dead candidacies are great, like the Revolu¬ tion itself. As for women being candidates, that is a claim, a demand that comes from the eternal slavery of the mother who must raise men and make them what they are. But what does that matter? We are all part of the same slavery, and we fight the same enemy.

For my part, I do not bother with particularist questions. I stand with all groups which attack the cursed edifice of the old society, whether with pick-ax, land mine, or fire.

I salute the awakening of the people, and I salute those who by dying have opened wide the gates of the future so that the Revolution can pass whole through those gates.

Louise Michel

Here is a second article on my being a candidate.

Seeing my name among those proposed as candidates, I feel obligated to respond. I cannot oppose the candidacy of women, because for women to be candidates affirms the equality of men and women. But, faced with the seriousness of the situation, I must repeat that women ought not to separate their cause from that of the rest of humanity; instead, they must take a militant part in the great revolutionary army.

We are combatants, not candidates. We are brave and implacable combatants—that’s all there is to it.

To propose the candidacy of women is enough to do in support of the principle. But because those candidacies won’t come to anything—and even if they should come to something, they would change nothing in the situation —I must ask our friends to withdraw my name.

What we want is not a few scattered outcries asking for a justice that will never be accorded without force. We want the entire people and all peoples to stand up for the freeing of all the slaves, whether they call those slaves women or workers.

There are three possible courses of action. Those who still hope for a favorable outcome through the ballot can vote for workers. Or they can abstain. But those whose heart is full of a seething disgust for this empire-in-miniature, this government that is called a republic, should acclaim the sacred principle of the Social Revolution. They should revive the names of their representatives who were assassinated in 1871.

It is still a question of waking from sleep. It is a sinister sleep, in which we will not allow the people to remain, because when the people sleep, empires are created and opportunism increases. Certain persons find it expedient that the daughter of the people should be in the street, exposed to rain and shame, so that the daughter of the rich is safeguarded; it pleases them to lead men in herds to the slaughterhouse and women in herds to the brothel. We want no more buying and selling of human flesh that is to be stuffed into the mouths of cannon or used to sate the appetites of parasites.

We proclaim very clearly: no more questions of personalities, not even questions of sex; no more egotism; no more fear.

The brave must go to the front of our march, and the fainthearted, when they realize where we are going, can fall away.

Louise Michel

I had no interest in cooperating with the opportunist republicans, even when their motives were good. Shortly after my return from New Caledonia, the Chamber of Deputies requested me to give testimony on conditions there, and I refused.

Paris, 2 February 1881

Chairman, Board of Inquiry into the System of Convict Deportation in New Caledonia

Chamber of Deputies, Tenth Committee Dear Sir:

Thank you for the honor you do me in calling me as a witness concern¬ ing prison conditions in New Caledonia.

While I approve of shedding light on those faraway torturers, I will not go to the Chamber of Deputies to testify against those bandits Aleyron and Ribourt as long as M. de Gallifet, whom I saw shoot prisoners, dines with the President of the Republic at the Palais-Bourbon.

In New Caledonia, if the jailers deprived the deportees of bread, if overseers with drawn revolvers insulted them at roll call, if guards shot at a deportee returning to his garden plot in the evening, still, those officials were not sent over there to put us on beds of roses.

But at this time when Barthelemy-Saint-Hilaire is a cabinet minister and Maxime du Camp is in the Academy; when Cipriani and young Morphy are expelled and so many other iniquities are being committed; when M. de Gallifet can draw his sword over Paris again; when the same voice that called for every severity of the law against the “bandits of la Villette” asks for the absolution and glorification of Aleyron and Ribourt—I’ll wait for true justice to come first.

Sincerely,

Louise Michel

In January 1881 I wrote a letter to Le Citoyen which they published on January 28. The problem was that the amnestied, heroic defenders of the Commune could find no work, and no work meant that they were starving. I helped with efforts to relieve their terrible suffering. The first part of my letter, however, did not talk about soup kitchens for the exiles.

The first part of my letter talked of a paltry thing, but it might amuse the reader. Various newspapers were repeating a stupid phrase they attributed to me: “When the pigs are fattened, you kill them.”

Amid several other images, I had said that when a wild boar is degraded by being fattened, it becomes a domestic porker. That’s all I said. But now every time that anyone made an allusion to pigs, the reactionaries claimed that a personage in the government was being insulted. It was forbidden to name anything fat. I couldn’t even mention Vitellius, and sometimes I wasn’t even thinking of the personage in question. If he were alive, I wouldn’t say so little about him.

Anyway, here is my letter to Le Citoyen:

It has now become an historic phrase: “The pigs shouldn’t get fat.” At least that was how the newspaper Le Gaulois quoted me. They did not get their money’s worth, because when they reported what I said—although they got more than half, I admit—they made it almost polite, while my intention was to be worse than the original offense. That offense is committed by the friends of a certain high personage who say that their master is attacked each time the name of the animal in question is pronounced. They express themselves crudely, while we are giving them a good example by using the proper word for a domesticated wild boar.

That was the first part of my letter. The second part became more serious.

Let us not forget those who are hungry and cold, the brave people who prevented the return of the Empire in 1871 and who are walking the ice-cold pavement without work and without shelter.

Some devoted citizens are talking about establishing a soup kitchen to be kept in operation until next March. There every amnestied person could find one meal daily to keep from dying of hunger. The project would be financed by a speech at which an enormous audience would raise the money.

In addition, if a hundred or two hundred families or men by themselves could each give an unemployed amnestied person a place to sleep until next March, then the people themselves would save the lives of their brothers returning from prison or exile.

That would be a first step in the people’s learning to act for themselves.

Louise Michel

This second part of my letter, the part about founding a soup kitchen for the exiles, put on paper a dream we hoped to make real even though we had no money. All we had were speeches and the devotion of those who had work and would help those who were not working. And then from among those people who would find in our midst the few crumbs that occasionally save a life, some might have helped others in their turn.

I had no money myself. A few idiots invented lies about my having horses and carriages, or that I got income from lands and so forth. I had to put up with that sort of nonsense during the entire three years I was free after my return from New Caledonia. My mother and I would get insulting letters after people had asked me, futilely, for three or four hundred francs, or even for several thousand francs—when there weren’t even a hundred sous in the house. My mother often cried about it. But my account book is open, and it has always been open.

To make money, I would have had to sell my writings, and I had no time to run from publisher to publisher. I was dividing my time between staying near my sick mother and going to meetings. That is why I used to collaborate with people who had the time to find a publisher.

I wrote a letter alluding to these matters to M. Fayet: “As for the fears you express about my future, don’t worry. I won’t need charity.”

Then I continued my letter with a comment on how tyranny might come to an end at last. “You have enough of my verses from the old days to recognize that I have always thought that it was better for one person to perish instead of a whole people.”

The last few lines of this excerpt are and always will be true. As for thinking that one person is nothing compared to all the people, I have always believed that way. Tyrannicide is practical only when tyranny has a single head, or at most a small number of heads. When it is a hydra, only the Revolution can kill it.

Perhaps ‘practical’ is the wrong word to use. We are nothing more than bullets more or less well adapted to the struggle and are not worth the trouble of being considered as anything more. There is no prohibition against wanting to live only as long as one is useful and to prefer dying upright rather than in bed.

Although we are still savages ourselves, we are nevertheless trying to make the world clean for those who are coming. The Revolution will be the flowering of humanity, as love is the flowering of the heart.

Those who will be alive then will march in the epic, and they alone will know how to tell it, because they will have done it; and they will have the artistic skill to tell it, because the sense of the arts which is now rudimentary will have developed in everybody.

In those years just after my return from New Caledonia I was concerned with more than indicting opportunist politicians and trying to ease the destitution of returned deportees; I also speculated about the power of strikes. I wrote a series of articles on strikes and what their effects would be. Among my favorites was a piece I wrote on conscripts going into the army. I have always dreamed of sheep refusing to become wolves, and in this article I wrote of conscripts who would refuse to become assassins.

The Strike of the Conscripts

As if there weren’t a social question here! Little children are born in the same beds where their fathers are dying, and to relieve that horrible misery Public Assistance sends one franc per person. To print up and display one single speech costs the people thirty-four thousand francs. It is the people who pay, always the people.

The people should be satisfied, however, because they are told they are “sovereign,” an opportunistic word in which to hide the other phrase that is really being spoken no less opportunistically, “the vile multitude.”

Trick election laws are applied when it is a matter of getting the herd to elect Badinguet the Third or Opportunist the First, and not used when the question concerns some right by which the “sovereign” multitude could solve social questions.

If “majority rule” were applied properly there would be a way to resolve social questions other than by selling the daughters of the people to brothels or by slitting the throats of the sons of the people on some battlefield to satisfy some opportunistic pleasure. There would be a better way to resolve social questions than by starving old workers as if they were worn-out horses at Montfaucon.

As if there weren’t a social question here! Now the people are enchained through having been made to believe that they are free. The social question could be summed up in one single act of will by the people. That act need be no more than a passive one, and would bring no repression, for although an army can be shot, or all the inhabitants of a city can have their throats cut, no one would dare to attack an entire nation.

If every one of a heroic people were to use his full authority to shut down the vice squad lists, the lists that make certain girls commit suicide— properly!—rather than have their names put down...

If an entire people were to refuse to send its sons into hazardous undertakings that might end up as future Sedans; if the conscripts were to strike, it would silence the potentates who claim they are fertilizing the soil with blood. It makes the land fertile only for them. If the conscripts were to strike, they would force kings and dictators to take Boulogne’s flag, Membrin’s helmet, and Marlborough’s saber and go off to war by themselves.

Rather than do that, those potentates would solve the problems they had hoped to exploit to maintain themselves in power. The authorities would solve them so they would not have to leave their peace and quiet and their lives at the trough.

Now that the wind is at war, if the authorities, using the new law on “freedom of the press,” came to arrest me at the bedside of my sick mother—to arrest me when I have seen the Franco-Prussian War, in which generals were bought and sold and in which great battalions had their spirit broken by forced marches—I would still scream out the cry that fills my soul:

Conscripts, strike!

Louise Michel

Marie Ferre stayed with my mother when I went to meetings, and in the spring of 1881 I was able to travel through France to speak to the various revolutionary groups that had invited me. On April 211 spoke to the Workers’ Union of Amiens, and one newspaper reported it this way:

The Workers’ Union of Amiens had delegated fifty of its members, led by Citizen Delambre, to welcome Citizen Louise Michel at the railroad station. More than five hundred persons joined the delegation. The Workers’ Union had organized a meeting at the Longueville Circus for that afternoon, and fifteen hundred persons attended.

Louise Michel went to the speaker’s platform after a few words from Citizen Hamet, who was presiding over the meeting. She described the sufferings of the working class, and condemned the conduct of those who govern us.

“The men in power today,” she said, “are Jesuits masquerading as republicans. They send soldiers to Tunis to kill them, as was done at Sedan.

“I claim the rights of women and not of men’s servants. If some day our enemies catch me, they must not let me slip away, for I don’t fight like an amateur. I’m fighting as people do when they are absolutely determined that it is time for social crimes to end. That is why I will be pitiless during the struggle and why I wish no mercy for myself. I am fooled by neither the lies about universal suffrage, nor the lies about the concessions they appear to be giving to women.

“We women are half of all humanity. We fight on the side of all the oppressed, and we will keep our share of equality, which is only just.

“The earth belongs to the peasant who cultivates it; the mine to those who dig it; all belongs to all—bread, work, science. The freer the human race is, the more it will draw riches and power from nature.

“The ‘vile multitude’ has the numbers, and when it decides to do it, it will be the force which sets people free instead of overburdening them.”

Following Louise Michel’s speech Citizen Gauthier explained his ideas on the question of capital and labor.

During that same spring I went through the Midi. At Bordeaux, I was with Cournet, and I remember that at one small meeting where various groups were represented, someone raised the question of death.

“We shall die standing,” Cournet cried out. He alluded to the commotion that would ensue when the Revolution attacked the old, empty shell from all sides. The day when that happens, everyone will give of himself—the young, those returning from the slaughter, probably the last Blanquistes. These persons bound together will all support the revolutionary forces like an army. At the head of their march, those of 1871 will take their place along with the anarchist groups. “We,” said Cournet, “have the right to die standing, too.”

Those who were mown down on the red anniversary at P&re Lachaise should not complain. They were following the blood-speckled flags, and they died without ever stopping the struggle. They died standing.

I knew only vaguely what had happened at P£re Lachaise on May 26, because I hadn’t read the newspapers for two years. Nothing other than what happened was possible. The prohibition against displaying the forbidden flags foreshadowed what was to come.

O my friends, I hope that none of you is crazy enough to dream of having any power whatever after the people are victorious. Every time someone possesses power, every single time, it leads to events like those at Pere Lachaise. When authority has been dressed in the cloak of Nessus, you smell the stench of Charenton.

This time the people must be the masters. The feeling for liberty will develop. Perhaps it would be better for the people if all of us who lead the fight now should fall in battle, so that after the victory, there will be no more general staffs. Then the people could understand that when everyone together shares power, then power is just and splendid; but unshared it drives some people mad.

A friend quoted a newspaper passage to me that he wanted me to know about. Savages, drunk with wine and blood, are applauded just as the assassins were applauded in 1871. People egg them on because not enough murders have been committed yet.

I hope that our side, the day after our victory, or even at the very moment when we attain it, will have other things to do than to duplicate those shameful acts.

The Revolution is terrifying, but its purpose is to win happiness for humanity. It has intrepid combatants, pitiless fighters, and it needs them. The Revolution is pulling humanity from an ocean of mud and blood, an ocean in which thousands of unknown persons serve as feasts for a few sharks, and if the Revolution has to cause pain to achieve its victory, it is necessary. To pull a drowning person from the water, you do not choose whether you are pulling him by the hair or in some way he finds more comfortable.

One item deserves prominent notice in my memoirs: the affair of the newspaper La Revolution sociale. Because of the revelations people have made, it is a matter of honor for me to bring up the matter.

What none of us knew at the time was that the Prefect of Police, Louis Andrieux, had financed a revolutionary newspaper by supplying funds to a Belgian named Serraux. Andrieux did this to give himself a way to watch over revolutionary groups more closely. His idea was stupid. His plan to destroy us by founding La Revolution sociale destroyed him as much as us. It was a strange thing for an intelligent man to do, to fight us this way. If we followed his example and established a reactionary newspaper the way he established a radical one, people would think we should be sent to the madhouse at Charenton.

I knew the ostensible program of La Revolution sociale from the editorial printed in its first issue, and it was most attractive. Anarchy is not a new idea; writers long before Saint-Just believed that a person who makes himself a leader commits a crime.

Here is a fragment from the editorial statement printed in the first issue of La Revolution sociale. Who would have believed that the Prefect of Police, M. Andrieux, was on the paper’s editorial committee?

The Revolutionary party ought to organize itself solidly on its own ground, with its own arms, without borrowing anything from its enemies’ institutions, sophistries, or procedures. It ought to prepare itself so that once the “heroic times” have returned, it can lay siege to the State, lay siege to the fortress which defends and protects the avenues of privilege, and not leave one stone upon another.

From each according to his strength, to each according to his needs. We believe that society is neither innate nor immanent, but is a human invention whose purpose is to struggle against the deaths that nature brings otherwise. Above all, society ought to benefit the weak and surround them with a special solicitude to compensate for their inferiority. Consequently, the goal we propose and hope for is the creation of a social order in which the individual, so long as he gives all he can give of devotion and work, will receive all he needs.

Let the table be set for everyone, and let each person have the right and the means to sit down to the social banquet. Let everyone eat at that banquet as his choice and appetite direct without anyone measuring out his serving according to the amount he can pay.

Before the Congress at London in July 1881, Emile Gautier and I got some anonymous warnings about agents of M. Andrieux, but who believes anonymous letters? To be sure, I had asked some of my London friends to go to see a woman who, they said, had advanced money to M. Serraux. Our friends found the lady in an apartment that gave them the impression of having just been furnished, but with only that impression and no other proof, they could not support the accusation. The lady gave them some reasonable explanation, and neither my London friends nor I were led to believe she represented M. Andrieux. But it doesn’t matter; the trap he set for us did more harm to those who set it than it did to us.

Now, even though M. Andrieux has confessed his deception publicly, I still need to clear the air. When I found an anarchist paper after my return, I blindly accepted an invitation to participate in writing it. M. Serraux offered me the chance to write for La Revolution sociale, but if he had not, I might have tried to submit my material to the paper anyway.

I admit I had great confidence in M. Serraux, and it was only recently that I learned of the trap. I must say, however, that M. Andrieux could have lied and accused my friends and me, but he did not do it. He was far less opportunistic than many others in his party.

Let me quote from one article published in La Revolution sociale. My original title was “To M. Andrieux.” I did not know that it was unnecessary to publish it for him to read it. Someone, perhaps Andrieux himself, retitled it “Silence the Villain.”

Silence the Villain

The traiter Andrieux, when he named me at the inquest that took place at Arbresles, has inspired a rejoinder. The villain made some costly admissions. He admitted that he let my companions and me return to France so that he could have us under his butcher’s paw. He wanted to dishonor us with degrading charges so he could murder us an inch at a time.

Noumea is too far away for Andrieux to be able to satisfy his hatred against the wrecks of the Commune. On his own authority at Lyon he had people arrested or murdered by his soldiers. But he ran out of victims and he had to get some new flesh for his club-wielding helpers. That was the reason he voted for the amnesty. He said so. He prides himself on it.

We must have justice against the one who is kept as a public executioner, the one who serves as the butchers’ valet for all sorts of repression. Does anyone believe that the French people will put up with what the Russian peasants refuse to accept? No. Like the Russian peasant we know how to die, but not how to live under the whip. It is a question of wounds that men who call themselves political realists do not feel; otherwise, that gallows salesman would have been hit as many times as there are fists on the city council. Because it is impossible for the men who work for the government to do anything about him, it is up to those of us who are independent to get justice done.

Louise Michel

I do not have the last issue of La Revolution sociale. I would like to have the last two or three articles I did, especially the last one. That one I did with the intention of having the authorities break up the newspaper. I told M. Serraux that was my idea, and now 1 understand why they did not want to. Who the devil could have guessed that the Prefect of Police was behind it all?

I have said enough to make it clear that I was above questions of personality. The affair of Foutriquet’s statue left me completely indifferent, also. [Andrieux was aware of, or instigated, a plot to blow up a new statue of President Thiers; the plan came to nothing when the explosives failed to go off.] To keep the misfire from being blamed on a man, I wanted to attribute it to a child. At that age, if the hand is unsure, the child is corrected, and then it doesn’t matter. If Andrieux deceived us, our frankness will break the trap, and it will not sully the Revolution.

The most perfidious part of Andrieux’s plan failed. Like other comrades, I had inserted in the newspaper several letters in which I declared I would write insults only against the government and I would refuse to deal with any insults stupidly addressed to other groups scattered along the path of revolution.

I have always made war against bad principles. As for particular men, they do not count. Andrieux and his lackeys who tried to set traps for us are having the trap turned on them.

Only this morning did I become aware of a little maneuver they had. When there were articles that especially attacked personalities instead of ideas (which is completely opposed to the way I see things), they would put a few adroitly cut words of mine in an epigraph. Then people were led to attribute the rest of the article to me. Personal hatreds were generated by that technique.

The rest of 1881 I spent making speeches, attending an international meeting in London, and writing for various newspapers. In January 1882 the silent poor spoke out on the anniversary of the great Blanqui’s death, and I was arrested. I have copied the story of the trial from L’Intransigeant of 7 January 1882, because the affair was not reported in the Gazette des tribunaux.

Police Court

Louise Michel was the first accused called. The valiant citizen was entirely self-possessed, and in her own voice she answered the judge’s questions in a very precise manner.

“You are charged with insulting policemen,” said M. Puget, the judge.

“On the contrary, it is we who should bring charges concerning brutality and insults,” Louise Michel said, “because we were very peaceful. What happened, and doubtless the reason I am here, is this: I went to the headquarters of the police commissioner and when I got there, I looked out a window and saw several policemen beating a man. I did not want to say anything to those policemen because they were very overexcited, so I went up to the next floor and found two other policemen who were calmer. I said to them, ‘Go down quickly. Someone is being murdered.’ ”

The judge said, “That story does not agree with the depositions of witnesses we’re about to hear.”

Louise Michel answered, “What I’ve said is the truth. When accusations against me have been true, I’ve admitted things far more serious than this.”

The first witness called was a police constable named Conar. He said that when he got to the police commissioner’s he found two women, one of whom was Louise Michel. He testified that she said to him, “You are hoods and deadbeats.”

“That’s a lie,” said Louise Michel. The police constable persisted in claiming his account was true. Louise Michel repeated that she was telling the truth and could say nothing more.

Regardless of the police constable’s story being a lie, the court sentenced Louise Michel to two weeks in prison for violating Article 224 of the Penal Code.

My friends were right to believe that I could not have said the words attributed to me. I said, “Someone is being murdered,” not some slang phrase, and the word “deadbeat” isn’t in my vocabulary. Nevertheless, I spent two weeks in the middle of January 1882 in jail, while my mother waited for me.