"What's his name?"

"His name is Gaetano, and he says he is a relation of yours."

My relation and Gaetano! I thought it might be the abbe.

I went up to the first floor, and found a score of wretched prisoners
sitting on the ground roaring an obscene song in chorus.

Such gaiety is the last resource of men condemned to imprisonment on the
galleys; it is nature giving her children some relief.

One of the prisoners came up to me and greeted me as "gossip." He would
have embraced me, but I stepped back. He told me his name, and I
recognized in him that Gaetano who had married a pretty woman under my
auspices as her godfather. The reader may remember that I afterwards
helped her to escape from him.

"I am sorry to see you here, but what can I do for you?"

"You can pay me the hundred crowns you owe me, for the goods supplied to
you at Paris by me."

This was a lie, so I turned my back on him, saying I supposed
imprisonment had driven him mad.

As I went away I asked an official why he had been imprisoned, and was
told it was for forgery, and that he would have been hanged if it had not
been for a legal flaw. He was sentenced to imprisonment for life.