There
be suffered from scurvy and all his teeth fell out.
His health gave way completely, and he found almost
all food impossible to assimilate. ``But, if his body
became enfeebled, his spirit remained inflexible. He
feared one thing above all. It was to find himself
some day led, by the debilitating action of prison,
to the condition of degradation of which Silvio Pellico
offers a well-known type. He feared that he might
cease to hate, that he might feel the sentiment of
revolt which upheld him becoming extinguished in
his hearts that he might come to pardon his persecutors
and resign himself to his fate. But this fear
was superfluous; his energy did not abandon him a
single day, and he emerged from his cell the same
man as when he entered.''[14]
[14] Ibid. p. xxvi.
After the death of the Tsar Nicholas many political
prisoners were amnested, but Alexander II with
his own hand erased Bakunin's name from the list.
When Bakunin's mother succeeded in obtaining an
interview with the new Tsar, he said to her, ``Know,
Madame, that so long as your son lives, he can never
be free.'' However, in 1857, after eight years of
captivity, he was sent to the comparative freedom of
Siberia. From there, in 1861, he succeeded in escaping
to Japan, and thence through America to London.
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