prisons where there is a daily medical inspection, where anyone who thinks he has a grievance of any sort has
the right of immediate and direct appeal; he, The Butcher, being perhaps
happiest when he can spend an evening showing us little parlour tricks
fit for children of four and three years old; quite at his best when he
remarks:
"Sickness doesn't exist in France,"
meaning that one is either well or dead; or
"If they (the French) get an inventor they put him in prison."
—So The Butcher is stooping heavily upon Surplice and slicing and gashing busily and carelessly, his thick lips stuck a little pursewise, his buried pig's eyes glistening—and in a moment he cries "Fini!" and poor Surplice rises unsteadily, horribly slashed, bleeding from at least three two-inch cuts and a dozen large scratches; totters over to his couch holding on to his face as if he were afraid it would fall off any moment; and lies down gently at full length, sighing with pleasurable surprise, cogitating the inestimable delights of cleanness....
It struck me at the time as intensely interesting that, in the case of a certain type of human being, the more cruel are the miseries inflicted upon him the more cruel does he become toward anyone who is so unfortunate as to be weaker or more miserable than himself. Or perhaps I should say that nearly every human being, given sufficiently miserable circumstances, will from time to time react to those very circumstances (whereby his own personality is mutilated) through a deliberate mutilation on his own part of a weaker or already more mutilated personality. I daresay that this is perfectly obvious. I do not pretend to have made a discovery. On the contrary, I merely state what interested me peculiarly in the course of my sojourn at La Ferté: I mention that I was extremely moved to find that, however busy sixty men may be kept suffering in common, there is always one man or two or three men who can always find time to make certain that their comrades enjoy a little extra suffering. In the case of Sur-
