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Updated: September 4, 2025
"Monsieur," said the prince of travellers, darting a savage glance at his enemy, "you are a scoundrel and a blackguard; and under pain of being thought a turn-key, a species of being far below a galley-slave, you will give me satisfaction for the insult you dared to offer me in sending me to a man whom you knew to be a lunatic! Do you hear me, Monsieur Vernier, dyer?"
If I desire to live long, it is that I may have the more to look back upon. Even to one, like the unhappy Duchess, "Acquainted with sad misery As the tamed galley-slave is with his oar," and seeing over the night of troubles no "lily-wristed morn" of hope appear, a retrospect of even chequered and doubtful happiness in the past may sweeten the bitterness of present tears.
Italians who have lost their children in their country's battles have never been heard to complain; nowhere was the seemliness of death for native land better understood than it has been in the Italy of this century, but to lose son or brother in a brigand ambush by the hand of an escaped galley-slave this was hard.
Twenty witnesses were called, of whom several swore that the accused was Pierre Mêge, the son of a galley-slave, and that they had known him for twenty years; while the others deposed that he was not the son of the Sieur de Caille, in whose studies they had shared.
"Monsieur le Baron," said he, "when a man is as vile as I am for you think me very vile, don't you? he would be the meanest galley-slave if he did not get the full benefit of his betrayed honor. You are for war; it will be hot work and no quarter. Come here no more, and do not attempt to get past me. I have given the police notice of my position with regard to you."
"And if I did," answered boldly their prisoner, "none the less was I slave and captive, constrained to serve detested masters. Where needs must I fight, I fought to the purpose. Doth not the galley-slave pull strongly at the oar, though the chase be English and of his own blood?" "He toils under the whip," said Ferne. "Now what whip did the Spaniard use?"
"My husband can do as he likes," said Madame de l'Estorade; "but as for me, I shall drop the acquaintance at once. I want my friends to be, like Caesar's wife, beyond suspicion." "Unfortunately," said Monsieur de l'Estorade, "there's that unfortunate obligation " "But, my dear," cried Madame de l'Estorade, "if a galley-slave saved my life, must I admit him to my salon?"
Thus the years passed, as Burns himself says, in the "cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing toil of a galley-slave." Then when Robert was about nineteen his father made another move to the farm of Lochlea, about ten miles off. It was a larger and better farm, and for three or four years the family lived in comfort.
Girard himself confirms this opinion. In one of his letters of 1820, to a friend in New Orleans, he says: "I observe with pleasure that you have a numerous family, that you are happy and in the possession of an honest fortune. This is all that a wise man has the right to wish for. As to myself, I live like a galley-slave, constantly occupied, and often passing the night without sleeping.
Ah, fortune's targe and butt was he, On whom were rained the strokes from hate From love that had not found its goal, From strange vicissitudes of fate. A galley-slave of Dragut he, Who once had pulled the laboring oar, Now, 'mid a garden's leafy boughs, He worked and wept in anguish sore.
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