My house from early morning till evening was filled with a crowd of those who sought assistance for their different troubles. Some, who had been accustomed to sumptuous tables, could not digest their daily ration of dry black bread, and required the means of procuring some relish to eat with it. There were others whose stomachs could not endure perpetual water-drinking, and wanted a little wine to mix with it. Some needed blankets, as they had nothing but the bare ground to sleep on, and therefore suffered from cold at night; one was in want of a cloak, another of shoes. The most numerous requests were for the means wherewith to fee their jailers, and thus render them more merciful.
To cure all these troubles money was the only remedy, so that a day never passed without several pieces of gold being thus expended.
But this evil was endurable and not fatal; another and a more ruinous one was impending from the persons who demanded that larger sums should be lent them, or wanted me to be surety for the amount of their ransom. None of them lacked some plausible pretext for puffing himself off, and maintaining that his own case had the best claim on my bounty. One put forward his high rank and his powerful relations or connections, another his long service and his captain’s commission, a third his great wealth at home and his ability to pay the debt without delay. Some too boasted of their own valour, and their glorious exploits in war. All, in a word, thought they had a fair claim for assistance on some ground or other. If a question was asked as to their credit and whether they would remember to pay, they told me to make myself perfectly easy; for what, said they, could be more unjust than to involve the man who had done them this great service in pecuniary difficulties and losses, when they owed to him their freedom and their lives, and had been rescued by him as it were from the very jaws of death?
And indeed it was most grievous for me to hear, ‘Unless I have this moment in ready money two hundred pieces of gold, it is all over with me; I shall be taken over into Asia, or sent I know not whither as a galley-slave,[231] without any hope of ever recovering my freedom or seeing my home again. There is a merchant, who will not refuse to supply goods sufficient to raise the sum, if you will only go security.’ Such statements were the only warranty they generally gave me; but I could not help being influenced by them when I reflected that what they said was true. Unless they were assisted, a large part of them must inevitably perish by various calamities, and there was no one on the spot, who had greater means of helping them than myself, or on whom they had a stronger claim.