The Count of Monte Cristo

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Caligula or Nero, those treasure-seekers, those desirers of the
impossible, would have accorded to the poor wretch, in exchange for his
wealth, the liberty he so earnestly prayed for. But the kings of modern
times, restrained by the limits of mere probability, have neither
courage nor desire. They fear the ear that hears their orders, and the
eye that scrutinizes their actions. Formerly they believed themselves
sprung from Jupiter, and shielded by their birth; but nowadays they are
not inviolable.

It has always been against the policy of despotic governments to suffer
the victims of their persecutions to reappear. As the Inquisition rarely
allowed its victims to be seen with their limbs distorted and their
flesh lacerated by torture, so madness is always concealed in its cell,
from whence, should it depart, it is conveyed to some gloomy hospital,
where the doctor has no thought for man or mind in the mutilated being
the jailer delivers to him. The very madness of the Abbe Faria, gone mad
in prison, condemned him to perpetual captivity.