“Who steals my purse steals trash”

The expression “Who steals my purse steals trash” is a passage from Shakespeare’s Othello that Alfred Dreyfus writes several times on the back of an intercepted letter. It begins by treating material loss as comparatively slight, then turns to the injury of a stolen good name: an injury that impoverishes its victim without enriching the thief. In the surrounding account of Dreyfus’s isolation and interrupted communication with his family, that distinction gives the quotation a particular force. The purse can be taken; reputation, once damaged, cannot be restored by treating the theft as an ordinary exchange.

The inscription and its setting

The passage appears on the back of a letter that has been intercepted and retained. Dreyfus has written the quotation out several times, apparently trying to commit it to memory. The repeated inscription is therefore more than a reference to a literary work: it is a fragment of language he keeps returning to while access to ordinary correspondence is restricted. The surviving surface of a withheld letter becomes the place where the lines are copied and preserved.

The position of the quotation matters. It is not presented as a passage in an uninterrupted exchange with family, but on the reverse of correspondence that has been stopped and kept. Immediately around this material, Dreyfus objects to being cut off even from open letters and describes the injustice of being buried alive in a tomb. Against that complaint, the quotation’s concern with theft and the good name condenses two kinds of deprivation: the practical loss of communication and the deeper injury to a person’s standing. The text does not say that Dreyfus chose these lines for only one reason, but their placement makes the connection between his circumstances and their subject difficult to miss.

From property to reputation

The opening line establishes a comparison: “Who steals my purse steals trash. ’Tis something, nothing:” A purse is a possession, but the words immediately diminish its value. The phrase “something, nothing” holds two judgments together: what is taken has real ownership and loss attached to it, yet it remains small beside what the quotation will identify next. The expression does not deny that theft matters. Instead, it arranges kinds of loss in a hierarchy, preparing the reader to see that material property is not the deepest measure of harm.

The next line sharpens the thought through a sequence of changing ownership: “’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands.” The movement from “mine” to “his” makes the transfer plain, while the closing reference to thousands makes the object’s passage through many hands seem commonplace. The purse can change owners; its history is a history of possession and use. That mobility is precisely what sets it apart from the injury described in the lines that follow. The quotation’s first half makes a measured argument by contrast, not by pretending that the smaller loss is no loss at all.

The theft of a good name

The turn comes with “But he that filches from me my good name”. “But” breaks the movement of the preceding lines and redirects attention from a transferable object to reputation. “Filches” retains the language of stealing, yet the object taken is no longer something held in the hand. The phrase “my good name” locates the injury in how a person is known and judged. As the passage is copied by a prisoner whose letters are being withheld, its contrast gives his circumstances a pointed resonance: a good name is not merely another possession that can be handed over to a new owner.

The following lines specify why this theft is worse: “Robs me of that which not enriches him / And makes me poor indeed.” The syntax balances thief and victim, but the consequences are unequal. The taker gains no enrichment; the person robbed becomes “poor indeed.” The expression thus challenges the ordinary logic of theft, in which loss for one party is imagined as gain for another. Here, the damage is not a profitable exchange but a wrong that diminishes the victim without a corresponding benefit to anyone else. The last phrase gives the argument its emotional weight: poverty becomes a measure not of money lost, but of dignity and standing taken away.

Repetition and significance

The quotation’s repetition on the retained letter makes its contrast memorable in form as well as in meaning. Its clauses move from the purse, through changing ownership, to the “good name,” and finally to the victim left “poor indeed.” Each step narrows the focus from a familiar, material loss to a less tangible injury that the quoted argument treats as more fundamental. Recopying those lines preserves that progression: the passage can be read again as a compact account of why reputation matters more than property.

The narrative places the quotation among evidence of Alfred Dreyfus’s isolation rather than presenting it as a free-standing literary allusion. That placement does not require the lines to serve as a complete statement of his feelings or to prove precisely what he intended by every repetition. It does establish the expression’s importance in the scene: Shakespeare’s contrast offers language for distinguishing the loss of possessions from the more profound damage of having one’s name taken from one. The final emphasis is not on what the thief possesses, but on what the person deprived of a good name is made to lose.