Short story about a man condemned to death because he cannot remember the details about a country

Question

I once read a short story about a man (a journalist?) visiting a prison inmate. He was incarcerated for a crime he did not commit, and it was a case of mistaken identity or insufficient alibi. The conviction hinged on the fact that he could not prove that he was really himself because he could not remember the location of a country he had been to. The story ended with the journalist leaving the prison making a note to himself to remember things so as to not be in such a situation himself.

Please identify the story. I must have read it a decade ago, but the story itself was probably very old (a century old or more, think O.Henry/Maupassant/Hawthorne…). I read the story in English, but it could have been a translation.

Answer 1

This matches in almost every detail ‘The Lost Sanjak’ by Saki, published in Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches (1910).

• “a man (a journalist?) visiting a prison inmate”

  The prison Chaplain entered the condemned’s cell for the last time, to give such consolation as he might.

• “He was incarcerated for a crime he did not commit”

  “In ten minutes’ time I shall be hanged by the neck until I am dead in expiation of the murder of myself, which murder never took place, and of which, in any case, I am necessarily innocent.”

• “it was a case of mistaken identity or insufficient alibi”

  “To make matters worse, infinitely worse, an aunt of the really murdered man, an appalling female of an obviously low order of intelligence, identified me as her nephew.”

• “The conviction hinged on the fact that he could not prove that he was really himself”

  “I had looked forward apprehensively to the proving of my identity and the establishment of my motives as a disagreeable necessity; I speedily found out that the most disagreeable part of the business was that it couldn’t be done.”

• “because he could not remember the location of a country he had been to”

  “The prosecution had made a careful note of the circumstance that the man whom I claimed to be—and actually was—had posed locally as some sort of second-hand authority on Balkan affairs, and, in the midst of a string of questions on indifferent topics, the examining counsel asked me with a diabolical suddenness if I could tell the Court the whereabouts of Novibazar. I felt the question to be a crucial one; something told me that the answer was St. Petersburg or Baker Street. I hesitated, looked helplessly round at the sea of tensely expectant faces, pulled myself together, and chose Baker Street.”

• “The story ended with the journalist leaving the prison making a note to himself to remember things so as to not be in such a situation himself.”

  When the Chaplain returned to his quarters some fifteen minutes later, the black flag was floating over the prison tower. Breakfast was waiting for him in the dining-room, but he first passed into his library, and, taking up the Times Atlas, consulted a map of the Balkan Peninsula. “A thing like that,” he observed, closing the volume with a snap, “might happen to any one.”

Answer 2

You might be remembering a chapter (commonly excerpted as a short story and often translated into English) called "The Prisoner," from Alexander Dumas's /The Man in the Iron Mask/ (itself a section of a longer work written in the 1840s, /The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later/). "The Prisoner" is available in an English translation via Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2759/2759-h/2759-h.htm#link2HCH0001). The "interviewer" is a priest, not a journalist, but the prisoner's situation sounds very similar (memory problems, doesn't know why he is imprisoned, etc.).