When, by the help of a ladder, you descend the twenty-five or thirty feet, you reach a platform from which you slide down the steep slope for five or six feet, and then you find yourself at the entrance of an immense labyrinth—compared with which that of the Cretan Dædalus was but a child's garden in a toy box.
Who had hewn out these great catacombs? What town had being in these unknown depths? It would indeed be difficult to tell.
Its subterranean passages had certainly communicated with some larger opening pointing to further undermining. The opening by which one entered was, as we have said, merely a crack, too narrow to have ever disgorged the quantity of stones missing from the bare sides of the mountain.
It was in this quarry, then, that half the people of Villers-Cotterets had taken refuge under stress of terror.
A large encampment had been set up; a regular village, inhabited by five or six hundred people, in the midst of the square hall of granite, under a granite vault upheld by granite pillars; nearly a quarter of a league from the opening, at a depth of a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet.
My mother was one of the first who had chosen and secured and marked out her allotment in it; and there we carried mattresses, blankets, a table and some books.
So, when the first alarm came, we had but to leave Villers-Cotterets and to hide in the quarry.
Before resorting to this extremity, my mother meant to try every means of conciliation, and one of her means of conciliation, the one she set most store by, was her haricot mutton and her Soissons wines.
But man proposes and God disposes. After three days of hanging over the fire, after three days of lying in the cellar, the haricot mutton was eaten and the wine was drunk by Frenchmen.
Marshal Mortier's Corps, with the remnant of the Young Guard, and a dozen of cannon, came; they were commissioned to defend the entrance to the forest.