Richelieu was back upon his chair in an instant.
“Now,” he said, “I can pay you a ten minutes’ visit. I know the routine of this place,” and he held out his hands to me. I reached down, grasped them, and he scrambled lightly up beside me.
I began to think that, after all, escape might not be such a difficult thing. What other secrets of the prison might he not possess?
“’Tis not the first time I have made that trip,” and he laughed as he brushed the dust from his sleeve. “When the king sent me here to repent of that affair at Marly he permitted my tutor to accompany me. But in the evening we were separated, and he was locked up in this cell to spend the night. We were both dying of ennui, and determined to spend the nights together. So with infinite patience he picked away the cement around this slab and the one under it. As you see, they rest on the girders and so remain in place. The guard cannot see into the cells after night falls, so we were not disturbed. It is fortunate the corner is dark,” he added, “and that the cracks of the floor are filled with dirt, else the ruse might have been discovered since I was last here.”
“And now what?” I asked, trembling with impatience.
“Now to escape,” said the duke, and sat down on the bench to consider.
But to escape, and with only our bare hands for tools! What a problem! Yet I was determined that it should be solved. Others had escaped from the Bastille. Why not we?
“Clearly,” I said, after a moment, “we cannot hope to break down the door nor penetrate these walls.”
My companion nodded in gloomy acquiescence.
“There remains, then, only one possible way,” I went on. “That is by the window.”