“My first care was to find out a place in which I could hide my implements and the other things as soon as I should obtain them. Through thinking earnestly about it, I at length hit on a happy idea. I had been in several rooms in the Bastille, and I had always been able to ascertain whether the one below or above me happened to be occupied, by the noise the prisoner made. On this occasion I heard sounds from above, but none from below, and yet I knew that some one was in the room beneath me. This led me to believe that there was a double thickness of boards between us; and I took the following means to test the correctness of my conclusion:—
“There was a chapel in the Bastille, where mass was said once a day during the week, and three times on Sunday. Permission to be present on these occasions was a favour very rarely granted, and obtained with no little difficulty. Both myself and my companion, however, with the prisoner in the room beneath us, were allowed to attend the service.
“I resolved to seek the opportunity of our leaving the chapel together, to obtain a hasty glimpse of this prisoner’s room, and I told Alègre how he could help me. He was to let his knife case fall down stairs, as though by accident, in drawing out his pocket-handkerchief, so that one of the turnkeys would be obliged to run back to pick it up. All this was managed to perfection. The turnkey went down to find the case; and I, in the meantime, hurried away to our fellow-prisoner’s room. The ceiling was a very low one, and measuring it and the height of the entire storey with my eye, I judged that there was an unoccupied space of about five feet between the two chambers. ‘My friend,’ said I to Alègre on my return, ‘we are saved; we have hiding-place enough for a whole workshop full of things.’ ‘But how are we to get them?’ he asked impatiently. ‘Well, as for materials, this trunk of mine will supply us with more rope than we are likely to want.’ ‘Trunk! rope! why, the thing does not contain a single yard of rope!’ ‘What! have I not a quantity of linen—several dozens of shirts, and a number of napkins, stockings, and other things? We have only to tear them up into strips to make a ladder of any length we please.’
“There was a folding table in our room with a good deal of iron work about it; and, by cutting away part of this iron work with our pocket knives, we soon obtained a kind of rough chisel for loosening the bars of the chimney. As soon as our guards had left us for the night, we prized up a portion of the flooring with this implement, and we then began to pick a hole in the brickwork beneath. After we had worked in this way for some six hours, I found that my hasty calculation had not deceived me. There was a clear space of four feet between our floor and the ceiling below. This was work enough for one day; so we carefully swept all the rubbish into the hole, and replaced the piece of flooring that had been torn up.
“Our next operation was to unstitch two of my shirts—carefully preserving the thread—and by cutting them in pieces, and tying or stitching them together, we made a ladder some twenty feet long, which enabled us to move from place to place in the chimney while we were removing the bars. This part of the undertaking was of the most painful and trying character, and its execution cost us six months of an agony which even now I shudder to think of. We were obliged to work in the most uncomfortable and torturing positions, and we had scarcely struck a dozen strokes before our hands were covered with blood. The bars were fixed in an extremely hard cement, on which we could make no impression with our tools till we had moistened it with water, and the water had to be carried up in our mouths. Our progress was so slow that we were well satisfied when we removed a single square inch of the cement in the course of a night. As soon as we had loosened one bar we left it in its place, not daring to remove it until the very last moment, for fear the chimney should be examined in the meantime.
“When this odious labour was at length completed, we set to work upon the wooden ladder, by means of which we were to make our way into the governor’s garden that lay beyond the ditch. It had to be from twenty to twenty-five feet in length; and to make it, we set aside the pieces of wood sent up as firing, using part of an old chandelier, notched with our pocket knives for a saw. With this and another rude tool, made from the ironwork of the table, we cut our logs of wood into smaller pieces, which we fastened together with small bits of metal and bolts of wood, that served as hinges and screws. Through the single pole thus made we placed the rounds of the ladder, which projected some six inches on either side. The whole thing could be taken to pieces easily, and therefore we had no difficulty in hiding it beneath the flooring of our room.
“Our little subterranean workshop (as I may call it) was now quite nicely furnished, and its contents were known to none but ourselves. We had contrived to avoid detection in a most wonderful manner, but there was one danger which still gave us particular uneasiness. It was the custom with the officers of the Bastille, not only to make irregular and unexpected visits to the cells, but even to set spies upon the prisoners’ most secret hours. We had to take care therefore to do all our work by night, and not to leave the faintest trace of it behind us. But guards have ears as well as eyes. We were, of course, talking over our projects incessantly; and since we could not avoid the necessity for doing this, we had to invent a language intelligible only to ourselves. This was easily done; the saw was called faun; a hook, Tubal Cain; the hole in the floor, Polyphemus; the wooden ladder, Jacob; and the rounds, sprigs; the ropes, doves (from their whiteness); the pocket knife, puppy, and so forth. We were constantly on our guard, however, in using even this gibberish, and we succeeded perfectly in keeping our guards in the dark.
“When the operations already spoken of were completed, we began to think about our great ladder. We calculated that it would have to be at least one hundred and eighty feet in length; and to find material for it we had to sacrifice shirts, napkins, stockings, flannels—in short, nearly the whole of our underclothing. As soon as we had made a hank, or twist, out of the shreds, we hid it away in ‘Polyphemus.’ When we had a sufficient number of these, we spent the whole night in binding them together; and I would defy any ropemaker to produce a stouter cable (of its size) than the one we then possessed.
“At the summit of all the towers of the Bastille a ledge projected some four or five feet beyond the wall. This we knew would cause any one using our ladder to swing about in the air, and in all probability to lose his hold from giddiness, and fall to the ground. We were obliged, there fore, to invent an apparatus for steadying the ladder, which was far too complicated to describe here. Suffice it to say, that it involved the use of another rope, some three hundred and sixty feet long; and this we actually made, together with shorter ropes for tying our ladder to a cannon, and for other necessities of the moment.
“When all these ropes were ready we measured them, and found they were fourteen hundred feet in length. Our ladders, all taken together, had two hundred and eight rounds.