Rochefort blew out his candle, and having replaced the bed, flung himself upon it, but not to sleep. Camille Fontrailles it was who now haunted him. The rapid events of the day had pushed her image to one side, and now in the darkness it reappeared to torment him. His passion for her, born of a moment, was by no means dead, but it had received a serious blow. At the crucial moment of his life she had refused to see him; after all that he had done for her friends, after all he had sacrificed for her, she had refused to see him, and not only that, she had sent a cold message, and also, she had sent it by the mouth of that fat-lipped libertine, Jean Dubarry.
Jean Dubarry could talk to her through her bedroom door, whilst he, Rochefort, had to remain downstairs, like a servant waiting for a message.
Yes, he would escape, if for no other object than to pull Jean Dubarry’s nose. An intense hatred of the whole Dubarry faction surged up in his mind again. Jean, Chon, and the Countess, he did not know which was the more detestable. He rose from his bed. The moon, which was now near the full, was casting her light through the window, a ray fell on the little steel saw that was lying on the table. He picked it up and examined it again.
The window had only one bar, but the bar was fairly thick and it seemed impossible that he could ever cut through it with the instrument in his hand. Yet M. de Thumery had prepared to do so and would he be daunted by a business that an invalid had contemplated and would undoubtedly have carried out had not Death intervened?
He opened the sash of the window carefully and examined the bar. Then he brought his chair to the window, and, standing on the chair and holding either end of the saw between finger and thumb, drew its teeth against the iron of the bar.
It was one of those saws nicknamed “Dust of Iron,” so wonderfully tempered and so keen that, properly used, no iron bar could stand before them. After five minutes’ work Rochefort found that he could use the thing properly and with effect, and it seemed to him that with patience and diligence, working almost night and day, he could cut through the bar top and bottom—in about ten years’ time.
In fact, though five minutes’ work had produced a tiny furrow in the bar sufficient to be felt with his thumb-nail, the whole thing seemed hopeless. But only for a minute. He began to calculate. If five minutes’ labour made a perceptible furrow in the iron of the bar, fifty minutes would give him ten times that result, and a hundred minutes twenty times. Two hours’ labour, then, ought to start him well on his way through the business.
But even with this calculation fresh in his mind, his heart quailed before the thought of what he would have to do and to suffer before the last cut of the saw and the crowning of his efforts.
It was a life’s work compressed into days. The labours of a Titan condensed and diminished, but not in the least lightened, and his heart quailed at the thought, not because he was a coward, but because he knew that if he once took the job in hand he would go through with it to the end.