The Works of Honoré de Balzac: About Catherine de' Medici, Seraphita, and Other Stories

by Honoré de Balzac

After giving his new apprentice a parting glance fraught with many meanings, Cornélius locked and double-locked the door, and carried away the key. He went downstairs again, leaving his man as much at his wit's end as a bell-founder who finds his mould empty. Alone, without a light, sitting on a stool in this little garret, which his four precursors had quitted only for the gallows, the young fellow felt like a wild animal caught in a sack. He sprang on to the stool, and stood on tiptoe to look out of the little loopholes through which the white light came in. He could thence see the Loire, the beautiful hills of Saint-Cyr, and the gloomy splendor of Le Plessis, where a few lights twinkled from the deep-set windows. Further away lay the fair fields of Touraine and the silvery reaches of the great river. Every detail of the pleasing landscape had at this moment an unwonted charm. Window-panes, water-pools, the roofs of the houses, glittered like gems in the tremulous moonbeams.

The young man could not altogether suppress some sweet but painful feeling.

"If it should be for the last time," thought he.

And he stood there, already tasting the terrible emotion his adventure had promised, and abandoning himself to the fears of a prisoner who still has a gleam of hope. Every difficulty added to his mistress' beauty. She was to him no longer a woman, but a supernatural being, seen through the hot vapors of desire.

A faint cry, which he fancied proceeded from the Hôtel de Poitiers, brought him to himself and to a sense of his situation. As he sat down on the bed to meditate on the matter, he heard a soft rustle on the winding stair. He listened with all his ears; and presently the words, "He is in bed," spoken by the old woman, reached his ear.

By an accident of which the architect was unaware, the least sound below was echoed in the turret room, so that the sham apprentice did not lose one of the movements of the miser and his sister, who were spying on him. He undressed, got into bed, and pretended to sleep, spending the time during which his two hosts remained on the watch on the turret steps, in devising the means for getting out of his prison and into the Hôtel de Poitiers. By about ten o'clock Cornélius and his sister, convinced that their apprentice was asleep, went to their own rooms.

The young man listened keenly to the dull remote sounds made by the Flemings, and fancied he could guess where they slept; they must, he thought, occupy the whole of the second floor.

As in all houses of that date, that floor was in the roof, with dormer windows richly ornamented with carved stone pediments. The roof was also edged by a sort of parapet, concealing the gutters for conducting the rain-water to the spouts, mimicking crocodiles' heads, which shed it into the street. The youth, who had studied his bearings as cunningly as a cat could have done, expected to find a means of getting from the tower on to the roof, and climbing along the gutter as far as Madame de Saint-Vallier's window, by the help of the water-spouts; but he had not known that the windows of the turret would be so small that it was impossible to pass through them. So he resolved to get out on the roof by the window that lighted the second-floor landing of the turret stair.

To execute this bold scheme, he must get out of his room, and Cornélius had the key. The young gentleman had taken the precaution of arming himself with one of the daggers, which were at this time in use for dealing the death-blow, the coup de grace, in single combat, when the adversary prayed that it might end. This horrible weapon had one edge as sharp as a razor, and the other toothed like a saw, with the teeth turned in a contrary sense to the thrust as it entered the body. The youth now proposed to use this dagger as a saw to cut the lock out from the wooden door. Happily for him, the staple proved to be attached to the inner side of the lintel by four large screws. By the help of his poniard he succeeded, not without difficulty, in unscrewing the staple which kept him a prisoner, and he carefully laid the screws on the chest.

By midnight he was free, and crept downstairs without his shoes to reconnoitre the ground. He was not a little surprised to find an open door to a passage leading to several rooms, and he saw at the end of it a window opening on to the V-shaped space between the roofs of the Hôtel de Poitiers and that of the Malemaison, which met here. Nothing could express his joy, unless it were the vow he forthwith made to the Holy Virgin to found a mass in her honor, at the famous parish church of Escrignoles. After studying from thence the tall and vast chimneys of the Hôtel de Poitiers, he went back again to fetch his weapon; but he now saw with a terrified shudder that there was a bright light on the stairs, and perceived Cornélius in his old dalmatic, carrying his lamp, his eyes wide open and fixed on the corridor, while he stood like a spectre at the entrance.