The Fine-Air was lighted by a skylight.
The prisoner had on his feet fetters weighing fifty pounds.
Every day, at four o’clock in the afternoon, a jailer, escorted by two dogs,—this was still in vogue at that time,—entered his cage, deposited beside his bed a loaf of black bread weighing two pounds, a jug of water, a bowl filled with rather thin bouillon, in which swam a few Mayagan beans, inspected his irons and tapped the bars.
This man and his dogs made two visits during the night.
Thenardier had obtained permission to keep a sort of iron bolt which he used to spike his bread into a crack in the wall, “in order to preserve it from the rats,” as he said.
As Thenardier was kept in sight, no objection had been made to this spike.
Still, it was remembered afterwards, that one of the jailers had said:
“It would be better to let him have only a wooden spike.”
At two o’clock in the morning, the sentinel, who was an old soldier, was relieved, and replaced by a conscript.
A few moments later, the man with the dogs paid his visit, and went off without noticing anything, except, possibly, the excessive youth and “the rustic air” of the “raw recruit.”
Two hours afterwards, at four o’clock, when they came to relieve the conscript, he was found asleep on the floor, lying like a log near Thenardier’s cage.
As for Thenardier, he was no longer there.
There was a hole in the ceiling of his cage, and, above it, another hole in the roof.
One of the planks of his bed had been wrenched off, and probably carried away with him, as it was not found.
They also seized in his cell a half-empty bottle which contained the remains of the stupefying wine with which the soldier had been drugged.
The soldier’s bayonet had disappeared.
At the moment when this discovery was made, it was assumed that Thenardier was out of reach.
The truth is, that he was no longer in the New Building, but that he was still in great danger.
Thenardier, on reaching the roof of the New Building, had found the remains of Brujon’s rope hanging to the bars of the upper trap of the chimney, but, as this broken fragment was much too short, he had not been able to escape by the outer wall, as Brujon and Guelemer had done.
When one turns from the Rue des Ballets into the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, one almost immediately encounters a repulsive ruin.
There stood on that spot, in the last century, a house of which only the back wall now remains, a regular wall of masonry, which rises to the height of the third story between the adjoining buildings.
This ruin can be recognized by two large square windows which are still to be seen there; the middle one, that nearest the right gable, is barred with a worm-eaten beam adjusted like a prop.
Through these windows there was formerly visible a lofty and lugubrious wall, which was a fragment of the outer wall of La Force.
The empty space on the street left by the demolished house is half-filled by a fence of rotten boards, shored up by five stone posts.
In this recess lies concealed a little shanty which leans against the portion of the ruin which has remained standing.
The fence has a gate, which, a few years ago, was fastened only by a latch.
It was the crest of this ruin that Thenardier had succeeded in reaching, a little after one o’clock in the morning.
How had he got there?
That is what no one has ever been able to explain or understand.
The lightning must, at the same time, have hindered and helped him.
Had he made use of the ladders and scaffoldings of the slaters to get from roof to roof, from enclosure to enclosure, from compartment to compartment, to the buildings of the Charlemagne court, then to the buildings of the Saint-Louis court, to the outer wall, and thence to the hut on the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile?
But in that itinerary there existed breaks which seemed to render it an impossibility.
Had he placed the plank from his bed like a bridge from the roof of the Fine-Air to the outer wall, and crawled flat, on his belly on the coping of the outer wall the whole distance round the prison as far as the hut?
But the outer wall of La Force formed a crenellated and unequal line; it mounted and descended, it dropped at the firemen’s barracks, it rose towards the bath-house, it was cut in twain by buildings, it was not even of the same height on the Hotel Lamoignon as on the Rue Pavee; everywhere occurred falls and right angles; and then, the sentinels must have espied the dark form of the fugitive; hence, the route taken by Thenardier still remains rather inexplicable.
In two manners, flight was impossible.
Had Thenardier, spurred on by that thirst for liberty which changes precipices into ditches, iron bars into wattles of osier, a legless man into an athlete, a gouty man into a bird, stupidity into instinct, instinct into intelligence, and intelligence into genius, had Thenardier invented a third mode?
No one has ever found out.
The marvels of escape cannot always be accounted for.
The man who makes his escape, we repeat, is inspired; there is something of the star and of the lightning in the mysterious gleam of flight; the effort towards deliverance is no less surprising than the flight towards the sublime, and one says of the escaped thief:
“How did he contrive to scale that wall?” in the same way that one says of Corneille:
“Where did he find the means of dying?”
At all events, dripping with perspiration, drenched with rain, with his clothes hanging in ribbons, his hands flayed, his elbows bleeding, his knees torn, Thenardier had reached what children, in their figurative language, call the edge of the wall of the ruin, there he had stretched himself out at full length, and there his strength had failed him.
A steep escarpment three stories high separated him from the pavement of the street.
The rope which he had was too short.
There he waited, pale, exhausted, desperate with all the despair which he had undergone, still hidden by the night, but telling himself that the day was on the point of dawning, alarmed at the idea of hearing the neighboring clock of Saint-Paul strike four within a few minutes, an hour when the sentinel was relieved and when the latter would be found asleep under the pierced roof, staring in horror at a terrible depth, at the light of the street lanterns, the wet, black pavement, that pavement longed for yet frightful, which meant death, and which meant liberty.
He asked himself whether his three accomplices in flight had succeeded, if they had heard him, and if they would come to his assistance.
He listened.
With the exception of the patrol, no one had passed through the street since he had been there.
Nearly the whole of the descent of the market-gardeners from Montreuil, from Charonne, from Vincennes, and from Bercy to the markets was accomplished through the Rue Saint-Antoine.
Four o’clock struck.