Page:Memoirs of Vidocq, Volume 1.djvu/117

 aided my escape. The turnkey Baptiste—whose only crime was that of having taken me for a superior officer, and having allowed me in this capacity to quit St Peter's Tower—the unlucky Baptiste was also imprisoned for the same fault. The terrible charge against him was, that the prisoners (overjoyed at an opportunity of revenging themselves) declared that a hundred crowns had made him take a young man of nineteen for an old soldier on the shady side of fifty.

As for me, I was sent to the prison of the department of Douai, where I was treated as a dangerous man; that is to say, I was thrust into a dungeon with my hands and legs in fetters. I found there my townsman Desfosseux and a young man named Doyenette, condemned to chains for sixteen years for a burglary effected with his father, mother, and two brothers under fifteen years of age. They had been four months in the dungeon where I was put, lying on straw, eaten up with vermin, and living on bean-bread and water. I ordered my provisions, which were soon consumed; we then talked over our business, and my fellow prisoners told me that for the last fortnight they were making a hole under the pavement of the dungeon which would open at the level of the Scarpe which washed the prison walls. I at first regarded the enterprise as difficult, as it was necessary to pierce a wall five feet thick and yet avoid the observation of the jailor, whose frequent visits would not allow of our suffering a morsel of rubbish to be seen.

We eluded detection from this by throwing out of the window, which overlooked the Scarpe, every handful of rubbish that we got from our mine. Desfosseux had besides found means of ridding us of our fetters, and we worked with less fatigue and difficulty. One of us was always in the hole, which was already large enough to admit a man. We thought that we had at length terminated our labours and our captivity, when we discovered that the foundations, which we had imagined to be composed of common stone, were