Page:Memoirs of Vidocq, Volume 1.djvu/124

 black hen will never come again." We may easily divine that it was not to visit the mysterious hen that the Duhesmes blackened their faces with smoke. The neighbour, who guessed as much, communicated her suspicion to her husband, who, in his turn, questioned the little girl, and convinced that the favourites of the black hen were Chauffeurs, he made a deposition, and on measures being taken, the band was apprehended, all disguised, as they were about to sally out on an expedition.

The youngest Duhesme had, in the sole of his shoe, a knife-blade, which he had contrived to conceal on the road from Bailleul to Douai. Being told that I knew the way of the prison, he communicated this to me, asking me if it were not possible to effect an escape with its assistance. I was reflecting about it, when a justice of the peace, attended by gendarmes, came to make a strict search throughout our room, and about our persons. No one amongst us knowing the reason of this, I thought it prudent to hide in my mouth a small file which I had always about me, but one of the gendarmes having watched me, cried "He is going to swallow it!" "Swallow what?" Everybody looked, and we then learnt that they wanted to find the seal which had served to stamp the forged order for Boitel's liberation. Suspected, as we have just learnt, of having got it, I was transferred to the prison of the Town Hall, and thrust in a dungeon so chained that my right hand was confined to my left leg, and my left hand to my right leg. The dungeon was moreover so damp, that in twenty minutes the straw which they had thrown me was as wet as if it had been dipped in water.

I remained eight days in this frightful state, and when they found that it was impossible I could have got rid of the seal in the way suspected, I was ordered to the usual prison. On learning this intelligence, I pretended, as is often done under such circumstances, to be exceedingly weak and scarcely able to bear the