Page:The Count of Monte-Cristo (1887 Volume 5).djvu/50

30 before him. The young man, having dismissed the boy and horse, knocked at the door of the hotel, which was opened, and again closed after his entrance. This late arrival had attracted much suspicion, and the young man being no other than Andrea, the commissaire and gendarme, who was a brigadier, directed their steps toward his room. They found the door ajar.

"Oh! oh!" said the brigadier, who thoroughly understood the trick; "a bad sign to find the door open! I would rather find it triply bolted."

And, indeed, the little note and pin upon the table confirmed, or rather supported, the sad truth. Andrea had fled. We say supported, because the brigadier was too experienced to yield to a single proof. He glanced round, looked in the bed, shook the curtains, opened the closets, and finally stopped at the chimney. Andrea had taken the precaution to leave no traces of his feet in the ashes, but still it was an outlet, and in this light was not to be passed over without serious investigation.

The brigadier sent for some sticks and straw, and having filled the chimney with them, set a light to it. The fire crackled, and the smoke ascended like the dull vapor from a volcano; but still no prisoner fell down, as they expected. The fact was, that Andrea, at war with society ever since his youth, was quite as deep as a gendarme, even though he were advanced to the rank of brigadier, and, quite prepared for the fire, he had reached the roof, and was crouching down against the chimneypots.

At one time he thought he was saved, for he heard the brigadier exclaim in a loud voice to the two gendarmes, "He is not here!" But venturing to peep, he perceived that the latter, instead of retiring, as might have been reasonably expected upon this announcement, were watching with increased attention. It was now his turn to look about him: the Hôtel de Ville, a massive building of the sixteenth century was on his right; any one could look down from the openings in the tower, and examine every corner of the roof below; and Andrea expected momentarily to see the head of a gendarme appear at one of these openings. If once discovered, he knew he would be lost, for a chase on the roof afforded no chance of success; he therefore resolved to descend, not through the same chimney by which he arrived, but by a similar one conducting to another room.

He looked round for a chimney from which no smoke issued, and having reached it, he disappeared through the orifice without being seen by any one. At the same minute, one of the little windows of the Hôtel de Ville was thrown open, and the head of a gendarme appeared. For an instant it remained motionless as one of the stone decorations of the