However, the heavy breathing of the fellow made me hope that it might be a very long time before he recovered his senses.  I gagged him, therefore, and bound him with strips of blanket to the bed, so that in his weakened condition there was good reason to think that, in any case, he might not get free before the next visit of the warder.  But now again I was faced with new difficulties, for you will remember that I had relied upon his height to help me over the walls.  I could have sat down and shed tears of despair had not the thought of my mother and of the Emperor come to sustain me.  ‘Courage!’ said I.  ’If it were anyone but Etienne Gerard he would be in a bad fix now; that is a young man who is not so easily caught.’

I set to work therefore upon Beaumont’s sheet as well as my own, and by tearing them into strips and then plaiting them together, I made a very excellent rope.  This I tied securely to the centre of my iron bar, which was a little over a foot in length.  Then I slipped out into the yard, where the rain was pouring and the wind screaming louder than ever.  I kept in the shadow of the prison wall, but it was as black as the ace of spades, and I could not see my own hand in front of me.  Unless I walked into the sentinel I felt that I had nothing to fear from him.  When I had come under the wall I threw up my bar, and to my joy it stuck the very first time between the spikes at the top.  I climbed up my rope, pulled it after me, and dropped down on the other side.  Then I scaled the second wall, and was sitting astride among the spikes upon the top, when I saw something twinkle in the darkness beneath me.  It was the bayonet of the sentinel below, and so close was it (the second wall being rather lower than the first) that I could easily, by leaning over, have unscrewed it from its socket.  There he was, humming a tune to himself, and cuddling up against the wall to keep himself warm, little thinking that a desperate man within a few feet of him was within an ace of stabbing him to the heart with his own weapon.  I was already bracing myself for the spring when the fellow, with an oath, shouldered his musket, and I heard his steps squelching through the mud as he resumed his beat.  I slipped down my rope, and, leaving it hanging, I ran at the top of my speed across the moor.

Heavens, how I ran!  The wind buffeted my face and buzzed in my nostrils.  The rain pringled upon my skin and hissed past my ears.  I stumbled into holes.  I tripped over bushes.  I fell among brambles.  I was torn and breathless and bleeding.  My tongue was like leather, my feet like lead, and my heart beating like a kettle-drum.  Still I ran, and I ran, and I ran.

But I had not lost my head, my friends.  Everything was done with a purpose.  Our fugitives always made for the coast.  I was determined to go inland, and the more so as I had told Beaumont the opposite.  I would fly to the north, and they would seek me in the south.  Perhaps you will ask me how I could tell which was which on such a night.  I answer that it was by the wind.  I had observed in the prison that it came from the north, and so, as long as I kept my face to it, I was going in the right direction.