About ten o’clock Cornelius and his sister, convinced that their new inmate was sleeping, retired to their rooms.  The young man studied carefully the sounds they made in doing so, and thought he could recognize the position of their apartments; they must, he believed, occupy the whole second floor.  Like all the houses of that period, this floor was next below the roof, from which its windows projected, adorned with spandrel tops that were richly sculptured.  The roof itself was edged with a sort of balustrade, concealing the gutters for the rain water which gargoyles in the form of crocodile’s heads discharged into the street.  The young seigneur, after studying this topography as carefully as a cat, believed he could make his way from the tower to the roof, and thence to Madame de Vallier’s by the gutters and the help of a gargoyle.  But he did not count on the narrowness of the loopholes of the tower; it was impossible to pass through them.  He then resolved to get out upon the roof of the house through the window of the staircase on the second floor.  To accomplish this daring project he must leave his room, and Cornelius had carried off the key.

By way of precaution, the young man had brought with him, concealed under his clothes, one of those poignards formerly used to give the “coup de grace” in a duel when the vanquished adversary begged the victor to despatch him.  This horrible weapon had on one side a blade sharpened like a razor, and on the other a blade that was toothed like a saw, but toothed in the reverse direction from that by which it would enter the body.  The young man determined to use this latter blade to saw through the wood around the lock.  Happily for him the staple of the lock was put on to the outside of the door by four stout screws.  By the help of his dagger he managed, not without great difficulty, to unscrew and remove it altogether, carefully laying it aside and the four screws with it.  By midnight he was free, and he went down the stairs without his shoes to reconnoitre the localities.

He was not a little astonished to find a door wide open which led down a corridor to several chambers, at the end of which corridor was a window opening on a depression caused by the junction of the roofs of the hotel de Poitiers and that of the Malemaison which met there.  Nothing could express his joy, unless it be the vow which he instantly made to the Blessed Virgin to found a mass in her honor in the celebrated parish church of the Escrignoles at Tours.  After examining the tall broad chimneys of the hotel de Poitiers he returned upon his steps to fetch his dagger, when to his horror, he beheld a vivid light on the staircase and saw Maitre Cornelius himself in his dalmatian, carrying a lamp, his eyes open to their fullest extent and fixed upon the corridor, at the entrance of which he stood like a spectre.

“If I open the window and jump upon the roofs, he will hear me,” thought the young man.