The turnkey soon left the cell; the bolts rattled once more, and the key grated in the lock.  After walking once or twice across his cell, May took up his volume of Beranger and for an hour or more seemed completely engrossed in its contents.  Finally, he threw himself down upon his bed.  Here he remained until meal-time in the evening, when he rose and ate with an excellent appetite.  He next resumed the study of his book, and did not go to bed until the lights were extinguished.

Lecoq knew well enough that during the night his eyes would not serve him, but he trusted that his ears might prove of use, hoping that some telltale word might escape the prisoner’s lips during his restless slumber.  In this expectation he was disappointed.  May tossed to and fro upon his pallet; he sighed, and one might have thought he was sobbing, but not a syllable escaped his lips.  He remained in bed until very late the next morning; but on hearing the bell sound the hour of breakfast, eleven o’clock, he sprang from his couch with a bound, and after capering about his cell for a few moments, began to sing, in a loud and cheerful voice, the old ditty: 

     “Diogene! 
     Sous ton manteau, libre et content,
     Je ris, je bois, sans gene—­”

The prisoner did not stop singing until a keeper entered his cell carrying his breakfast.  The day now beginning differed in no respect from the one that had preceded it, neither did the night.  The same might be said of the next day, and of those which followed.  To sing, to eat, to sleep, to attend to his hands and nails—­such was the life led by this so-called buffoon.  His manner, which never varied, was that of a naturally cheerful man terribly bored.

Such was the perfection of his acting that, after six days and nights of constant surveillance, Lecoq had detected nothing decisive, nor even surprising.  And yet he did not despair.  He had noticed that every morning, while the employees of the prison were busy distributing the prisoner’s food, May invariably began to sing the same ditty.

“Evidently this song is a signal,” thought Lecoq.  “What can be going on there by the window I can’t see?  I must know to-morrow.”

Accordingly on the following morning he arranged that May should be taken on his walk at half-past ten o’clock, and he then insisted that the governor should accompany him to the prisoner’s cell.  That worthy functionary was not very well pleased with the change in the usual order of things.  “What do you wish to show me?” he asked.  “What is there so very curious to see?”

“Perhaps nothing,” replied Lecoq, “but perhaps something of great importance.”

Eleven o’clock sounding soon after, he began singing the prisoner’s song, and he had scarcely finished the second line, when a bit of bread, no larger than a bullet, adroitly thrown through the window, dropped at his feet.

A thunderbolt falling in May’s cell would not have terrified the governor as much as did this inoffensive projectile.  He stood in silent dismay; his mouth wide open, his eyes starting from their sockets, as if he distrusted the evidence of his own senses.  What a disgrace!  An instant before he would have staked his life upon the inviolability of the secret cells; and now he beheld his prison dishonored.