“Our little subterranean workshop (as I may call it) was now quite nicely furnished, and its contents were known to none but ourselves. We had contrived to avoid detection in a most wonderful manner, but there was one danger which still gave us particular uneasiness. It was the custom with the officers of the Bastille, not only to make irregular and unexpected visits to the cells, but even to set spies upon the prisoners’ most secret hours. We had to take care therefore to do all our work by night, and not to leave the faintest trace of it behind us. But guards have ears as well as eyes. We were, of course, talking over our projects incessantly; and since we could not avoid the necessity for doing this, we had to invent a language intelligible only to ourselves. This was easily done; the saw was called _faun_; a hook, _Tubal Cain_; the hole in the floor, _Polyphemus_; the wooden ladder, _Jacob_; and the rounds, _sprigs_; the ropes, _doves_ (from their whiteness); the pocket knife, _puppy_, and so forth. We were constantly on our guard, however, in using even this gibberish, and we succeeded perfectly in keeping our guards in the dark.
“When the operations already spoken of were completed, we began to think about our great ladder. We calculated that it would have to be at least one hundred and eighty feet in length; and to find material for it we had to sacrifice shirts, napkins, stockings, flannels--in short, nearly the whole of our underclothing. As soon as we had made a hank, or twist, out of the shreds, we hid it away in ‘Polyphemus.’ When we had a sufficient number of these, we spent the whole night in binding them together; and I would defy any ropemaker to produce a stouter cable (of its size) than the one we then possessed.
“At the summit of all the towers of the Bastille a ledge projected some four or five feet beyond the wall. This we knew would cause any one using our ladder to swing about in the air, and in all probability to lose his hold from giddiness, and fall to the ground. We were obliged, there fore, to invent an apparatus for steadying the ladder, which was far too complicated to describe here. Suffice it to say, that it involved the use of another rope, some three hundred and sixty feet long; and this we actually made, together with shorter ropes for tying our ladder to a cannon, and for other necessities of the moment.