“Look,” said D’Artagnan, “day is declining.  It must be nearly four o’clock.  We have been in this place nearly eighty-three hours.”

“Hem!” muttered Porthos, with a kind of pretense of answering.

“Did you hear, eternal sleeper?” cried D’Artagnan, irritated that any one could doze during the day, when he had the greatest difficulty in sleeping during the night.

“What?” said Porthos.

“I say we have been here eighty-three hours.”

“’Tis your fault,” answered Porthos.

“How, my fault?”

“Yes, I offered you escape.”

“By pulling out a bar and pushing down a door?”

“Certainly.”

“Porthos, men like us can’t go out from here purely and simply.”

“Faith!” said Porthos, “as for me, I could go out with that purity and that simplicity which it seems to me you despise too much.”

D’Artagnan shrugged his shoulders.

“And besides,” he said, “going out of this chamber isn’t all.”

“Dear friend,” said Porthos, “you appear to be in a somewhat better humor to-day than you were yesterday.  Explain to me why going out of this chamber isn’t everything.”

“Because, having neither arms nor password, we shouldn’t take fifty steps in the court without knocking against a sentinel.”

“Very well,” said Porthos, “we will kill the sentinel and we shall have his arms.”

“Yes, but before we can kill him —­ and he will be hard to kill, that Swiss —­ he will shriek out and the whole picket will come, and we shall be taken like foxes, we, who are lions, and thrown into some dungeon, where we shall not even have the consolation of seeing this frightful gray sky of Rueil, which no more resembles the sky of Tarbes than the moon is like the sun.  Lack-a-day! if we only had some one to instruct us about the physical and moral topography of this castle.  Ah! when one thinks that for twenty years, during which time I did not know what to do with myself, it never occurred to me to come to study Rueil.”

“What difference does that make?” said Porthos.  “We shall go out all the same.”

“Do you know, my dear fellow, why master pastrycooks never work with their hands?”

“No,” said Porthos, “but I should be glad to be informed.”

“It is because in the presence of their pupils they fear that some of their tarts or creams may turn out badly cooked.”

“What then?”

“Why, then they would be laughed at, and a master pastrycook must never be laughed at.”

“And what have master pastrycooks to do with us?”

“We ought, in our adventures, never to be defeated or give any one a chance to laugh at us.  In England, lately, we failed, we were beaten, and that is a blemish on our reputation.”

“By whom, then, were we beaten?” asked Porthos.

“By Mordaunt.”

“Yes, but we have drowned Monsieur Mordaunt.”