ight 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.