THE ADVENTURES OF JOSEPH ROULETABILLE: The Mystery of the Yellow Room & The Secret of the Night E-Book
Gastón Leroux
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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Adventures of Joseph Rouletabille: The Mystery of the Yellow Room & The Secret of the Night," Gaston Leroux masterfully melds the elements of detective fiction and atmospheric storytelling. This collection introduces the astute young detective Joseph Rouletabille, who navigates the complexities of crime with a sharp intellect and a flair for dramatic revelations. Leroux employs a vivid narrative style, rich in suspense and intricate plots, constructing elaborate puzzles that challenge both Rouletabille and the reader. The interplay of rationalism and supernatural themes reflects the literary currents of the early 20th century, showcasing the evolution of the detective genre in a milieu fascinated by both scientific advancements and the unexplained. Gaston Leroux, a pioneering figure in the genre, drew upon his extensive background in journalism and theater to craft compelling narratives that captivate and engage. His own experiences in Parisian society, combined with an acute awareness of the mysteries of human behavior, inspired him to create Rouletabille'—a character who embodies both youthful exuberance and profound insight. Leroux's ability to intertwine real social issues with imaginative tales offers layers of meaning that resonate in contemporary literature. This collection is highly recommended for anyone who cherishes the art of mystery storytelling. Leroux's engaging prose and ingenious plot twists make these stories not only entertaining but thought-provoking, inviting readers to match wits with the brilliant Rouletabille. Delve into the pages and experience the thrill of unraveling mysteries that set the groundwork for future detective fiction. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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THE ADVENTURES OF JOSEPH ROULETABILLE: The Mystery of the Yellow Room & The Secret of the Night
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume presents two complete novels from Gaston Leroux’s celebrated cycle featuring the young journalist-detective Joseph Rouletabille. Gathered under one cover, they showcase the author’s mastery of tightly engineered mysteries and high-stakes suspense. The aim is not to provide an exhaustive survey of Leroux’s output, but to offer a focused introduction to the character’s most influential adventures and to the techniques that helped shape modern crime fiction. Read together, these narratives trace how a seemingly impossible crime and a perilous mission in a foreign capital test the same disciplined intelligence, revealing a coherent vision of reason confronting danger, rumor, and fear.
Both works are full-length novels that blend detective fiction with the momentum of the thriller. The first builds a classic locked-room puzzle—an apparently insoluble crime contained within four walls—while the second extends the investigative method to a broader canvas of political intrigue. Their pages reflect the rhythms of serialized storytelling while delivering the completeness and architectural unity of the novel. Readers will find no miscellany of poems, essays, or letters here; rather, two narrative engines designed for immersion, deduction, and suspense. The collection is therefore an exemplar of early twentieth-century popular fiction at the intersection of mystery and adventure.
Gaston Leroux, a former journalist before turning to fiction, brought a reporter’s eye for detail and a dramatist’s sense of timing to his narratives. His creation, Joseph Rouletabille, is introduced as a remarkably perceptive young newspaperman whose vocation equips him to question appearances, navigate institutions, and sift testimony with methodical care. He is neither a policeman nor a private detective; his authority arises from intelligence, persistence, and the credibility of the press. The result is a sleuth who embodies modernity’s confidence in observation and analysis, while remaining vividly human—curious, energetic, and sensitive to the moral stakes of discovery.
The first novel centers on an assault committed in a locked chamber within a French country residence, a setting that reduces the world to a few corridors, keys, and footprints. The victim survives, the windows are barred, and the door was secured from the inside, yet an assailant has vanished. Suspicion circulates among a small circle of witnesses, and official investigators advance plausible but conflicting theories. Rouletabille enters as a skeptical outsider, guided by a conviction that every impossibility conceals a simple fact patiently overlooked. The atmosphere is tense and analytical, inviting readers to weigh physical evidence against unreliable perception.
The second novel transports Rouletabille to imperial Russia, where he is summoned to protect a high-ranking figure threatened by assassination. The backdrop of court politics, secret police, and revolutionary plots floods the narrative with shifting loyalties and perilous nights, yet the core remains an exercise in lucid reasoning under pressure. Narrow corridors give way to palaces and guarded apartments, but the same questions of access, motive, and timing prevail. The result is a political thriller energized by the investigative discipline of classic detection, demonstrating how a method forged in a secluded room can operate within a city-wide conspiracy.
Together, the novels explore the confrontation between rational inquiry and the fog of rumor, fear, and theatrical misdirection. Leroux repeatedly tests how far logic can travel in environments designed to obstruct it: shuttered rooms, labyrinthine residences, and the opaque mechanisms of power. Themes of secrecy and performance abound, as characters stage alibis, manipulate appearances, or conceal truths for reasons that range from self-preservation to misguided loyalty. Another unifying thread is youth challenging authority: a reporter scrutinizes official narratives, questions habit, and insists on verifiable facts. The stories argue, without didacticism, that clarity is earned through patience, curiosity, and courage.
Stylistically, Leroux favors brisk chapters, strategic revelations, and vivid staging that transforms physical space into a map for the reader’s reasoning. He distributes clues with care, planting small anomalies that later reshape the entire case when properly understood. The narration often comes through an associate who records Rouletabille’s exploits, a device that heightens immediacy while preserving the mystery of the sleuth’s inner calculations. Dialogue is functional and quick, descriptions economical yet atmospheric, and suspense maintained through steady alternation between hypothesis and event. The effect is an engaging lesson in reading closely without sacrificing the pleasures of momentum and surprise.
The settings derive additional force from their historical moment. The French domestic scene reflects the comforts and anxieties of the Belle Époque, where technological progress coexisted with fascination for the marvelous. The Russian chapters unfold amid imperial grandeur shadowed by political unrest, an environment that lends the thriller its sense of urgency and danger. These contexts are not mere backdrops; they shape how people testify, how institutions respond, and which explanations seem credible. Leroux draws on his knowledge of reportage to evoke public opinion, the press, and the machinery of authority, situating private mysteries within broader social tensions.
As a whole, the pair illuminates Leroux’s contribution to the evolution of detective and thriller fiction. The locked-room problem in the first novel remains a touchstone for the genre, emblematic of the fair-play puzzle in which readers receive the pertinent facts even as they are artfully misdirected. The second adds scale and political complexity without relinquishing logical rigor, bridging domestic mystery and international intrigue. Together they anticipate later developments in crime fiction, where deduction coexists with espionage, psychology, and action. Their endurance rests on the clarity of the challenges posed and the satisfying elegance of their resolutions.
Rouletabille’s character binds the books beyond their plots. He is observant without cynicism, bold without theatrics, and keenly aware that explanations affect real lives. His rivals and counterparts—policemen, officials, and fellow investigators—are portrayed with nuance, sometimes competent, sometimes blinkered by procedure or pride. Witnesses and suspects are more than pawns; they carry histories, loyalties, and fears that complicate simple narratives of guilt or innocence. Ethical questions simmer beneath the puzzles: What counts as proof? How should truth be communicated? When does secrecy protect, and when does it harm? The novels stage these inquiries with tact and suspense.
Approached as a sequence, the two novels reward both patient detection and swift reading. They invite the audience to attend to spatial details, timeframes, and the telling inconsistency, while also surrendering to the atmosphere of looming peril. New readers encounter a self-contained initiation into Rouletabille’s methods; returning readers can appreciate how the second book broadens the canvas without abandoning the intellectual game. Because the collection avoids extraneous materials, its focus remains on narrative craft. The stories are designed to be read with delight rather than anxiety: the clues are there, the stakes are high, and logic is a trustworthy guide.
This collection thus offers a concentrated experience of Gaston Leroux’s art: two complete, complementary novels that display the architecture of the impossible crime and the velocity of the political thriller. Presenting them together underscores the consistency of the author’s vision and the versatility of his hero, whose reasoning adapts from isolated corridors to turbulent capitals without losing its clarity. As entries in the tradition of popular storytelling, they exemplify why these works continue to be read as classics of suspense. They remain bright demonstrations that, even amid darkness, thoughtful attention can still illuminate the most perplexing of nights.
Author Biography
Gaston Leroux was a French journalist and novelist active from the late nineteenth century into the 1920s, widely recognized for blending investigative rigor with popular storytelling. Best known for The Phantom of the Opera, he also helped define the modern detective and adventure novel in France. His work moved fluently between serialized newspaper fiction and book publication, and he became a touchstone for the locked-room mystery through his Rouletabille series. Leroux’s career bridged the Belle Époque and the interwar years, bringing together courtroom reportage, sensational plots, and urban gothic atmospheres that have kept his stories in circulation for readers and adaptors alike.
Born in Paris and associated with Normandy during his youth, Leroux studied law in Paris in the late 1880s before turning decisively to journalism. He worked for prominent Parisian newspapers as a theater critic, court reporter, and foreign correspondent. Reporting on high-profile trials and political upheavals across Europe honed his command of evidence, motive, and narrative pacing. The newsroom and the courthouse gave him a front-row seat to the mechanics of testimony and deduction, experiences he later transformed into fiction. This training also made him adept at the rhythms of serial publication, sustaining suspense week by week for a mass readership.
Leroux’s literary formation shows the imprint of popular serial culture and earlier masters of crime and sensation. He drew on models associated with Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, while the French tradition of Émile Gaboriau offered a template for methodical inquiry and police procedure. His legal education and field reporting lent procedural detail, and his travels supplied contemporary settings in which modern technology, bureaucracy, and the press shaped events. The result was a hybrid style: theatrical yet tightly constructed, attentive to clue patterns, and animated by the spectacle of modern urban life—opera houses, grand hotels, courtrooms, and transnational intrigue.
Leroux’s breakthrough came with The Mystery of the Yellow Room, serialized in 1907, which introduced the youthful reporter-detective Joseph Rouletabille. Celebrated as an early landmark of the locked-room puzzle, it showcased his ability to stage an apparently impossible crime and resolve it through reasoned analysis. He swiftly followed with The Perfume of the Lady in Black and later Rouletabille novels, including The Secret of the Night, extending the hero’s reach across borders and into the orbit of state secrets. These books were praised for ingenuity and pace, and they helped fix the figure of the journalist-sleuth in popular imagination.
In 1909–1910 Leroux serialized The Phantom of the Opera, published in book form soon after, fusing gothic romance with the modern mythos of a grand Parisian opera house. It explored art, celebrity, and the hidden spaces of the city without sacrificing the author’s penchant for investigative revelation. Beyond these marquee titles, he wrote across registers: Balaoo offered a scientific–fantastic premise; the Chéri-Bibi cycle followed an unjustly condemned man through adventure and disguise; and The Island of Thirty Coffins blended mystery with coastal folklore. Throughout, Leroux favored propulsive plots, vivid settings, and the dramaturgy of masks, doubles, and secret architecture.
After the First World War, Leroux intensified his engagement with cinema. Around 1919 he co-founded the Société des Cinéromans with Arthur Bernède, a venture designed to create stories simultaneously as film serials and novels. This cross-media strategy extended his longstanding use of the feuilleton and ensured rapid adaptation of plots, characters, and cliffhangers to the screen. Rouletabille and Chéri-Bibi both migrated effectively to film, and Leroux contributed scenarios as well as prose. The enterprise exemplified his instinct for popular formats and his understanding that suspense, revelation, and visual spectacle could move fluidly between page and projector.
Leroux continued to publish into the 1920s and died in the late 1920s on the French Riviera. His legacy is twofold: within crime fiction, The Mystery of the Yellow Room remains a foundational locked-room text, studied for its construction and influence on later puzzle-plot writers; in popular culture, The Phantom of the Opera has enjoyed an afterlife through translations and major stage and screen adaptations, introducing generations to his blend of romance and urban gothic. Scholars also read him as a key figure of Belle Époque mass culture, where journalism, modern architecture, and serial storytelling converged to shape new forms of narrative suspense.
Historical Context
Gaston Leroux’s investigative thrillers emerged from the Belle Époque, the period of relative peace and dazzling innovation in France between the Franco‑Prussian War’s aftermath and the First World War (roughly 1871–1914). Paris functioned as a global showcase of modernity, symbolized by the Eiffel Tower (1889) and the Exposition Universelle of 1900, which inaugurated the Grand Palais and Petit Palais. Electric light, telephones, and urban transit reconfigured daily life. Yet prosperity coexisted with disquiet: strikes, anarchist violence, and political scandals unsettled the Third Republic. This fusion of optimism and anxiety supplied Leroux with the atmospheric duality his fiction exploits—rational progress shadowed by uncertainty and peril.
Born on 6 May 1868 in Paris and deceased on 15 April 1927 in Nice, Gaston Leroux began as a law student before turning to journalism in the 1890s. He reported for L’Écho de Paris and later Le Matin, cultivating an eye for courtroom procedure, police methods, and political intrigue. His dispatches led him across France and Europe, including Russia, where he observed conditions under the late Romanov empire. He left daily journalism after 1907, the year he turned to fiction full time. The practitioner’s knowledge of institutions, travel logistics, and the press infuses the narrative texture of his detective and political thrillers alike.
Leroux’s formative years unfolded within the precincts of the Palais de Justice on the Île de la Cité. The Third Republic’s legal machinery—led by examining magistrates (juges d’instruction), the Sûreté, and the Préfecture de Police—was both a stage and a resource. High‑profile trials in the 1890s drew enormous crowds and were parsed daily in the press, accentuating procedural minutiae and evidentiary disputes. Close observation of these rituals introduced Leroux to the rhythms of testimony, cross‑examination, and evidentiary reasoning that undergird his narratives. His protagonists maneuver amidst magistrates, commissaires, and reporters in ways that reflect the actual interplay of law, police, and media in Paris.
European detective fiction had matured by the turn of the century, and Leroux wrote within a transnational tradition. Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin tales (1841–1844) provided the prototype of analytical detection; Émile Gaboriau’s Monsieur Lecoq (1860s) localized the genre in France with a procedural bent; and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (from 1887) popularized deductive bravura. Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin (from 1905) added a charismatic, ironic counterpoint. Leroux synthesized these influences while pushing the “problem” story—especially the locked‑room conundrum—toward heightened technical rigor. His work both honors and complicates the genre’s rationalist ethos, embedding deductive puzzles within volatile social and political landscapes.
The period’s scientific culture made forensic innovation central to plausibility. Alphonse Bertillon’s anthropometric identification, developed in the 1880s at the Préfecture de Police, professionalized criminal records; France began adopting fingerprinting in the early 1900s, while Edmond Locard established one of the first police laboratories in Lyon in 1910, articulating the transfer principle. Telegraphy, telephony, portable cameras, revolvers, and laboratory techniques reshaped crime and investigation alike. Leroux drew upon this milieu, populating his plots with laboratories, expert witnesses, and debates over trace evidence. The credibility of impossible crimes and nocturnal conspiracies rests on a contemporary faith in methodical inquiry tempered by technological ambivalence.
A mass press revolution framed Leroux’s career. The Law on the Freedom of the Press (29 July 1881) unleashed a competitive daily market in Paris, where illustrated weeklies and feuilletons multiplied readerships. Serialized publication—the feuilleton—staged novels as public events, timed to commuter habits and café debates. Le Mystère de la chambre jaune appeared as a serial in 1907, rapidly followed by volume publication in Paris by Pierre Lafitte et Cie. This mode of dissemination honed cliffhangers, episodic architecture, and expert recapitulation. Leroux’s pacing, chapter‑end shocks, and careful planting of clues reflect an author writing in direct dialogue with deadline‑driven, reader‑responsive media.
The Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906), spanning the first conviction at Rennes and the final rehabilitation, reoriented French attitudes toward justice, evidence, and state secrecy. Émile Zola’s J’Accuse…! (13 January 1898) made the courtroom a moral theater, while technical controversies over handwriting analysis and military archives seeped into popular consciousness. The press proved capable of both inflaming prejudice and rescuing truth. Leroux’s fiction, shaped by this background, treats dossiers, experts, and procedural rigor with ambivalence: institutions can vindicate or miscarry justice; evidence is potent yet fallible; publicity can clarify facts or cloud them. The era’s contested epistemologies animate his investigative drama.
Violent anarchism in France during the 1890s—associated with Ravachol, Auguste Vaillant (1893), and Émile Henry (1894)—left a durable imprint on public fear, policing, and legal reform. Newspapers chronicled bombings, assassinations, and show trials with sensational detail. Parisian police refined surveillance methods and informant networks, while criminological schools, including that of Alexandre Lacassagne in Lyon, debated causes and typologies of crime. Leroux, covering trials and police operations, internalized how spectacular violence and political radicalism alter investigative priorities and media narratives. His thrillers tap the atmosphere of clandestine cells, coded messages, and shadowy conspirators that a generation of readers had learned to expect and dread.
Modern Paris supplied Leroux’s topographies of fear and wonder. The Opéra Garnier (opened 1875), the Gare d’Orsay (1900), and scientific institutions near the Latin Quarter provided settings where nineteenth‑century grandeur intersected with twentieth‑century technique. Urban infrastructure—sewers, gasworks, electrical grids—created hidden corridors and technical spaces that could be exploited by criminals and investigators alike. Renovations after Baron Haussmann endowed the city with boulevards that enhanced surveillance and spectacle. Country estates and suburban villas, connected by rail and carriage roads, remained repositories of privilege and secrecy. Leroux’s narratives mobilize these environments to stage collisions of tradition and innovation, private power and public scrutiny.
Internationally, the Franco‑Russian Alliance of 1892 bound Paris and St. Petersburg through military treaties and finance. French capital underwrote Russian railways and industry; visits in 1893 (Kronstadt) and 1896 (St. Petersburg) cemented ties. Journalists traveled along diplomatic circuits, reporting on imperial ceremonies and unrest. This alliance facilitated the imaginative crossing of borders for French readers, who followed Russian affairs in their dailies. The geopolitical entanglement provided Leroux with plausible itineraries, credible contacts, and a sense that intrigue could shift from a Paris salon to a Winter Palace corridor overnight. The thrill of transcontinental investigation was grounded in treaty politics and commerce.
Under Nicholas II (r. 1894–1917), Russia traversed upheaval: the 1905 Revolution, the October Manifesto, the first and second Dumas (from 1906), and Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin’s reforms and assassination in 1911. The Okhrana monitored radicals, while aristocratic salons buzzed with rumors of palace influence and court favorites. St. Petersburg’s ceremonial façades concealed a brittle state apparatus whose contradictions were evident to foreign correspondents by the 1910s. Leroux’s exposure to this environment—imperial etiquette entwined with surveillance and subversion—enriched his capacity to frame plots where personal loyalty, high politics, and clandestine policing intersect, lending multinational resonance to his investigative fiction.
Continental mobility enabled Leroux’s characters to move with convincing speed. The Compagnie Internationale des Wagons‑Lits operated luxury sleepers like the Nord Express, linking Paris to St. Petersburg via Berlin and Warsaw by the early twentieth century. Telegraph offices, poste restante services, and hotel registers at hubs such as the Grand Hotel Europe in St. Petersburg (opened 1875) and the Metropol in Moscow (1901) formed a documentary trail for investigators and spies. Border controls, passports, and customs searches introduced procedural friction. These practicalities furnish the scaffolding for pursuit, misdirection, and encounter, ensuring that transnational plots feel anchored in timetables, tariffs, and the etiquette of travel.
The culture of scientific marvels overlapped with currents of occult speculation, a duality Leroux exploits. Psychical research drew attention in Europe after the 1880s, championed in France by figures like Camille Flammarion, while societies tested mediums and debated fraud. Hypnotism, X‑rays (1895), and wireless telegraphy fed both rational inquiry and quasi‑magical thinking. Leroux’s narratives draw dramatic energy from this equilibrium: laboratories and expert testimony confront shadows, whispers, and illusions. The point is not to endorse the supernatural but to recognize how modern life made the marvelous plausible and the plausible marvelous—a sensibility that intensifies the lure of the seemingly impossible crime.
Leroux wrote as cinema and popular serial culture blossomed. Pathé and Gaumont expanded film exhibition before 1914; Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas (1913–1914) and later Les Vampires (1915–1916) translated feuilleton logic to the screen. After the war, Leroux co‑founded the Société des Cinéromans in 1919 with Arthur Bernède, adapting prose seriality to film production. This back‑and‑forth between page and screen refined cliffhangers, cross‑cutting, and visually conceived puzzles. Even in prose, Leroux’s chase sequences, architectural reveals, and timed reversals anticipate cinematic montage. The novels’ structural tempo reflects a broader media ecology in which episodes, spectacles, and suspense were engineered for mass, repeat consumption.
French procedural culture placed the juge d’instruction at the narrative center of serious crime. This magistrate’s mandate to gather both inculpatory and exculpatory evidence, alongside the Sûreté’s investigative work, generated dossiers in which forensics, witness statements, and expert reports converged. Parisian prisons such as La Santé housed suspects awaiting judicial sorting. Journalists could, within limits, shadow cases and cultivate leaks under the liberal press regime instituted in 1881. Leroux’s investigator navigates these channels, acting as an intermediary between private inquiry and official process. The dance between institutional authority and independent reasoning gives the stories their friction and procedural realism.
The prewar decade blended cosmopolitan flourish with strategic dread. Naval races, espionage scandals, and arms monopolies signaled an oncoming rupture; by 1914 St. Petersburg had officially become Petrograd. In France, army reforms and public debates over national preparedness amplified tension. Post‑1914, Leroux extended his reporter’s lens to wartime industry—later entries in his cycle touch on Krupp and other symbols of militarized modernity. The earlier novels, however, belong to the hinge years when a nighttime conspiracy in a capital or an enigmatic crime in a French estate could be read as symptoms of a continent drifting toward systemic crisis.
The works achieved rapid international circulation, shaping the locked‑room and political‑intrigue traditions for decades. English translations appeared soon after initial publication, and puzzle‑mystery specialists—from John Dickson Carr to later formalists—acknowledged Leroux’s influence on the architecture of impossible crimes. The author’s death in Nice in 1927 closed a career that bridged journalism, the feuilleton, and early cinema. His thrillers, grounded in precise dates, places, and institutions—Paris, St. Petersburg, courts, laboratories, hotels, trains—memorialize an era when faith in method contended with fear of conspiracy. The Adventures of Joseph Rouletabille endure as vital documents of European modernity’s promises and perils.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Mystery of the Yellow Room
A locked-room mystery in which young journalist Joseph Rouletabille investigates the assault on Mathilde Stangerson inside a chamber sealed from within. Matching wits with police and a rival sleuth, he uses strict reasoning to resolve an apparently impossible crime.
The Secret of the Night
Rouletabille is summoned to St. Petersburg to protect General Trebassof from suspected revolutionary conspirators and court intrigues. Amid mounting assassination attempts, he traces overlapping plots to identify the hidden instigators.
THE ADVENTURES OF JOSEPH ROULETABILLE: The Mystery of the Yellow Room & The Secret of the Night (Thriller Classics)
The Mystery of the Yellow Room
Chapter 1. In Which We Begin Not to Understand
It is not without a certain emotion that I begin to recount here the extraordinary adventures of Joseph Rouletabille. Down to the present time he had so firmly opposed my doing it that I had come to despair of ever publishing the most curious of police stories of the past fifteen years. I had even imagined that the public would never know the whole truth of the prodigious case known as that of The Yellow Room, out of which grew so many mysterious, cruel, and sensational dramas, with which my friend was so closely mixed up, if, propos of a recent nomination of the illustrious Stangerson to the grade of grandcross of the Legion of Honour, an evening journal—in an article, miserable for its ignorance, or audacious for its perfidy—had not resuscitated a terrible adventure of which Joseph Rouletabille had told me he wished to be for ever forgotten.
The Yellow Room! Who now remembers this affair which caused so much ink to flow fifteen years ago? Events are so quickly forgotten in Paris. Has not the very name of the Nayves trial and the tragic history of the death of little Menaldo passed out of mind? And yet the public attention was so deeply interested in the details of the trial that the occurrence of a ministerial crisis was completely unnoticed at the time. Now The Yellow Room trial, which, preceded that of the Nayves by some years, made far more noise. The entire world hung for months over this obscure problem—the most obscure, it seems to me, that has ever challenged the perspicacity of our police or taxed the conscience of our judges. The solution of the problem baffled everybody who tried to find it. It was like a dramatic rebus with which old Europe and new America alike became fascinated. That is, in truth—I am permitted to say, because there cannot be any author’s vanity in all this, since I do nothing more than transcribe facts on which an exceptional documentation enables me to throw a new light—that is because, in truth, I do not know that, in the domain of reality or imagination, one can discover or recall to mind anything comparable, in its mystery, with the natural mystery of The Yellow Room.
That which nobody could find out, Joseph Rouletabille, aged eighteen, then a reporter engaged on a leading journal, succeeded in discovering. But when, at the Assize Court, he brought in the key to the whole case, he did not tell the whole truth. He only allowed so much of it to appear as sufficed to ensure the acquittal of an innocent man. The reasons which he had for his reticence no longer exist. Better still, the time has come for my friend to speak out fully. You are going to know all; and, without further preamble, I am going to place before your eyes the problem of The Yellow Room as it was placed before the eyes of the entire world on the day following the enactment of the drama at the Chateau du Glandier.
On the 25th of October, 1892, the following note appeared in the latest edition of the “Temps”:
“A frightful crime has been committed at the Glandier, on the border of the forest of Sainte-Genevieve, above Epinay-sur-Orge, at the house of Professor Stangerson. On that night, while the master was working in his laboratory, an attempt was made to assassinate Mademoiselle Stangerson, who was sleeping in a chamber adjoining this laboratory. The doctors do not answer for the life of Mdlle. Stangerson.”
The impression made on Paris by this news may be easily imagined. Already, at that time, the learned world was deeply interested in the labours of Professor Stangerson and his daughter. These labours—the first that were attempted in radiography—served to open the way for Monsieur and Madame Curie to the discovery of radium. It was expected the Professor would shortly read to the Academy of Sciences a sensational paper on his new theory,—the Dissociation of Matter,—a theory destined to overthrow from its base the whole of official science, which based itself on the principle of the Conservation of Energy. On the following day, the newspapers were full of the tragedy. The “Matin,” among others, published the following article, entitled: “A Supernatural Crime”:
“These are the only details,” wrote the anonymous writer in the “Matin”—“we have been able to obtain concerning the crime of the Chateau du Glandier. The state of despair in which Professor Stangerson is plunged, and the impossibility of getting any information from the lips of the victim, have rendered our investigations and those of justice so difficult that, at present, we cannot form the least idea of what has passed in The Yellow Room in which Mdlle. Stangerson, in her night-dress, was found lying on the floor in the agonies of death. We have, at least, been able to interview Daddy Jacques—as he is called in the country—a old servant in the Stangerson family. Daddy Jacques entered The Room at the same time as the Professor. This chamber adjoins the laboratory. Laboratory and Yellow Room are in a pavilion at the end of the park, about three hundred metres (a thousand feet) from the chateau.
“‘It was half-past twelve at night,’ this honest old man told us, ‘and I was in the laboratory, where Monsieur Stangerson was still working, when the thing happened. I had been cleaning and putting instruments in order all the evening and was waiting for Monsieur Stangerson to go to bed. Mademoiselle Stangerson had worked with her father up to midnight; when the twelve strokes of midnight had sounded by the cuckoo-clock in the laboratory, she rose, kissed Monsieur Stangerson and bade him good-night. To me she said “bon soir, Daddy Jacques” as she passed into The Yellow Room. We heard her lock the door and shoot the bolt, so that I could not help laughing, and said to Monsieur: “There’s Mademoiselle double-locking herself in,—she must be afraid of the ‘Bete du bon Dieu!’” Monsieur did not even hear me, he was so deeply absorbed in what he was doing. Just then we heard the distant miawing of a cat. “Is that going to keep us awake all night?” I said to myself; for I must tell you, Monsieur, that, to the end of October, I live in an attic of the pavilion over The Yellow Room, so that Mademoiselle should not be left alone through the night in the lonely park. It was the fancy of Mademoiselle to spend the fine weather in the pavilion; no doubt, she found it more cheerful than the chateau and, for the four years it had been built, she had never failed to take up her lodging there in the spring. With the return of winter, Mademoiselle returns to the chateau, for there is no fireplace in The Yellow Room.
“‘We were staying in the pavilion, then—Monsieur Stangerson and me. We made no noise. He was seated at his desk. As for me, I was sitting on a chair, having finished my work and, looking at him, I said to myself: “What a man!—what intelligence!—what knowledge!” I attach importance to the fact that we made no noise; for, because of that, the assassin certainly thought that we had left the place. And, suddenly, while the cuckoo was sounding the half after midnight, a desperate clamour broke out in The Yellow Room. It was the voice of Mademoiselle, crying “Murder!—murder!—help!” Immediately afterwards revolver shots rang out and there was a great noise of tables and furniture being thrown to the ground, as if in the course of a struggle, and again the voice of Mademoiselle calling, “Murder!—help!—Papa!—Papa!—”
“‘You may be sure that we quickly sprang up and that Monsieur Stangerson and I threw ourselves upon the door. But alas! it was locked, fast locked, on the inside, by the care of Mademoiselle, as I have told you, with key and bolt. We tried to force it open, but it remained firm. Monsieur Stangerson was like a madman, and truly, it was enough to make him one, for we heard Mademoiselle still calling “Help!—help!” Monsieur Stangerson showered terrible blows on the door, and wept with rage and sobbed with despair and helplessness.
“‘It was then that I had an inspiration. “The assassin must have entered by the window!” I cried;—“I will go to the window!” and I rushed from the pavilion and ran like one out of his mind.
“‘The inspiration was that the window of The Yellow Room looks out in such a way that the park wall, which abuts on the pavilion, prevented my at once reaching the window. To get up to it one has first to go out of the park. I ran towards the gate and, on my way, met Bernier and his wife, the gate-keepers, who had been attracted by the pistol reports and by our cries. In a few words I told them what had happened, and directed the concierge to join Monsieur Stangerson with all speed, while his wife came with me to open the park gate. Five minutes later she and I were before the window of The Yellow Room.
“‘The moon was shining brightly and I saw clearly that no one had touched the window. Not only were the bars that protect it intact, but the blinds inside of them were drawn, as I had myself drawn them early in the evening, as I did every day, though Mademoiselle, knowing that I was tired from the heavy work I had been doing, had begged me not to trouble myself, but leave her to do it; and they were just as I had left them, fastened with an iron catch on the inside. The assassin, therefore, could not have passed either in or out that way; but neither could I get in.
“‘It was unfortunate,—enough to turn one’s brain! The door of the room locked on the inside and the blinds on the only window also fastened on the inside; and Mademoiselle still calling for help!—No! she had ceased to call. She was dead, perhaps. But I still heard her father, in the pavilion, trying to break down the door.
“‘With the concierge I hurried back to the pavilion. The door, in spite of the furious attempts of Monsieur Stangerson and Bernier to burst it open, was still holding firm; but at length, it gave way before our united efforts,—and then what a sight met our eyes! I should tell you that, behind us, the concierge held the laboratory lamp—a powerful lamp, that lit the whole chamber.
“‘I must also tell you, monsieur, that The Yellow Room is a very small room. Mademoiselle had furnished it with a fairly large iron bedstead, a small table, a night-commode; a dressing-table, and two chairs. By the light of the big lamp we saw all at a glance. Mademoiselle, in her night-dress, was lying on the floor in the midst of the greatest disorder. Tables and chairs had been overthrown, showing that there had been a violent struggle. Mademoiselle had certainly been dragged from her bed. She was covered with blood and had terrible marks of finger-nails on her throat,—the flesh of her neck having been almost torn by the nails. From a wound on the right temple a stream of blood had run down and made a little pool on the floor. When Monsieur Stangerson saw his daughter in that state, he threw himself on his knees beside her, uttering a cry of despair. He ascertained that she still breathed. As to us, we searched for the wretch who had tried to kill our mistress, and I swear to you, monsieur, that, if we had found him, it would have gone hard with him!
“‘But how to explain that he was not there, that he had already escaped? It passes all imagination!—Nobody under the bed, nobody behind the furniture!—All that we discovered were traces, blood-stained marks of a man’s large hand on the walls and on the door; a big handkerchief red with blood, without any initials, an old cap, and many fresh footmarks of a man on the floor,—footmarks of a man with large feet whose boot-soles had left a sort of sooty impression. How had this man got away? How had he vanished? Don’t forget, monsieur, that there is no chimney in The Yellow Room. He could not have escaped by the door, which is narrow, and on the threshold of which the concierge stood with the lamp, while her husband and I searched for him in every corner of the little room, where it is impossible for anyone to hide himself. The door, which had been forced open against the wall, could not conceal anything behind it, as we assured ourselves. By the window, still in every way secured, no flight had been possible. What then?—I began to believe in the Devil.
“‘But we discovered my revolver on the floor!—Yes, my revolver! Oh! that brought me back to the reality! The Devil would not have needed to steal my revolver to kill Mademoiselle. The man who had been there had first gone up to my attic and taken my revolver from the drawer where I kept it. We then ascertained, by counting the cartridges, that the assassin had fired two shots. Ah! it was fortunate for me that Monsieur Stangerson was in the laboratory when the affair took place and had seen with his own eyes that I was there with him; for otherwise, with this business of my revolver, I don’t know where we should have been,—I should now be under lock and bar. Justice wants no more to send a man to the scaffold!’”
The editor of the “Matin” added to this interview the following lines:
“We have, without interrupting him, allowed Daddy Jacques to recount to us roughly all he knows about the crime of The Yellow Room. We have reproduced it in his own words, only sparing the reader the continual lamentations with which he garnished his narrative. It is quite understood, Daddy Jacques, quite understood, that you are very fond of your masters; and you want them to know it, and never cease repeating it—especially since the discovery of your revolver. It is your right, and we see no harm in it. We should have liked to put some further questions to Daddy Jacques—Jacques—Louis Moustier—but the inquiry of the examining magistrate, which is being carried on at the chateau, makes it impossible for us to gain admission at the Glandier; and, as to the oak wood, it is guarded by a wide circle of policemen, who are jealously watching all traces that can lead to the pavilion, and that may perhaps lead to the discovery of the assassin. “We have also wished to question the concierges, but they are invisible. Finally, we have waited in a roadside inn, not far from the gate of the chateau, for the departure of Monsieur de Marquet, the magistrate of Corbeil. At half-past five we saw him and his clerk and, before he was able to enter his carriage, had an opportunity to ask him the following question:
“‘Can you, Monsieur de Marquet, give us any information as to this affair, without inconvenience to the course of your inquiry?’
“‘It is impossible for us to do it,’ replied Monsieur de Marquet. ‘I can only say that it is the strangest affair I have ever known. The more we think we know something, the further we are from knowing anything!’
“We asked Monsieur de Marquet to be good enough to explain his last words; and this is what he said,—the importance of which no one will fail to recognise:
“‘If nothing is added to the material facts so far established, I fear that the mystery which surrounds the abominable crime of which Mademoiselle Stangerson has been the victim will never be brought to light; but it is to be hoped, for the sake of our human reason, that the examination of the walls, and of the ceiling of The Yellow Room—an examination which I shall to-morrow intrust to the builder who constructed the pavilion four years ago—will afford us the proof that may not discourage us. For the problem is this: we know by what way the assassin gained admission,—he entered by the door and hid himself under the bed, awaiting Mademoiselle Stangerson. But how did he leave? How did he escape? If no trap, no secret door, no hiding place, no opening of any sort is found; if the examination of the walls—even to the demolition of the pavilion—does not reveal any passage practicable—not only for a human being, but for any being whatsoever—if the ceiling shows no crack, if the floor hides no underground passage, one must really believe in the Devil, as Daddy Jacques says!’”
And the anonymous writer in the “Matin” added in this article—which I have selected as the most interesting of all those that were published on the subject of this affair—that the examining magistrate appeared to place a peculiar significance to the last sentence: “One must really believe in the Devil, as Jacques says.”
The article concluded with these lines: “We wanted to know what Daddy Jacques meant by the cry of the Bete Du Bon Dieu.” The landlord of the Donjon Inn explained to us that it is the particularly sinister cry which is uttered sometimes at night by the cat of an old woman,—Mother Angenoux, as she is called in the country. Mother Angenoux is a sort of saint, who lives in a hut in the heart of the forest, not far from the grotto of Sainte-Genevieve.
“The Yellow Room, the Bete Du Bon Dieu, Mother Angenoux, the Devil, Sainte-Genevieve, Daddy Jacques,—here is a well entangled crime which the stroke of a pickaxe in the wall may disentangle for us to-morrow. Let us at least hope that, for the sake of our human reason, as the examining magistrate says. Meanwhile, it is expected that Mademoiselle Stangerson—who has not ceased to be delirious and only pronounces one word distinctly, ‘Murderer! Murderer!’—will not live through the night.”
In conclusion, and at a late hour, the same journal announced that the Chief of the Surete had telegraphed to the famous detective, Frederic Larsan, who had been sent to London for an affair of stolen securities, to return immediately to Paris.
Chapter 2. In Which Joseph Roultabille Appears for the First Time
I remember as well as if it had occurred yesterday, the entry of young Rouletabille into my bedroom that morning. It was about eight o’clock and I was still in bed reading the article in the “Matin” relative to the Glandier crime.
But, before going further, it is time that I present my friend to the reader.
I first knew Joseph Rouletabille when he was a young reporter. At that time I was a beginner at the Bar and often met him in the corridors of examining magistrates, when I had gone to get a “permit to communicate” for the prison of Mazas, or for Saint-Lazare. He had, as they say, “a good nut.” He seemed to have taken his head—round as a bullet—out of a box of marbles, and it is from that, I think, that his comrades of the press—all determined billiard-players—had given him that nickname, which was to stick to him and be made illustrious by him. He was always as red as a tomato, now gay as a lark, now grave as a judge. How, while still so young—he was only sixteen and a half years old when I saw him for the first time—had he already won his way on the press? That was what everybody who came into contact with him might have asked, if they had not known his history. At the time of the affair of the woman cut in pieces in the Rue Oberskampf—another forgotten story—he had taken to one of the editors of the “Epoque,”—a paper then rivalling the “Matin” for information,—the left foot, which was missing from the basket in which the gruesome remains were discovered. For this left foot the police had been vainly searching for a week, and young Rouletabille had found it in a drain where nobody had thought of looking for it. To do that he had dressed himself as an extra sewer-man, one of a number engaged by the administration of the city of Paris, owing to an overflow of the Seine.
When the editor-in-chief was in possession of the precious foot and informed as to the train of intelligent deductions the boy had been led to make, he was divided between the admiration he felt for such detective cunning in a brain of a lad of sixteen years, and delight at being able to exhibit, in the “morgue window” of his paper, the left foot of the Rue Oberskampf.
“This foot,” he cried, “will make a great headline.”
Then, when he had confided the gruesome packet to the medical lawyer attached to the journal, he asked the lad, who was shortly to become famous as Rouletabille, what he would expect to earn as a general reporter on the “Epoque”?
“Two hundred francs a month,” the youngster replied modestly, hardly able to breathe from surprise at the proposal.
“You shall have two hundred and fifty,” said the editor-in-chief; “only you must tell everybody that you have been engaged on the paper for a month. Let it be quite understood that it was not you but the ‘Epoque’ that discovered the left foot of the Rue Oberskampf. Here, my young friend, the man is nothing, the paper everything.”
Having said this, he begged the new reporter to retire, but before the youth had reached the door he called him back to ask his name. The other replied:
“Joseph Josephine.”
“That’s not a name,” said the editor-in-chief, “but since you will not be required to sign what you write it is of no consequence.”
The boy-faced reporter speedily made himself many friends, for he was serviceable and gifted with a good humour that enchanted the most severe-tempered and disarmed the most zealous of his companions. At the Bar cafe, where the reporters assembled before going to any of the courts, or to the Prefecture, in search of their news of crime, he began to win a reputation as an unraveller of intricate and obscure affairs which found its way to the office of the Chief of the Surete. When a case was worth the trouble and Rouletabille—he had already been given his nickname—had been started on the scent by his editor-in-chief, he often got the better of the most famous detective.
It was at the Bar cafe that I became intimately acquainted with him. Criminal lawyers and journalists are not enemies, the former need advertisement, the latter information. We chatted together, and I soon warmed towards him. His intelligence was so keen, and so original!—and he had a quality of thought such as I have never found in any other person.
Some time after this I was put in charge of the law news of the “Cri du Boulevard.” My entry into journalism could not but strengthen the ties which united me to Rouletabille. After a while, my new friend being allowed to carry out an idea of a judicial correspondence column, which he was allowed to sign “Business,” in the “Epoque,” I was often able to furnish him with the legal information of which he stood in need.
Nearly two years passed in this way, and the better I knew him, the more I learned to love him; for, in spite of his careless extravagance, I had discovered in him what was, considering his age, an extraordinary seriousness of mind. Accustomed as I was to seeing him gay and, indeed, often too gay, I would many times find him plunged in the deepest melancholy. I tried then to question him as to the cause of this change of humour, but each time he laughed and made me no answer. One day, having questioned him about his parents, of whom he never spoke, he left me, pretending not to have heard what I said.
While things were in this state between us, the famous case of The Yellow Room took place. It was this case which was to rank him as the leading newspaper reporter, and to obtain for him the reputation of being the greatest detective in the world. It should not surprise us to find in the one man the perfection of two such lines of activity if we remember that the daily press was already beginning to transform itself and to become what it is to-day—the gazette of crime.
Morose-minded people may complain of this; for myself I regard it a matter for congratulation. We can never have too many arms, public or private, against the criminal. To this some people may answer that, by continually publishing the details of crimes, the press ends by encouraging their commission. But then, with some people we can never do right. Rouletabille, as I have said, entered my room that morning of the 26th of October, 1892. He was looking redder than usual, and his eyes were bulging out of his head, as the phrase is, and altogether he appeared to be in a state of extreme excitement. He waved the “Matin” with a trembling hand, and cried:
“Well, my dear Sainclair,—have you read it?”
“The Glandier crime?”
“Yes; The Yellow Room!—What do you think of it?”
“I think that it must have been the Devil or the Bete du Bon Dieu that committed the crime.”
“Be serious!”
“Well, I don’t much believe in murderers* who make their escape through walls of solid brick. I think Daddy Jacques did wrong to leave behind him the weapon with which the crime was committed and, as he occupied the attic immediately above Mademoiselle Stangerson’s room, the builder’s job ordered by the examining magistrate will give us the key of the enigma and it will not be long before we learn by what natural trap, or by what secret door, the old fellow was able to slip in and out, and return immediately to the laboratory to Monsieur Stangerson, without his absence being noticed. That, of course, is only an hypothesis.”
* Although the original English translation often uses the words “murder” and “murderer,” the reader may substitute “attack” and “attacker” since no murder is actually committed.
Rouletabille sat down in an armchair, lit his pipe, which he was never without, smoked for a few minutes in silence—no doubt to calm the excitement which, visibly, dominated him—and then replied:
“Young man,” he said, in a tone the sad irony of which I will not attempt to render, “young man, you are a lawyer and I doubt not your ability to save the guilty from conviction; but if you were a magistrate on the bench, how easy it would be for you to condemn innocent persons!—You are really gifted, young man!”
He continued to smoke energetically, and then went on:
“No trap will be found, and the mystery of The Yellow Room will become more and more mysterious. That’s why it interests me. The examining magistrate is right; nothing stranger than this crime has ever been known.”
“Have you any idea of the way by which the murderer escaped?” I asked.
“None,” replied Rouletabille—“none, for the present. But I have an idea as to the revolver; the murderer did not use it.”
“Good Heavens! By whom, then, was it used?”
“Why—by Mademoiselle Stangerson.”
“I don’t understand,—or rather, I have never understood,” I said.
Rouletabille shrugged his shoulders.
“Is there nothing in this article in the ‘Matin’ by which you were particularly struck?”
“Nothing,—I have found the whole of the story it tells equally strange.”
“Well, but—the locked door—with the key on the inside?”
“That’s the only perfectly natural thing in the whole article.”
“Really!—And the bolt?”
“The bolt?”
“Yes, the bolt—also inside the room—a still further protection against entry? Mademoiselle Stangerson took quite extraordinary precautions! It is clear to me that she feared someone. That was why she took such precautions—even Daddy Jacques’s revolver—without telling him of it. No doubt she didn’t wish to alarm anybody, and least of all, her father. What she dreaded took place, and she defended herself. There was a struggle, and she used the revolver skilfully enough to wound the assassin in the hand—which explains the impression on the wall and on the door of the large, blood-stained hand of the man who was searching for a means of exit from the chamber. But she didn’t fire soon enough to avoid the terrible blow on the right temple.”
“Then the wound on the temple was not done with the revolver?”
“The paper doesn’t say it was, and I don’t think it was; because logically it appears to me that the revolver was used by Mademoiselle Stangerson against the assassin. Now, what weapon did the murderer use? The blow on the temple seems to show that the murderer wished to stun Mademoiselle Stangerson,—after he had unsuccessfully tried to strangle her. He must have known that the attic was inhabited by Daddy Jacques, and that was one of the reasons, I think, why he must have used a quiet weapon,—a life-preserver, or a hammer.”
“All that doesn’t explain how the murderer got out of The Yellow Room,” I observed.
“Evidently,” replied Rouletabille, rising, “and that is what has to be explained. I am going to the Chateau du Glandier, and have come to see whether you will go with me.”
“I?—”
“Yes, my boy. I want you. The ‘Epoque’ has definitely entrusted this case to me, and I must clear it up as quickly as possible.”
“But in what way can I be of any use to you?”
“Monsieur Robert Darzac is at the Chateau du Glandier.”
“That’s true. His despair must be boundless.”
“I must have a talk with him.”
Rouletabille said it in a tone that surprised me.
“Is it because—you think there is something to be got out of him?” I asked.
“Yes.”
That was all he would say. He retired to my sitting-room, begging me to dress quickly.
I knew Monsieur Robert Darzac from having been of great service to him in a civil action, while I was acting as secretary to Maitre Barbet Delatour. Monsieur Robert Darzac, who was at that time about forty years of age, was a professor of physics at the Sorbonne. He was intimately acquainted with the Stangersons, and, after an assiduous seven years’ courtship of the daughter, had been on the point of marrying her. In spite of the fact that she has become, as the phrase goes, “a person of a certain age,” she was still remarkably good-looking. While I was dressing I called out to Rouletabille, who was impatiently moving about my sitting-room:
“Have you any idea as to the murderer’s station in life?”
“Yes,” he replied; “I think if he isn’t a man in society, he is, at least, a man belonging to the upper class. But that, again, is only an impression.”
“What has led you to form it?”
“Well,—the greasy cap, the common handkerchief, and the marks of the rough boots on the floor,” he replied.
“I understand,” I said; “murderers don’t leave traces behind them which tell the truth.”
“We shall make something out of you yet, my dear Sainclair,” concluded Rouletabille.
Chapter 3. “A Man Has Passed Like a Shadow Through the Blinds”
Half an hour later Rouletabille and I were on the platform of the Orleans station, awaiting the departure of the train which was to take us to Epinay-sur-Orge.
On the platform we found Monsieur de Marquet and his Registrar, who represented the Judicial Court of Corbeil. Monsieur Marquet had spent the night in Paris, attending the final rehearsal, at the Scala, of a little play of which he was the unknown author, signing himself simply “Castigat Ridendo.”
Monsieur de Marquet was beginning to be a “noble old gentleman.” Generally he was extremely polite and full of gay humour, and in all his life had had but one passion,—that of dramatic art. Throughout his magisterial career he was interested solely in cases capable of furnishing him with something in the nature of a drama. Though he might very well have aspired to the highest judicial positions, he had never really worked for anything but to win a success at the romantic Porte-Saint-Martin, or at the sombre Odeon.
Because of the mystery which shrouded it, the case of The Yellow Room was certain to fascinate so theatrical a mind. It interested him enormously, and he threw himself into it, less as a magistrate eager to know the truth, than as an amateur of dramatic embroglios, tending wholly to mystery and intrigue, who dreads nothing so much as the explanatory final act.
So that, at the moment of meeting him, I heard Monsieur de Marquet say to the Registrar with a sigh:
“I hope, my dear Monsieur Maleine, this builder with his pickaxe will not destroy so fine a mystery.”
“Have no fear,” replied Monsieur Maleine, “his pickaxe may demolish the pavilion, perhaps, but it will leave our case intact. I have sounded the walls and examined the ceiling and floor and I know all about it. I am not to be deceived.”
Having thus reassured his chief, Monsieur Maleine, with a discreet movement of the head, drew Monsieur de Marquet’s attention to us. The face of that gentleman clouded, and, as he saw Rouletabille approaching, hat in hand, he sprang into one of the empty carriages saying, half aloud to his Registrar, as he did so, “Above all, no journalists!”
Monsieur Maleine replied in the same tone, “I understand!” and then tried to prevent Rouletabille from entering the same compartment with the examining magistrate.
“Excuse me, gentlemen,—this compartment is reserved.”
“I am a journalist, Monsieur, engaged on the ‘Epoque,’” said my young friend with a great show of gesture and politeness, “and I have a word or two to say to Monsieur de Marquet.”
“Monsieur is very much engaged with the inquiry he has in hand.”
“Ah! his inquiry, pray believe me, is absolutely a matter of indifference to me. I am no scavenger of odds and ends,” he went on, with infinite contempt in his lower lip, “I am a theatrical reporter; and this evening I shall have to give a little account of the play at the Scala.”
“Get in, sir, please,” said the Registrar.
Rouletabille was already in the compartment. I went in after him and seated myself by his side. The Registrar followed and closed the carriage door.
Monsieur de Marquet looked at him.
“Ah, sir,” Rouletabille began, “You must not be angry with Monsieur de Maleine. It is not with Monsieur de Marquet that I desire to have the honour of speaking, but with Monsieur ‘Castigat Ridendo.’ Permit me to congratulate you—personally, as well as the writer for the ‘Epoque.’” And Rouletabille, having first introduced me, introduced himself.
