The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux (ereader iphone txt) 📕

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MYSTERY OF THE YELLOW ROOM *** Produced by Anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteers, and David Widger

THE MYSTERY OF “THE YELLOW ROOM”

By Gaston Leroux

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. In Which We Begin Not to Understand

CHAPTER II. In Which Joseph Rouletabille Appears for the First Time

CHAPTER III. “A Man Has Passed Like a Shadow Through the Blinds”

CHAPTER IV. “In the Bosom of Wild Nature”

CHAPTER V. In Which Joseph Rouletabille Makes a Remark to Monsieur
Robert Darzac Which Produces Its Little Effect

CHAPTER VI. In the Heart of the Oak Grove

CHAPTER VII. In Which Rouletabille Sets Out on an Expedition Under the Bed

CHAPTER VIII. The Examining Magistrate Questions Mademoiselle Stangerson

CHAPTER IX. Reporter and Detective

CHAPTER X. “We Shall Have to Eat Red Meat—Now”

CHAPTER XI. In Which Frederic Larsan Explains How the Murderer Was Able
to Get Out of The “Yellow Room”

CHAPTER XII. Frederic Larsan’s Cane

CHAPTER XIII. “The Presbytery Has Lost Nothing of Its Charm, Nor the Garden
Its Brightness”

CHAPTER XIV. “I Expect the Assassin This Evening”

CHAPTER XV. The Trap

CHAPTER XVI. Strange Phenomenon of the Dissociation of Matter

CHAPTER XVII. The Inexplicable Gallery

CHAPTER XVIII. Rouletabille Has Drawn a Circle Between the Two Bumps
on His Forehead

CHAPTER XIX. Rouletabille Invites Me to Breakfast at the Donjon Inn

CHAPTER XX. An Act of Mademoiselle Stangerson

CHAPTER XXI. On the Watch

CHAPTER XXII. The Incredible Body

CHAPTER XXIII. The Double Scent

CHAPTER XXIV. Rouletabille Knows the Two Halves of the Murderer

CHAPTER XXV. Rouletabille Goes on a Journey

CHAPTER XXVI. In Which Joseph Rouletabille Is Awaited with Impatience

CHAPTER XXVII. In Which Joseph Rouletabille Appears in All His Glory

CHAPTER XXVIII. In Which It Is Proved That One Does Not Always
Think of Everything

CHAPTER XXIX. The Mystery of Mademoiselle Stangerson

CHAPTER I. 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