Rouletabille and the Mystery of the Yellow Room

by Gaston Leroux

  We also wished to question the caretakers, Monsieur and Madame Bernier, but they were nowhere to be found. Finally, we resolved to wait for Monsieur de Marquet at the Auberge du Donjon, a roadside inn not far from the Chateau.

  At 5:30 p.m., we saw him and his clerk leave Glandier. Before he was able to enter his carriage, we had the opportunity to ask him the following question:

  “Monsieur, can you give us any information on this mystery, without, of course, hampering your investigation?’

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that,” replied Monsieur de Marquet. “I can only say that it is the strangest case that I have ever investigated. The more we think we know something, the further we are from knowing anything!”

  We asked Monsieur de Marquet to be kind enough to explain his last words, and this is what he said—the importance of which no one will fail to recognize:

  “Unless we discover some new evidence, I fear that the mystery which surrounds the dreadful assault om Mademoiselle Stangerson may well never be solved. However, one hopes—if only for the sake of our peace of mind—that the examination of the walls and of the ceiling of the Yellow Room, which I shall conduct tomorrow with the assistance of the contractor who built the pavilion four years ago, will help us unearth such new evidence, and prove that logic always prevails. Our problem is this: we know that the perpetrator entered the Yellow Room through the door and that he hid under the bed, lying in wait for Mademoiselle Stangerson, but how did he leave? How did he escape? If we fail to discover any kind of opening or hidden doorway, or any hiding place or aperture of any sort; if the examination of the walls—even to the point of their demolition—does not reveal any secret passage useable by a human being, or any other kind of being; if the ceiling reveals no trapdoors; if the floor hides no underground passage, then I shall start believing in the Devil, just as Père Jacques said!”

  And the anonymous reporter of Le Matin added in his article—which I selected because I thought it was the most complete of all those that had been published on the matter—that the Investigating Magistrate seemed to place a peculiar emphasis on that last sentence: “Then I shall start believing in the Devil, just as Père Jacques said!”

  The article concluded:

  We wanted to know what Père Jacques meant when he mentioned the cry of the “Holy Beast.” The landlord of the Auberge du Donjon explained that it is the particularly sinister cry sometimes uttered at night by the cat of a local inhabitant, Mère Angenoux, a saintly old woman who lives in a hut in the forest, not far from the grotto of Sainte Genevieve.

  The Yellow Room, the Holy Beast, Mère Angenoux, the Devil, Sainte Genevieve, Père Jacques… All these make for an utterly baffling mystery, which the stroke of a pickaxe in a wall might solve tomorrow. Let us at least hope so, if only for our own peace of mind, to quote Monsieur de Marquet’s very own words. Meanwhile, the doctors do not expect Mademoiselle Stangerson—who remains delirious and utters only one, single word repeatedly, ‘Murderer!’—to make it through the night.

  Finally, in its evening edition, Le Matin revealed that the Head of the Sûreté had sent a cable to the famous Inspector Frederic Larsan, currently in London for an affair of stolen bonds, to ask him to return at once to Paris.

  Chapter Two

  In Which We Meet Joseph Rouletabille

  I remember, just as if it were yesterday, the entrance of young Joseph Rouletabille into my bedroom that morning. It was 8 a.m., and I was still in bed, reading the article in Le Matin recounting the Mystery of the Yellow Room.

  Before going any further, I should introduce my friend.

  I first met Rouletabille when he was a young reporter. At that time, I was myself a newcomer to the Paris Bar, and I often saw him in the waiting rooms of the Investigating Magistrates from whom I had requested the permission to talk to clients locked up in the jails of Mazas and Saint-Lazare. Rouletabille had, as they say, a “great mug.” His head was round as a marble, which is why, I think, his fellow journalists had given him that nickname which stuck to him and which he made so famous—“Rouletabille.”5 “Did you see Rouletabille?” “There’s that scamp, Rouletabille!” they said. He could be red as a tomato, happy as a lark, or grave as a judge.

  How could he, being so young—he was only 16-1/2 years old when I first met him—be gainfully employed as a journalist? Everyone who came into contact with him soon learned of his first, triumphant case, now mostly forgotten. The body of a woman had been found dismembered in the Rue Oberkampf. Then, Rouletabille brought her left foot to the editors of L’Epoque, which was in a heated competition with Le Matin for that kind of story. The police had been vainly looking for that left foot for a week, as it had been missing from the basket in which the gruesome remains had been found, but young Rouletabille had found it in a drain, where no one else had thought of looking for it. To do that, he had hired himself out as one of the temporary sewer-men recruited by the city of Paris to clean up after an unusual overflow of the Seine.

  When the editor-in-chief of L’Epoque found himself in possession of the precious foot, and informed of the series of clever deductions that the boy who had found it had had to make, he was torn between the admiration he felt for the astonishing detective skills of a lad of a mere 16, and the delight at being able to exhibit the left foot of the victim of the Rue Oberskampf murder in the “morgue window” of his newspaper.

  “This foot,” he said, “will make a great headline.”

  After entrusting the gruesome delivery to their medical consultant, the editor-in-chief asked the lad, who was shortly to become famous as “Rouletabille,” what he would expect to earn as a reporter-in-training for L’Epoque?

  “Two hundred francs a month,” the young man replied modestly, hardly able to breathe from the surprise he felt at receiving such a proposal.

  “You shall have 250 francs,” said the editor-in-chief, “but you must tell everyone that you’ve been working for us for a month. Let it be quite clear that it wasn’t you, but the paper itself, that discovered that foot. Here, my young friend, the man is nothing, the paper everything.”

  Having said that, he asked his newest employee to leave, but before the young man had reached the door, he called him back to ask for his name. The boy replied:

  “Joseph Josephin.”

  “That’s not a good name for a reporter,” said the editor-in-chief, “but since you won’t be signing your articles, it doesn’t matter.”

  The young reporter made many friends immediately, because he was helpful and gifted with a sense of humor that charmed the grumpiest and disarmed the most jealous of his colleagues. At the café of the Paris Bar, where crime reporters gathered before visiting the Criminal Courts or the Prefecture of Police in search of new stories, he began to gain the reputation of being a clever lad, a reputation which spread even to the Head of the Sûreté. When a case was worth the trouble, and Rouletabille—by then, he had acquired his nickname—had been assigned to it, he often produced better results than even the most famous of detectives.

  It was at the café of the Bar that I became acquainted with him. Criminal lawyers and journalists are not enemies; the former need publicity, the latter information. We chatted and I soon felt much sympathy for the brave little lad. His intelligence was so keen and original, and he had a quality of thought that I have never found in any other person.

  A little later, I was asked to chronicle criminal cases by the Cri du Boulevard. My entry into the field of journalism only strengthened my friendship with Rouletabille. Also, Rouletabille had proposed to his editor at L’Epoque the idea of a legal chronicle, which he was allowed to write under the nom-de-plume of “M. Business” and I was often able to provide him with the legal information he sought.

  Nearly two years went by, and the better I knew him, the more I liked him, because, despite his joyous extravagance, I found him to be extraordinarily serious for someone of his age. However, a few times, accustomed as I was to seeing him cheerful—indeed, often
too cheerful—I suddenly caught him in a state of deep melancholy. I tried to question him as to the cause of this mood, but each time, he laughed and gave me no answer. One day, having asked him about his parents, of whom he never spoke, he left, pretending not to have heard what I said.

  It was at that time that the famous Mystery of the Yellow Room burst upon us. It was this case which earned him the reputation of being one of the world’s best reporters, as well as one of its greatest detectives. We should not be surprised to find a single man embodying these two sets of skills, because the daily press had already begun to turn into what it’s become since, which is not unlike the annals of crime. Some negative minds may disapprove of this; for myself, I regard it as a beneficial transformation. After all, society can never have enough weapons, be they public or private, against criminals. The same negative minds will say that, by constantly publishing the details of each new crime, the press only encourages the commission of more crimes. But then, one can never reason with some people...

  Rouletabille, as I said, entered my room that morning of October 26, 1892. He was looking more flushed than usual, and his eyes were bulging out of his head, as the saying goes. He was in a state of extreme excitement. He waved a copy of Le Matin at me with a trembling hand.

  “Well, my dear Sainclair,” he said, “have you read the news?”

  “The Glandier crime?”

  “Yes! The Mystery of the Yellow Room! What do you think of it?”

  “By Jove, it’s either the work of the Devil, or maybe Père Jacques’ Holy Beast.”

  “You can’t be serious!”

  “All right, I don’t really believe in murderers capable of walking through walls. I think Père Jacques made a mistake when he left his gun behind. Since he lived in the attic immediately above Mademoiselle Stangerson’s room, I expect that the architectural survey ordered by the Investigating Magistrate will provide us with the key to the whole mystery. We will soon find out by what trapdoor or secret passage that old rascal was able to slip in and out of the room, and return immediately to the laboratory of Professor Stangerson, who failed to notice his absence. That, of course, is only a hypothesis.”

  Rouletabille sat down in an armchair, lit his pipe, which never left him, and smoked silently for a few minutes, no doubt to calm his excitement.

  “Young man,” he said, in a tone of contemptuous irony which I cannot adequately convey here, “you are a good lawyer and I don’t doubt your ability to save a guilty man from the gallows, but if you ever become an Investigating Magistrate, you will all too soon send an innocent to the guillotine! You appear to have a gift for it, my friend!” He continued to smoke vigorously, and then continued: “No trapdoor will be found, and the Mystery of the Yellow Room will become more impenetrable than ever. That’s why it interests me. The Investigating Magistrate was right; it is the strangest case that I’ve ever come across.”

  “Have you any idea how the would-be murderer was able to escape then?” I asked.

  “None at the present,” replied Rouletabille. “But I have an idea about the gun. I don’t think our murderer used it.”

  “Good Heavens! By whom, then, was it used?”

  “Why, by Mademoiselle Stangerson.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Worse, I now feel as if I never understood anything about that case at all.”

  Rouletabille shrugged.

  “Was there anything in that article in Le Matin which particularly struck you?”

  “No, nothing… Truthfully, I found everything equally bizarre.”

  “But what about the door, locked from the inside?”

  “That seems to be the only perfectly natural thing in the whole story.”

  “Really? What about the bolt then?”

  “The bolt?”

  “Yes, the bolt, also pushed from inside. Mademoiselle Stangerson seems to have taken some extraordinary precautions. I think she feared someone. That was why she took such precautions, going as far as borrowing Père Jacques’s revolver without telling him. No doubt, she didn’t wish to alarm anybody, least of all, her father. What she dreaded took place, and she defended herself. There was a skirmish, and she used the gun 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 struggling to find an exit. But she didn’t fire soon enough to avoid the terrible blow she received on the right temple.”

  “Then you don’t think that the wound on her temple was caused by a gunshot?”

  “Le Matin doesn’t say that it was, and I’m inclined to think it wasn’t because, logically, it seems to me that the revolver was used by Mademoiselle Stangerson against her attacker. So, what weapon did he use to strike her? That blow appears to show that he wished to stun Mademoiselle Stangerson, after having tried unsuccessfully to strangle her. Our villain must have known that the attic was inhabited by Père Jacques, and that’s one of the reasons why, I think, he probably preferred to use a quieter weapon, a truncheon or a hammer perhaps...”

  “All that doesn’t explain how the murderer got out of the Yellow Room,” I remarked.

  “Of course,” replied Rouletabille, rising, “and since we still have to solve that mystery, I’m planning to visit the Chateau du Glandier. I came here to ask you if you’d like to come with me.”

  “I?”

  “Yes, my friend. I need you. L’Epoque has assigned this case to me, and I have to solve it as soon as possible.”

  “But how can I be of any use to you?”

  “Monsieur Robert Darzac is presently at Glandier.”

  “Ah, I see... His distress must be overwhelming.”

  “Still, I need to talk to him.”

  Rouletabille spoke that last sentennce in a tone that surprised me.

  “Is it because you harbor some… suspicions?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  And that was all he would say. He retired to my sitting room, pushing me to dress quickly.

  I knew Monsieur Darzac, having been of great service to him in a civil lawsuit, when I was secretary to Maître Barbet-Delatour. Darzac, who was then about 40, was Professor of physics at the Sorbonne University. He was intimately acquainted with the Stangersons, and, after seven years of assiduous courtship, was about to marry Mademoiselle Stangerson. She was still remarkably beautiful despite the fact that she was now “of a certain age,” as some say. (I personally thought her to be around 35.)

  While I was dressing, I called out to Rouletabille, who was impatiently pacing around my sitting room:

  “Have you any ideas as to the attacker’s identity?”

  “Some,” he replied. “I think he is a man of the world, or at least belongs to the upper class. But that’s only an impression…”

  “What has led you to form it?”

  “Well, the old béret, the common handkerchief, and the footprints left by dirty boots on the floor,” he replied.

  “I see,” I said. “No one would leave so many clues behind them unless they were meant to mislead the police.”

  “We shall make a detective out of you yet, my dear Sainclair,” concluded Rouletabille.

  Chapter Three

  “Did He Walk Through the Shutters Like a Ghost?”

  Half an hour later, Rouletabille and I stood on the platform at the Gare d’Orléans, waiting for the train which would take us to Epinay-sur-Orge.

  On the platform, we saw the Investigating Magistrate from the Tribunal of Corbeil, Monsieur de Marquet, and his clerk. They both had spent the night in Paris, attending the final rehearsal at the Scala of a play authored by Monsieur de Marquet under the nom-de-plume of “Castigat Ridendo.”6

  The Magistrate was starting to turn into what is sometimes referred to as a “grand old man.” He was ordinarily very polite and courteous, and he had one passion in life—the dramatic arts. As an Investigating Magistrate, he was only interested in those cases that could provide him with enough inspiration to write a pla
y. With his family connections, he could have aspired to higher posts, but in truth, the only success he sought was at the romantic Porte-Saint-Martin, or at the thoughtful Odéon.7 His relative lack of ambition had led him to be satisfied with a position at the provincial Corbeil Tribunal, and a somewhat naughty one-act play at the Scala.

  Because of its nature, the Mystery of the Yellow Room was bound to fascinate such a theatrical mind. It immediately captured his attention. He threw himself into it, not as much as a Magistrate eager to learn the truth, but as a fan of the theater, a lover of mystery and intrigue, who dreads the coming of the last act, when the curtain falls and all is finally explained.

  As we were about to introduce ourselves, I heard Monsieur de Marquet say to his clerk, sighing:

  “I hope, my dear Monsieur Maleine, that this builder with his pickaxe isn’t going to ruin such a fine mystery.”

  “Have no fear,” replied the clerk. “His pickaxe may demolish the pavilion, but I think it will leave our case intact. I sounded the walls and examined both the ceiling and the floor. I’m something of an expert in these matters and not easily deceived. You can rest assured that he won’t find anything new.”

  Having thus reassured the Magistrate, Monsieur Maleine, drew his attention to us with a discreet movement of his head. The Magistrate’s expression grew sterner. As he saw Rouletabille approaching him, hat in hand, he sprang into one of the train’s empty carriages, saying, half-aloud to his clerk, “And, above all, I don’t want to talk to any journalists!”

  Monsieur Maleine replied in the same tone: “I understand!” He then tried to prevent Rouletabille from following the Magistrate.

  “Excuse me, Messieurs,” he said. “I believe that this compartment is reserved.”

  “I’m a journalist from L’Epoque, Monsieur,” replied my friend with a great display of courtesy. “I have a word to say to Monsieur de Marquet.”

  “Monsieur de Marquet is too busy with his investigation to…”