Rouletabille and the Mystery of the Yellow Room

by Gaston Leroux

  Turning towards Professor Stangerson, the Chief of the Sûreté asked in that cold tone which, I think, is the mark of superior intelligences and strong characters:

  “I understand that your daughter was shortly to have been married?”

  The Professor looked sadly at Monsieur Darzac.

  “Yes, to my friend here, whom I should have been happy to call my son, Monsieur Robert Darzac.”

  “I gather that Mademoiselle Stangerson is feeling much better and is recovering from her wounds. So the marriage is presumably only delayed, isn’t that right, Professor?” insisted the Chief of the Sûreté.

  “I certainly hope so.

  “What! Do you have any doubts about it?”

  Professor Stangerson did not reply. Monsieur Darzac appeared agitated. Being very observant, I noticed that his hand was trembling a little as he fingered his watch chain. Monsieur Dax coughed, as did Monsieur de Marquet, a sign that he was embarrassed.

  “You understand, Professor,” he said, “that in an affair as confusing as this one, we cannot neglect any fact. We must know everything concerning the victim, even the smallest and seemingly most insignificant details. So why do you doubt that this marriage will take place, now that we know that Mademoiselle Stangerson will surely recover? You expressed a hope, but hope also implies doubt. So I ask you again: why do you doubt?”

  Professor Stangerson made a visible effort to regain his composure.

  “You’re right, of course, Monsieur,” he said finally. “It is best that you should know something which, if I were to conceal it, might appear significant. Monsieur Darzac agrees with me on this.”

  Monsieur Darzac, whose pallor at that moment seemed altogether abnormal to me, made a sign of assent. In my opinion, he made that sign because he was unable to speak.

  “I want you to know,” continued Professor Stangerson, “that my daughter swore never to leave me, and has stuck firmly to her oath despite all my entreaties urging her to marry, as is my duty. We’ve known Monsieur Darzac for many years. He loves Mathilde, and I believed that she loves him, since she recently consented to marry him, something which I desire with all my heart. I’m an old man, Monsieur, and it was a great reassurance for to me to know that, after I had gone, my daughter would have someone at her side who loved her, and who would help her in continuing our common work. I love and esteem Monsieur Darzac, both for his greatness of heart and for his devotion to science. However, two days before the tragedy, for a reason unknown to me, my daughter told me that she would not marry him.”

  A long silence followed Professor Stangerson’s words. It was a moment fraught with apprehension.

  “Did Mademoiselle Stangerson give you any explanation? Did she tell you what her reason was?” asked Monsieur Dax.

  “She told me that she was now too old to marry, that she had waited too long. She said she had given much thought to the matter and, while she had a great esteem, even affection, for Monsieur Darzac, she felt it would be better if things remained as they were. She would be happy, she said, to see the relations between ourselves and Monsieur Darzac become closer, but only on the understanding that there would be no more talk of marriage.”

  “That is very strange!” muttered Monsieur Dax.

  “Very strange indeed!” echoed Monsieur de Marquet.

  “You’ll certainly not find any motive there, Monsieur Dax,” Monsieur Stangerson said with a cold smile.

  “In any case, the motive doesn’t appear to have been a robbery!” said the Chief of the Sûreté impatiently.

  “I’m entirely convinced of that!” said the Investigating Magistrate.

  At that moment, the door of the laboratory opened. The Brigadier entered and handed a card to Monsieur de Marquet. The Magistrate read it and exclaimed:

  “This is really too much!”

  “What is it?” asked Monsieur Dax.

  “It’s the card of that young reporter from L’Epoque, Joseph Rouletabille. It has these words written on it: ‘One of the motives of the crime was robbery.’ ”

  The Chief of the Sûreté smiled.

  “Ah! Young Rouletabille! I’ve heard of him. He’s considered rather clever. Let him in.”

  Monsieur Rouletabille was allowed to enter. I had made his acquaintance that morning in the train to Epinay-sur-Orge. He had sneaked, against my will, into our compartment. I should say that his manners, the arrogance with which he pretended to know what was going on in an affair where even the best investigators were puzzled, hadn’t endeared him to me. I don’t like journalists. They interfere and meddle and are the type of writers that should be avoided like the plague. They think that everything is permissible and they respect nothing. Grant them the least favor, allow them even to talk to you, and you never can tell what kind of trouble will ensue. This one appeared to be scarcely 20, and the effrontery with which he had dared to question us and discuss the case had made him particularly odious to me. Further, he had a way of expressing himself that made us feel as if he were making fun of us. I know quite well that L’Epoque is an influential paper, with which one must stay on good terms, but it shouldn’t allow itself to be represented by such novice reporters.

  Monsieur Rouletabille entered the laboratory, bowed to us, and waited for Monsieur de Marquet to ask him to explain his presence.

  “You claim, Monsieur,” said the Magistrate, “that you know the motive for the crime, and that, despite all evidence to the contrary, it was robbery?”

  “No, Monsieur, I don’t claim that. I didn’t say that robbery was the motive for the crime, and I don’t believe it was.”

  “Then, what is the meaning of this card?”

  “It means that robbery was one of the motives for the crime.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “If you will be kind enough to follow me, I will show you…”

  The young man asked us to follow him into the vestibule, which we did. There, he led us towards the lavatory and asked Monsieur de Marquet to kneel beside him. This lavatory was lit through a glass door by the vestibule’s lights. When that door was open, enough light went inside to light it perfectly. Monsieur de Marquet and Monsieur Rouletabille knelt down on the threshold, and the young man pointed to a spot on the tiles.

  “The floor of this lavatory hasn’t been washed by Père Jacques for some time,” he said. “It’s obvious because of the layer of dust on the tiles. Now, notice here these two large footprints and the sooty residue they left behind—the same as the perpetrator’s footprints in the Yellow Room. That residue is charcoal dust from the road which one must take in order to get from Epinay to Glandier through the woods. You must know that there is a little village of charcoal-burners there, who make large quantities of charcoal. What the murderer did was to come here during the afternoon, when the pavilion was empty, and rob it.”

  “What robbery? Where do you see any signs of a robbery? What proves to you that a robbery was committed here?” we all said at once.

  “What put me on the right track…” replied the journalist.

  “…Was this!” interrupted Monsieur de Marquet, still on his knees.

  “Exactly!” said Rouletabille.

  And Monsieur de Marquet explained that there was on the dusty tiles, next to the footprints, the impression, freshly-made, of a heavy rectangular parcel, the string marks of which were still clearly visible.

  “You have been here, then, Monsieur Rouletabille?” said the Magistrate. “I thought I had given strict orders to Père Jacques, who was in charge of the pavilion, not to allow anyone on the premises.”

  “Don’t scold Père Jacques, I came here with Monsieur Darzac.”

  “Really?” said Monsieur de Marquet, unhappy. He cast a side-glance at Monsieur Darzac, who remained perfectly silent.

  “When I saw the impression of that parcel next to the footprints, I had no doubt as to the robbery,” replied Monsieur Rouletabille. “The thief didn’t bring a parcel with him. He made it here to carry off hi
s loot, then he put it in this corner intending to take it with him when he made his escape. He also left his boots beside the parcel. As you can see, there are no footprints leading to or from the boots. Further, the two footprints are next to each other, resting on the floor, clearly made by two empty boots just placed there. That accounts for the fact that the murderer left no footprints when he fled from the Yellow Room, not in the laboratory, nor in the vestibule. After entering the Yellow Room in his boots, the perpetrator took them off, either because they bothered him, or because he wished to make as little noise as possible. The marks left by him coming through the vestibule and the laboratory were subsequently washed away by Père Jacques. This leads us to the conclusion that the perpetrator entered the pavilion through the vestibule’s open window during Père Jacques’ first absence, before he washed the floors at 5:30 p.m.

  “Having taken off his boots, which must have somehow impeded him, our villain then carried them in his hand to the lavatory and left them there, on the threshold, since we can’t find any other footprints in the dust: no traces of bare feet, feet covered with socks, or wearing another kind of shoes. He left his boots next to the parcel he had prepared. By that time, the robbery had been accomplished. Our man then returned to the Yellow Room and slipped under the bed, where the mark of his body is still perfectly visible on the carpet, which is slightly creased and rumpled on that very spot. Bits of straw, recently broken, also bear witness to the perpetrator’s presence under the bed.”

  “Yes, yes, we know all that,” said Monsieur de Marquet.

  “That return trip from the lavatory to hide under the bed of the Yellow Room,” continued the amazing young reporter, “proves that robbery wasn’t the only motive behind our man’s visit. Don’t tell me that he might have had to find refuge there in a hurry because, through the vestibule window, he might have seen or heard Père Jacques, Professor Stangerson or his daughter about to return to the pavilion. No, if that were so, it would have been much easier for him to climb up to the attic and hide there, waiting for an opportunity to get away, that is, if his only purpose had been to escape. No! No! He wanted to be in the Yellow Room!”

  Here, the Chief of the Sûreté intervened:

  “That’s very good! Congratulations, young man! If we don’t know yet how our perpetrator managed to get away, at least, we can see how he got in and committed his robbery. But what did he steal?”

  “Something very valuable,” replied the reporter.

  At that moment, we heard a cry coming from the laboratory. We rushed in and found Professor Stangerson, his eyes rolling, his arms trembling, pointing to a cabinet which he had opened, and which, we saw, was empty.

  The Professor sank into the large armchair before the desk and moaned:

  “I have been robbed again!” Tears began rolling down his cheeks. “For God’s sake,” he added, “don’t say a word to my daughter. She would be even more hurt than I am.”

  He sighed very deeply and concluded, in a tone that I shall never forget:

  “After all, what does it matter, as long as she lives!”

  “She will live!” said Monsieur Darzac, in a voice that was strangely touching.

  “And we will find the stolen articles,” said Monsieur Dax. “But what was in that cabinet?”

  “Twenty years of my life,” replied the illustrious professor sadly, “or rather, of our lives, the lives of myself and my daughter! Yes, our most precious documents, the records of our most secret experiments and all our labors of 20 years were in that cabinet. I stored a selection of our most valuable documents there, which are all too often spread around this room. It’s an irreparable loss to us and, dare I say, science. All the processes which I carefully studied before reaching the irrefutable proof of the dissociation of matter were all in there, methodically filed, labeled, annotated, illustrated with graphs and photos. It was all kept in that cabinet! There were also the blueprints for three new inventions: one, a device to study the decrease of certain electrified bodies under the effect of ultraviolet light, another to render that electrical decrease visible by projecting particles of dissociated matter in superhot gases, and, finally, the most ingenious of all three, a new differential electroscopic condenser. There was also a binder containing all our charts recording the fundamental properties of the intermediate substance between tangible matter and intangible aether; 20 years of experiments in intranuclear chemistry and the unknown states of equilibrium in matter; my unpublished manuscript on stressed metals… And what else? What else?... The man who robbed us took everything from me: my daughter, my work, my heart and my soul.”

  And the great Professor Stangerson began to cry like a child.

  We stood around him in silence, deeply affected by his great distress. Monsieur Darzac, leaning against the Professor’s armchair, tried in vain to comfort him, which, for a moment, almost made me like him, despite the instinctive dislike I felt for this strange man’s odd behavior and inexplicable nervousness.

  Meanwhile, Monsieur Rouletabille, as if his precious time and the sense of his mission on Earth didn’t permit him to dwell on the contemplation of human suffering, had very calmly stepped up to the empty cabinet. Pointing at it, he crudely broke our solemn silence acknowledging the Professor’s great loss. The young man gave the Chief of the Sûreté some basic reasons—which we cared little about—why he had been led to believe that a robbery had been committed. These included the discovery he had made in the lavatory and the presence of the cabinet in the laboratory. He said that he had only made a cursory examination of the laboratory, but the first thing that had struck him was the unusual shape of that cabinet. It was strongly built, made of iron, fire-proofed, clear evidence that it was intended for the safekeeping of valuable objects. Then, he had noticed that the key had been left in the lock. “One does not ordinarily bother having a safe and leaving it open!” he had thought.

  This little key, with its brass head and complicated wards, had attracted Monsieur Rouletabille’s attention, when it had been ignored by the rest of us. To us, respectable members of society, the presence of a key in a lock made us think of safekeeping. But to Monsieur Rouletabille, who is obviously a genius (like José Dupuy says in The Five Hundred Millions of Gladiator, “What a genius! What a dentist!”13), a key in a lock instead suggests robbery! We soon found out his conclusions.

  But before I share them here, I have to report that Monsieur de Marquet appeared to be greatly concerned, as if he didn’t know whether he should be glad of the new direction given to the investigation by the young reporter, or sorry that he hadn’t found those new clues by himself. In our profession, we have to put up with such embarrassments and bury our pride for the sake of the public good. That’s why Monsieur de Marquet’s better nature won out and he was soon adding his compliments to those of Monsieur Dax, who was being lavish with praise.

  As for our young Monsieur Rouletabille, he simply shrugged his shoulders and said: “All in a day’s work!” I would have gladly slapped him, especially when he added: “You would do well, Monsieur, to ask Professor Stangerson who normally kept that key.”

  “My daughter,” replied the Professor. “She was never without it.

  “Ah! But then, this must change Monsieur Rouletabille’s conception of the crime!” said Monsieur de Marquet. “If that key never left Mademoiselle Stangerson, the perpetrator must have waited for her in her room for the purpose of stealing it. Therefore, the robbery couldn’t have been committed until after the attack on her person. But then, after that attack, there were four persons present in the laboratory! Upon my word, I can’t make neither heads nor tails of this!”

  Monsieur de Marquet repeated that last sentence several times gleefully, because, as I think I have already noted, nothing pleased him more that a mystery which he couldn’t solve.

  “…Neither heads nor tails!”

  “The robbery,” said the reporter, “could only have been committed before the attack upon Mademoiselle Stangerson.
That fact is incontrovertible for the very reason you stated Monsieur, and for others, which I believe I know. When the murderer entered the pavilion, he already had the brass key in his possession.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Professor Stangerson in a low voice.

  “Not at all, Professor, and here’s the proof…”

  And the young rascal pulled out of his pocket a copy of L’Epoque dated October 21 (the crime was committed on the night between October 24 and 25), and showed us a classified advertisement which read:

  “ ‘Lost yesterday at the Grands Magasins du Louvre a black satin handbag containing, among other things, a small key with a brass head. A handsome reward will be given to the person who has found it. This person must write to M.A.T.H.S.N., Poste Restante, Bureau 40.’ Don’t these letters suggest Mademoiselle Stangerson?” continued the reporter. “The key with a brass head—is it not this key? I always read the classifieds. In my business, as in yours, Monsieur, one should always read the classifieds. They often contain the keys to many mysteries, not always brass-headed ones, but none the less interesting. This advertisement caught my eye because of the aura of mystery with which the woman who had lost her key—normally not a compromising item—surrounded herself. Obviously, she valued that key very much, since she promised a big reward for it! And then, I considered these six letters: M.A.T.H.S.N. The first four pointed to a Christian first name; I thought M.A.T.H. stood for ‘Mathilde’—obviously, the first name of the woman who had lost her handbag. But I could make nothing of the last two letters. So I threw the paper aside and busied myself with other matters.

  “Four days later, when the evening papers appeared with enormous headlines announcing the attempted murder of Mademoiselle MATHILDE STANGERSON, without any conscious thought, I remembered the advertisement. But I had forgotten the last two letters. So I asked the archives to pull out another copy of that issue for me, and when I had it, I finally got my answer: S.N. When I saw it, I couldn’t help exclaiming, ‘STANGERSON!’