The Mystery of the Yellow Room

by Gaston Leroux




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