Project Gutenberg's The Mystery of the Yellow Room, by Gaston Leroux

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Title: The Mystery of the Yellow Room

Author: Gaston Leroux

Posting Date: November 25, 2008 [EBook #1685]
Release Date: March, 1999

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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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 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