The Mystery of the Yellow Room quotes

“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?

“ ‘It is impossible for us to do it,’ replied Monsieur de Marquet. ‘I can only say that it is the strangest affair I have ever known.

The more we think we know something, the further we are from knowing anything!

’

… seemed to have taken his head—round as a bullet—out of a box of marbles, and it is from that, I think, that his comrades of the press—all determined billiard-players—had given him that nickname, which was to stick to him and be made illustrious by him.

He was always as red as a tomato, now gay as a lark, now grave as a judge.

How, while still so young—he was only sixteen and a half years old when I saw him for the first time—had he already won his way on the press?

“only you must tell everybody that you have been engaged on the paper for a month. Let it be quite understood that it was not you but the Epoque that discovered the left foot of the Rue Oberkampf.

Here, my young friend, the man is nothing, the paper everything.

”

Frédéric Larsan shrugged his shoulders.

“When you can’t arrest the real murderer,” he said with an air of supreme irony, “you can always indulge in the luxury of discovering accomplices.”

“Did you have them arrested, Monsieur Fred?”

And it was in this sombre and desolate retreat that we saw the white walls of the pavilion as we approached. A queer-looking building without a window visible on the side by which we neared it. A little door alone marked the entrance to it.

It might have passed for a tomb, a vast mausoleum in the midst of a thick forest.

As we came nearer, we were able to make out its disposition. The building obtained all the light it needed from the south, that is to say, from the open country. The little door closed on the park.

He could not be better likened than to an admirable sporting dog on the scent of some unusual game. And, indeed, he was scenting the steps of a man—the man whom he has sworn to report to his master, the manager of the Epoque.

It must not be forgotten that Rouletabille was first and last a journalist.

Thus, on his hands and knees, he made his way to the four corners of the room, so to speak, sniffing and going round everything—everything that we could see, which was not much, and everything that we could not see, which must have been infinite.

“You are a wizard!” said Daddy Jacques, trying to laugh and not quite succeeding. “How do you know that the handkerchief is blue with red stripes?”

“Because, if it had not been blue with red stripes, it would not have been found at all.”

Without giving any further attention to Daddy Jacques, my friend took a piece of paper from his pocket, and taking out a pair of scissors, bent over the footprints. Placing the paper over one of them he began to cut.

he murmured. “He is very clever—very clever—and I admire him. But what we have to do today is something more than the work of a policeman—something quite different from the teachings of experience.

We have to take hold of our reason by the right end.

”

You, already, have your idea about the murderer, Monsieur Fred. Don’t deny it; and your theory demands that the murderer should not have been wounded in the hand, otherwise it comes to nothing. And you have searched, and have found something else.

It’s dangerous, very dangerous, Monsieur Fred, to go from a preconceived idea to find the proofs to fit it.

That method may lead you far astray. Beware of judicial error, Monsieur Fred, it will trip you up!”

He had introduced himself almost against my wish into our compartment. I had better say at once that his manners, and the arrogance with which he assumed to know what was incomprehensible even to us, impressed him unfavourably on my mind.

I do not like journalists. They are a class of writers to be avoided as the pest.

They think that everything is permissible and they respect nothing. Grant them the least favour, allow them even to approach you, and you never can tell what annoyance they may give you.

It was very strongly built of fireproof iron, clearly showing that it was intended for the keeping of most valuable objects. Then he noticed that the key had been left in the lock.

“One does not ordinarily have a safe and leave it open!”

he had said to himself. This little key, with its brass head and complicated wards, had strongly attracted him—its presence had suggested robbery.

“Yes—terrible!—terrible!

For it is fighting with nothing, when you have only an idea to fight with.

”

“Perhaps he is right,” I cried, interrupting Rouletabille. “Are you sure that Monsieur Darzac is innocent?—It seems to me that these are extraordinary coincidences—”

“Coincidences,” replied my friend, “are the worst enemies to truth.”

“What does the examining magistrate think now of the matter?”

“We looked at each other stupidly and with eyes terrified.

The man had vanished like a ghost.

‘Where is he—where is he?’ we all asked.

“Where is he?—where is he?—He could not have got away by a door or a window, nor by any other way.

He could not have passed through our bodies!

“I confess that, for the moment, I felt ‘done for.’ For the gallery was perfectly lighted, and there was neither trap, nor secret door in the walls, nor any sort of hiding-place. We moved the chairs and lifted the pictures. Nothing!—nothing!

“Mademoiselle Stangerson appeared at the door of her anteroom,” continues Rouletabille’s notebook. “We were near her door in the gallery where this incredible phenomenon had taken place.

There are moments when one feels as if one’s brain were about to burst.

A bullet in the head, a fracture of the skull, the seat of reason shattered—with only these can I compare the sensation which exhausted and left me void of sense.

“I came to the conclusion that I was a fool, lower in the scale of intelligence than even the police of the modern romancer.

Novelists build mountains of stupidity out of a footprint on the sand, or from an impression of a hand on the wall.

That’s the way innocent men are brought to prison. It might convince an examining magistrate or the head of a detective department, but it’s not proof. You writers forget that what the senses furnish is not proof.

That’s the way innocent men are brought to prison. It might convince an examining magistrate or the head of a detective department, but it’s not proof.

You writers forget that what the senses furnish is not proof.

If I am taking cognisance of what is offered me by my senses I do so but to bring the results within the circle of my reason.

That circle may be the most circumscribed, but if it is, it has this advantage—it holds nothing but the truth!

Yes, I swear that I have never used the evidence of the senses but as servants to my reason. I have never permitted them to become my master.

They have not made of me that monstrous thing—worse than a blind man—a man who sees falsely. And that is why I can triumph over your error and your merely animal intelligence, Frédéric Larsan.

This lad’s brain was one of the most curious things I have ever observed.

Rouletabille went on the even tenor of his way without suspecting the astonishment and even bewilderment he roused in others.

I am sure he was not himself in the least conscious of the originality of his genius. He was himself and at ease wherever he happened to be.

“Why that ‘now’?

When you are, as I am, in search of some hidden secret, you can’t afford to have anything escape you. You’ve got to know the meaning of everything.

We had come into a rather out-of-the-way part of the country which had been turned topsy-turvey by a crime, and my reason led me to suspect every phrase that could bear upon the event of the day. ‘Now,’ I took to mean, ‘since the outrage.’

“

Everything in this business is strange, my friend; but take my word for it, the strangeness you now feel is nothing to the strangeness that’s to come!

”

And my friend laughed silently.

There are moments when I ask myself if he is not laughing at me.

The door of the inn opened. Rouletabille was on his feet so suddenly that one might have thought he had received an electric shock.

My hand closed on the butt of my revolver and I waited.

I am not a hero; but neither am I a coward.

I waited about an hour, and during all that time I saw nothing unusual. The rain, which had begun to come down strongly towards nine o’clock, had now ceased.

“Listen to what I am about to say,” he said in a low tone, “and let it give you confidence.

You do not know the name of the murderer. Mademoiselle Stangerson knows it; but only half of it; but I know his two halves; I know the whole man!

”

“Yes, Monsieur President, I did,” replied Rouletabille, proudly. “

I am not a policeman, I am a journalist; and my business is not to arrest people. My business is in the service of truth, and is not that of an executioner.

If you are just, Monsieur, you will see that I am right. You can now understand why I refrained until this hour to divulge the name.