Library of the Worlds Best Mystery and Detective Stories | Page 3

All the men looked at her, asked her name, endeavored to be introduced.
All the attachés of the Cabinet wanted to waltz with her. She was
remarked by the minister himself.
She danced with intoxication, with passion, made drunk by pleasure,
forgetting all, in the triumph of her beauty, in the glory of her success,
in a sort of cloud of happiness composed of all this homage, of all this
admiration, of all these awakened desires, and of that sense of complete
victory which is so sweet to woman's heart.
She went away about four o'clock in the morning. Her husband had
been sleeping since midnight, in a little deserted anteroom, with three
other gentlemen whose wives were having a very good time.
He threw over her shoulders the wraps which he had brought, modest
wraps of common life, whose poverty contrasted with the elegance of
the ball dress. She felt this and wanted to escape so as not to be
remarked by the other women, who were enveloping themselves in
costly furs.
Loisel held her back.
"Wait a bit. You will catch cold outside. I will go and call a cab."
But she did not listen to him, and rapidly descended the stairs. When
they were in the street they did not find a carriage; and they began to
look for one, shouting after the cabmen whom they saw passing by at a
distance.

They went down toward the Seine, in despair, shivering with cold. At
last they found on the quay one of those ancient noctambulent coupés
which, exactly as if they were ashamed to show their misery during the
day, are never seen round Paris until after nightfall.
It took them to their door in the Rue des Martyrs, and once more, sadly,
they climbed up homeward. All was ended for her. And as to him, he
reflected that he must be at the Ministry at ten o'clock.
She removed the wraps, which covered her shoulders, before the glass,
so as once more to see herself in all her glory. But suddenly she uttered
a cry. She had no longer the necklace around her neck!
Her husband, already half undressed, demanded:
"What is the matter with you?"
She turned madly toward him:
"I have--I have--I've lost Mme. Forestier's necklace."
He stood up, distracted.
"What!--how?--Impossible!"
And they looked in the folds of her dress, in the folds of her cloak, in
her pockets, everywhere. They did not find it.
He asked:
"You're sure you had it on when you left the ball?"
"Yes, I felt it in the vestibule of the palace."
"But if you had lost it in the street we should have heard it fall. It must
be in the cab."
"Yes. Probably. Did you take his number?"

"No. And you, didn't you notice it?"
"No."
They looked, thunderstruck, at one another. At last Loisel put on his
clothes.
"I shall go back on foot," said he, "over the whole route which we have
taken, to see if I can't find it."
And he went out. She sat waiting on a chair in her ball dress, without
strength to go to bed, overwhelmed, without fire, without a thought.
Her husband came back about seven o'clock. He had found nothing.
He went to Police Headquarters, to the newspaper offices, to offer a
reward; he went to the cab companies--everywhere, in fact, whither he
was urged by the least suspicion of hope.
She waited all day, in the same condition of mad fear before this
terrible calamity.
Loisel returned at night with a hollow, pale face; he had discovered
nothing.
"You must write to your friend," said he, "that you have broken the
clasp of her necklace and that you are having it mended. That will give
us time to turn round."
She wrote at his dictation.
At the end of a week they had lost all hope.
And Loisel, who had aged five years, declared:
"We must consider how to replace that ornament."
The next day they took the box which had contained it, and they went
to the jeweler whose name was found within. He consulted his books.

"It was not I, madame, who sold that necklace; I must simply have
furnished the case."
Then they went from jeweler to jeweler, searching for a necklace like
the other, consulting their memories, sick both of them with chagrin
and with anguish.
They found, in a shop at the Palais Royal, a string of diamonds which
seemed to them exactly like the one they looked for. It was worth forty
thousand francs. They could have it for thirty-six.
So they begged the jeweler not to sell it for three days yet. And they
made a bargain that he should buy it back for thirty-four thousand
francs in case they found the