And I had held her so close to me! She was so entirely mine, the happiest dream that ever mortal dreamt, the most mysterious and beautiful. She had taken the carriage which we left at the inn at Etiolles, and returned to Paris. That we discovered; but beyond that there was no word or sign to lead me. I only knew that she was in Paris. Even of that I was not quite sure, for she may have used Paris only as a stage on her journey into the unknown. But to Paris I came. I could not stay at Etiolles, even on the chance of her returning. I must go where she had gone. And I swore in my madness to find her, even though I searched Paris from the heights of Montmartre to the depths of the Seine. And then, when I got to Paris, I found my hands idle and useless. I did not know, even, what name she had gone under during her metamorphosis. She who had no name--this ghost from the past! At times I found myself wondering whether it was all a dream, an illusion of the brain. Whether I was mad. But actuality brought me to reason on this point. I had to answer the inquiries following the death of De Coigny. I had to appear before an examining magistrate, I and my seconds. Felix Rebouton was the magistrate in question, the same who, if my memory serves me, conducted the inquiry on the death of Victor Noir. He was a thin, tall man, in spectacles, a lawyer, not a man; a procès-verbal in a tightly buttoned frock-coat. And I had to face this individual, who seemed less an individual than a roll of parchment, and, with my heart breaking and my thoughts elsewhere, answer questions relative to my relations with De Coigny. "We have always hated each other, since boyhood. He lied about me, and I killed him," was my answer. "This lady who arrived on the scene of the duel, and with whom you departed; where is she?" "Ah, if you could tell me that," I replied, "I would give you every penny of my fortune." "Her name?" "She has no name." "No name!" "She is a ghost." The man of parchment scratched his head and made a note, looked sideways through his spectacles at his clerk and at De Brissac and the other seconds who were in the room. He thought I was mad. And he was not far wrong. The inquiry was suspended for three weeks, and I was free to return to my misery and the streets of Paris. I lived now in the streets. They were my only hope. From early morning till night I haunted the boulevards. Franzius had orders to telegraph to my club and to the Place Vendôme should any news reach the Pavilion, and the club porter grew weary of the inquiry: "Any telegram for me?" Men began to avoid me as they do the stricken, the leprous, and the mad. I must have seemed mad, indeed, for ever wandering hither and thither, searching the crowded streets with eager eyes, scarcely answering if spoken to, careless and untidy in my dress, a phantom of myself. Like Poe's man of the crowd, I drifted about Paris, ever in the thick of the throng, seeking the most populous streets.