About two months after these events, I came upon Rouletabille sitting on a bench in the Palais de Justice, looking very depressed. “What’s the matter, old man?” I asked. “You are looking very downcast. How are your friends getting on?” “Apart from you,” he said, “I have no friends.” “I hope that Monsieur Darzac—” “No doubt.” “And Mademoiselle Stangerson—How is she?” “Better—much better.” “Then you ought not to be sad.” “I am sad,” he said, “because I am thinking of the perfume of the lady in black—” “The perfume of the lady in black!—I have heard you often refer to it. Tell me why it troubles you.” “Perhaps—some day; some day,” said Rouletabille. And he heaved a profound sigh. [Transcriber’s Notes: This transcription follows the text of the first edition published by Brentano’s in 1908. Archaic and inconsistent spellings and punctuation have generally been left unchanged. However, the following alterations have been made to correct what are believed to be unambiguous errors in the text. * Fourteen occurrences of invalid or misleading punctuation (twelve of which involved errors in placement or type of quotation marks) have been corrected. * Two occurrences of paragraphs ending without punctuation have been corrected. * The original text contained the misspelled words “uttereed”, “villanies”, and “hmself”; these have all been corrected. * The original text also contained the following misspellings specific to non-English names and phrases: * two occurrences of “Bête Du Bon Dieu”, * two occurrences of “Monsieur Marquet”, * two occurrences of “Frédérick Larsan”, * three occurrences of “Rue Oberskampf”, * four occurrences of “Mâitre”, and * thirteen occurrences of “Elysée”. These have all been corrected. * The phrase “is if we were” has been corrected to “as if we were”, in Chapter XVII. * The original text has no heading for Chapter XVII, despite being part of the same continuous excerpt as Chapters XVI and XVIII. This absence has been corrected.]