ook.

"A great misfortune has happened during the night, Monsieur," said he.

"What is it?"

"Somebody has stolen the whole of Monsieur's furniture, all,
everything, even to the smallest articles."

This news pleased me. Why? Who knows? I was complete master of myself,
bent on dissimulating, on telling no one of anything I had seen;
determined on concealing and in burying in my heart of hearts a
terrible secret. I responded:

"They must then be the same people who have stolen my keys. The police
must be informed immediately. I am going to get up, and I will join you
in a few moments."

The investigation into the circumstances under which the robbery might
have been committed lasted for five months. Nothing was found, not even
the smallest of my knickknacks, nor the least trace of the thieves.
Good gracious! If I had only told them what I knew--If I had said--I
should have been locked up--I, not the thieves--for I was the only
person who had seen everything from the first.

Yes! but I knew how to keep silence. I shall never refurnish my house.
That were indeed useless. The same thing would happen again. I had no
desire even to re-enter the house, and I did not re-enter it; I never
visited it again. I moved to Paris, to the hotel, and consulted doctors
in regard to the condition of my nerves, which had disquieted me a good
deal ever since that awful night.

They advised me to travel, and I followed their counsel.

II.

I began by making an excursion into Italy. The sunshine did me much
good. For six months I wandered about from Genoa to Venice, from Venice
to Florence, from Florence to Rome, from Rome to Naples. Then I
traveled over Sicily, a country celebrated for its scenery and its
monuments, relics left by the Greeks and the Normans. Passing over into
Africa, I traversed at my ease that immense desert, yellow and
tranquil, in which camels, gazelles, and Arab vagabonds roam
about--where, in the rare and transparent atmosphere, there hover no
vague hauntings, where there is never any night, but always day.

I returned to France by Marseilles, and in spite of all its Provencal
gaiety, the diminished clearness of the sky made me sad. I experienced,
in returning to the Continent, the peculiar sensation of an illness
which I believed had been cured, and a dull pain which predicted that
the seeds of the disease had not been eradicated.

I then returned to Paris. At the end of a month I was very dejected. It
w