l 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 other one before the end of February.

Loisel possessed eighteen thousand francs which his father had left
him. He would borrow the rest.

He did borrow, asking a thousand francs of one, five hundred of
another, five louis here, three louis there. He gave notes, took up
ruinous obligations, dealt with usurers, and all the race of lenders.
He compromised all the rest of his life, risked his signature without
even knowing if he could meet it; and, frightened by the pains yet to
come, by the black misery which was about to fall upon him, by the
prospect of all the physical privations and of all the moral tortures
which he was to suffer, he went to get the new neck