They entered. Duveyrier passed first, holding high the candle. The ante-room was empty, even the hat-pegs had disappeared. The drawing-room and the parlor were also empty: not a stick of furniture, not a curtain at the windows, not even a brass rod. Duveyrier stood as one petrified, first looking down at his feet, then raising his eyes to the ceiling, and then searchingly gazing at the walls, as though he had been seeking the hole through which everything had disappeared.
“What a clear out!” Trublot could not help exclaiming.
“Perhaps the place is going to be done up,” observed Gueulin, without as much as a smile. “Let us see the bed-room. The furniture may have been moved in there.”
But the bed-room was also bare, with that ugly and chilly bareness of plaster walls from which the paper has been torn off. Where the bedstead had stood, the iron supports of the canopy, also removed, left gaping holes; and, one of the windows having been left partly open, the air from the street filled the apartment with the humidity and the unsavoriness of a public square.
“My God! my God!” stuttered Duveyrier, at length able to weep, unnerved by the sight of the place where the friction of the mattresses had rubbed the paper off the wall.
Uncle Bachelard became quite paternal.
“Courage, sir!” he kept repeating. “The same thing happened to me, and I did not die of it. Honor is safe, damn it all!”
The counselor shook his head, and went into the dressing-room, and then into the kitchen. The evidence of the disaster increased. The piece of American cloth behind the washstand in the dressing-room had been taken down, and the hooks had been removed from the kitchen.
“No, that is too much, it is pure capriciousness!” said Gueulin, in amazement. “She might have left the hooks.”
“I can’t stand this any longer, you know,” Trublot ended by declaring, as they visited the drawing-room for the third time.