"However this might be, my adversary did not re-appear, and after the strange affair had been for four weeks the favorite topic of conversation all over town--for it had created an enormous sensation--I saw myself compelled to leave Naples without having accomplished my purpose.
"I went by way of Rome--where I took leave of my friend--to Paris. I felt that I had fulfilled my duty only half; the hardest part was yet to be done. I was afraid to meet Leonora again; and yet I wished it almost as earnestly. You will ask how I could take so deep an interest in a person who had so frivolously trifled with my happiness, and who had lost the last relic of respect which might have remained alive for her after her elopement with the Pole, by running away with the Frenchman. But I told you I had loved Leonora with an ardent, demoniacal love, the fire of which had never yet burned out, and which was to burn, alas! long after all was consumed. Besides, I knew that Leonora, however recklessly she might have acted, was in reality not ignoble, but had probably in Rome been forced by a most fearful necessity to leave the man whom she had followed so far from love. I felt that now, if she was still alive, she must most assuredly be wretchedly unhappy.
"I reached Paris. The city was quite familiar to me, for I had already paid two visits there, in company with a few thousand armed friends. Moreover, I had provided myself in Naples with letters of introduction from the painter and several distinguished Italian and French gentlemen, whose acquaintance I had made there. A few inquiries confirmed at once the painter's original suspicion, that the marquis who had carried off Leonora from Rome was an adventurer. A marquis of that name did not exist, had never existed, at all events not in the Faubourg St. Germain. I had to continue my search in other less aristocratic quarters.
"A young Frenchman, an author, whose acquaintance I had made years ago, was my faithful companion in all my wanderings. He was a pleasant man, warmly attached to myself, and has ever since remained my best friend. I had, of course, told him the whole of my sad story; and he, who was far superior to me in knowledge of the world, and especially of that little world which makes up Paris, had first suggested to me to carry my investigations into the Quartier Latin, and other still more modest parts of the city. 'Paris,' said the Frenchman, 'is a place where men and things rarely preserve their original value long; they rise and fall in price with amazing rapidity. During a whole year the poor girl may have passed through very sad changes. If she has not committed suicide--and this is hardly probable, as she would probably have killed herself already in Rome, if she had had the courage to die--she has certainly sunk very low. I pray you prepare yourself for the very worst.'
"You may imagine how my heart bled when I heard these words, and felt how true they were likely to be. I felt like a man who is grappling in a lake for the body of his drowned child.
"One evening, as we were wandering about at haphazard through one of the most crowded suburbs, my companion surprised me by asking me: 'Did Leonora have any talent for dancing?' When I told him that she had always been perfect in that art, he said, 'We ought to have thought of that before. How strange that I never thought of asking you before.' He was so taken up with his new idea that he did not deign to answer when I inquired what the art of dancing had to do with our search. He hailed a cab; we went back into the city. We stopped at one of those dancing-halls which were then less brilliant, perhaps, but certainly not less crowded than nowadays. 'Look around, if you can see Leonora anywhere! We searched the whole establishment; Leonora was not there. 'Then let us go on.' We drove to another dancing-hall, and, when our search was here also fruitless, to a third, and a fourth. All in vain. I was so exhausted by the sad scenes I had witnessed, by the dust and the heat which filled these crowded rooms, by the efforts to find one certain person among so many, who were constantly changing from place to place, and by the excitement, the anxiety, and the very fear of finding what I was looking for, that I begged my companion to abandon the search, at least for to-night. 'Only one more locality,' he replied; 'I have on purpose left it for the last, because the probability of finding her there is strong enough, but also very painful.' 'How so?' 'The establishments which you have seen so far,' replied the Frenchman, 'are after a fashion quite respectable in spite of what is going on there. The visitors are beyond measure reckless, arrogant, frivolous, but after all not exactly vicious. They are students with their ladies, clerks with their grisettes, well-to-do mechanics who want to have a frolic, in company with their girls. The society into which I am now going to introduce you is far more elegant, but not quite so harmless. It is a house frequented mainly by wild young men of rank from the aristocratic quarters of the town, who seek here compensation for the dullness of their own saloons, and by foreigners who come to Paris to ruin their health and to waste their fortune. The fair sex is such as suits these people. You find here the most beautiful, but also the most corrupt of women, men-catchers, who drive to-day a four-in-hand, and die to-morrow in the hospital--mainly foreigners: Creoles, English, Italian, or German girls, who here find countrymen in numbers. Prepare yourself to look for her--I trust in vain--in this pandemonium.
"We reached the place. Broad marble steps led up. My heart beat violently; I could scarcely stand, for something within me told me that I had reached the goal of my wanderings; that the disfigured, swollen head of the dead body would the next moment rise from the black waters.
"We entered the brilliantly lighted hall. The orchestra played bacchantic music, and in bacchantic madness the dancers rushed by each other. The dazzling lights, the loud trumpets, the crowds, the heat, the narcotic fragrance of exotics, with which the room was adorned, and the fearful excitement under which I labored, took away my breath. I had to lean for a moment against a pillar, and closed my eyes in order to collect myself. As I was standing thus, faint and nearly falling, a voice fell upon my ear which stung me at the first note like an adder. The ear is a faithful monitor; it never in all this life forgets a voice whose notes have once been sweet and dear to it. It had not deceived me.
"Close before me, so close that I could have touched her with my hand, stood a girl, talking fast to a handsome young man; she was tall and slender, had large, brown eyes, which shone with feverish brightness, and a face far too sharply accented, too much worn out by life for so young a person, but nevertheless still very beautiful--and this girl was Leonora.
"Strange! when I had first heard her voice my heart had trembled as at the moment when I stood at night before the house in Fichtenau, and the old woman called down to me that Leonora had eloped. But after the first spasm I felt calm, quite calm. The chord had been stretched too far, it had broke; it now uttered not a sound of joy or of grief. I looked down upon Leonora as coldly as if she were a picture on the wall. I heard every word she said to her partner, as we hear words just before we are going to faint--as if they had been spoken at the other end of the hall. I examined her from head to foot, even her costume, with the calm criticism of an artist. I noticed that she was rouged, and that her dark eyebrows and lashes were dyed still darker. I noticed that she wore her hair exactly in the same manner in which I had myself once arranged it, after an antique, and as she had ever after worn it as long as I knew her. I heard everything, I saw everything, and yet I heard and saw nothing; for I had no clear perception of what I saw and heard.