“I have—­I have—­I no longer have Madame Forestier’s necklace.”

He stood up, distracted.

“What!—­how!—­it is impossible!”

They looked in the folds of her dress, in the folds of her cloak, in the pockets, everywhere.  They could not find a trace of it.

He asked: 

“You are sure you still had it when you left the ball?”

“Yes.  I felt it on me in the vestibule at the palace.”

“But if you had lost it in the street we should have heard it fall.  It must be in the cab.”

“Yes.  That’s probable.  Did you take the number?”

“No.  And you, you did not notice it?”

“No.”

They looked at each other thunderstruck.  At last Loisel put on his clothes again.

“I am going back,” said he, “over every foot of the way we came, to see if I cannot find it.”

So he started.  She remained in her ball dress without strength to go to bed, sitting on a chair, with no fire, her mind a blank.

Her husband returned about seven o’clock.  He had found nothing.

He went to police headquarters, to the newspapers to offer a reward, to the cab companies, everywhere, in short, where a trace of hope led him.

She watched all day, in the same state of blank despair before this frightful disaster.

Loisel returned in the evening with cheeks hollow and pale; he had found nothing.

“You must write to your friend,” said he, “that you have broken the clasp of her necklace and that you are having it repaired.  It will give us time to turn around.”

She wrote as he dictated.

* * * * *

At the end of a week they had lost all hope.

And Loisel, looking five years older, declared: 

“We must consider how to replace the necklace.”

The next day they took the box which had contained it, and went to the place of the jeweller whose name they found inside.  He consulted his books.

“It was not I, madame, who sold the necklace; I must simply have furnished the casket.”

Then they went from jeweller to jeweller, looking for an ornament like the other, consulting their memories, both sick with grief and anguish.

They found, in a shop at the Palais Royal, a string of diamonds which seemed to them exactly what they were looking for.  It was worth forty thousand francs.[*] They could have it for thirty-six thousand.

[* A franc is equal to twenty cents of our money.]

So they begged the jeweller not to sell it for three days.  And they made an arrangement that he should take it back for thirty-four thousand francs if the other were found before the end of February.

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