He stood up, bewildered.

“What!—­how?  Impossible!”

They looked among the folds of her skirt, of her cloak, in her pockets, everywhere, but did not find it.

“You’re sure you had it on when you left the ball?” he asked.

“Yes, I felt it in the vestibule of the minister’s house.”

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

“Yes, probably.  Did you take his number?”

“No.  And you—­didn’t you notice it?”

“No.”

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

“I shall go back on foot,” said he, “over the whole route, to see whether I can find it.”

He went out.  She sat waiting on a chair in her ball dress, without strength to go to bed, overwhelmed, without any fire, without a thought.

Her husband returned 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 spark 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.  Loisel, who had aged five years, declared: 

“We must consider how to replace that ornament.”

The next day they took the box that had contained it and 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, trying to recall it, both sick with chagrin and grief.

They found, in a shop at the Palais Royal, a string of diamonds that seemed to them exactly like the one they had lost.  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 should find the lost necklace 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 signing a note without even knowing whether he could meet it; and, frightened by the trouble yet to come, by the black misery that was about to fall upon him, by the prospect of all the physical privations and moral tortures that he was to suffer, he went to get the new necklace, laying upon the jeweler’s counter thirty-six thousand francs.