Gaston Leroux

The Man with the Black Feather Gaston Leroux

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912 edition. Excerpt: ... chapter xxiv the solution in the catacombs "When one comes to oneself in the depth of the Catacombs," says Commissary Mifroid in the admirable report of the matter which he drew up, "the first thought which steals into one's mind is a fearful one: the fear of being old-fashioned. I mean by that a sudden anxiety lest one should find oneself reproducing all the ridiculous behaviour of which writers of romance and melodrama never fail to make their unfortunate heroes guilty when they find themselves immured in caves, grottoes, excavations, caverns, or tombs. "At the moment of my fall, even while I was so rapidly covering the space which separated me from the soil of the Catacombs, my presence of mind did not forsake me. I was aware that I was falling into those thousandyear-old subways which interlace their innumerable and capricious windings under the soil of Paris. The next thing I was aware of was a slight and painful numbness which followed my recovery from the insensibility into which I had been plunged by the inevitable shock. I was, then, in the Catacombs. At once I said to myself, 'Above all things I must not be old-fashioned.' "It would have been old-fashioned, for example, to utter cries of despair, to appeal to Providence, or to strike my brow against the wall of the passage. It would have been oldfashioned to find at the bottom of my pocket a bar of chocolate and at once divide it into eight pieces which would have represented assured sustenance for eight days. It would have been equally old-fashioned to find a candle-end in my pocket--a place in which no rational human being ever keeps candle-ends--and five or six matches, and so create the harrowing problem whether one ought to let the candle burn once it was lighted, or blow...