From the first chapter: IN WHICH, PERHAPS, EVERYTHING WHICH IS TO FOLLOW DEPENDS UPON A LETTER FROM THE ARTIST ALBERT LEBOURG I WAS born at la Varenne-Saint-Hilaire, on the 17th of June of I don't know what year. It was on a 17th of a month I no longer remember that the civil court pronounced the divorce between Maxime Aubry, artist, and Pauline Mutel, his wife. It was again upon a 17th, the 17th of October, 1907, that I was found murdered by an unknown hand, in the city of Dieppe, at the end of the Quay Henri IV. And once more, by a providential chance, it was on the 17th of last month that I again gave my name to Pauline Mutel, my divorced wife! Superstitious minds are at liberty to assign to this fateful number 17 an importance in the occurrences which I do not recognise! I shall have enough to do in explaining the extraordinary incidents with which I have been mixed up, without adding to them any useless mystery. In fact, my divorce and my second marriage are connected with the terrible story only as incidental circumstances which, to a certain degree, are independent of it. Nevertheless, it is plausible to suppose that, but for it, the mysterious affair of the van Brymans brothers would never have happened, or, if so, it would not have been in the same way. Nor is it rash to add that, but for the van Brymans affair, I should probably never have been led to marry a second time my first wife, Pauline Mutel. Moreover, it is easy to make a calculation whose solution we possess. People do it generally and stupidly for the most trivial actions in life. We say: "I lost an opportunity today which I shall not recover, the chance of going to such a place, of transacting that business; and this merely because the doctor ordered me to stay in my room. I was forced to keep my room, because I caught cold three days before while loitering at the corner of the Rue La Boetie, for instance, watching some trifling accident-an auto which had run into the front of a pastry-cook's shop-when it was bitterly cold, with a wind blowing keen enough to cut one in two! Now, if the auto had not dashed so noisily into the front of the shop, I should not have delayed at the corner of the Rue La Boetie, -etc., etc. So we reach the conclusion, unreasonably, that, if autos 1iad not been invented, we should not have to stay in our rooms, by order of the Faculty. And again . . . the series of consequences! Evidently, all this is very specious. It is less so to refer the whole to chance and bow before bronchitis. And, above all, it is more logical to look after the disease when in its grasp than to discuss endlessly the conditions under which you caught it! In the same way I might say that the terrible adventure which befell me began with the friendly letter from the landscape artist, Albert Lebourg, which would be very nearly veracious -for I am not absolutely sure that it might not have occurred in any case. However, let us take the matter from the commencement or, more precisely, from the distance, and satisfy ourselves with explaining the facts. Facts, I have every reason to believe, will speak better than I could do. Oh, zounds! If I were a writer, I would plunge at once into the terrible portion! But I am only an artist-and so far as the horror of the story is concerned, whether I desire it or not, the reader will lose nothing by waiting!...."