After giving the alarm to the men of his section and sending to inform the chaplain and the surgeons, Paul resolved to ask for a private interview with his colonel and to tell him the whole of the secret story, hoping that it might throw some light on the execution of Élisabeth and the assassination of the two soldiers. But he learnt that the colonel and his regiment were fighting on the other side of the frontier and that the 3rd Company had been hurriedly sent for, all but a detachment which was to remain at the château under Sergeant Delroze's orders. Paul therefore made his own investigation with his men.
It yielded nothing. There was no possibility of discovering the least clue to the manner in which the murderer had made his way first into the park, next into the ruins and lastly into the bedroom. As no civilian had passed, were they to conclude that the perpetrator of the two crimes was one of the privates of the 3rd company? Obviously not. And yet what other theory was there to adopt?
Nor did Paul discover anything to tell him of his wife's death or of the place where she was buried. And this was the hardest trial of all.
He encountered the same ignorance among the German wounded as among the prisoners. They had all heard of the execution of a man and two women, but they had all arrived after the execution and after the departure of the troops that occupied the château.
He went on to the village, thinking that they might know something there; that the inhabitants had some news to tell of the lady of the château, of the life she led, of her martyrdom and death. But Ornequin was empty, with not a woman even, not an old man left in it. The enemy must have sent all the inhabitants into Germany, doubtless from the start, with the manifest object of destroying every witness to his actions during the occupation and of creating a desert around the château.
Paul in this way devoted three days to the pursuit of fruitless inquiries.
"And yet," he said to Bernard, "Élisabeth cannot have disappeared entirely. Even if I cannot find her grave, can I not find the least trace of her existence? She lived here. She suffered here. I would give anything for a relic of her."
They had succeeded in fixing upon the exact site of the room in which she used to sleep and even, in the midst of the ruins, the exact heap of stones and plaster that remained of it. It was all mixed up with the wreckage of the ground-floor rooms, into which the first-floor ceilings had been precipitated; and it was in this chaos, under the pile of walls and furniture reduced to dust and fragments, that one morning he picked up a little broken mirror, followed by a tortoise-shell hair-brush, a silver pen-knife and a set of scissors, all of which had belonged to Élisabeth.