"Which of you, messieurs, is named Andurillo de' Pseudonimi?" he inquired.
A cry of stupor erupted from the crowd. "But who, then, is Andurillo de' Pseudonimi?" asked Sacqueville-Danglars almost alarmed.
"A former convict escaped from the prison of l'Archet," said the officer in a voice devoid of emotion. "He stands accused of murdering the one named Buttrebeurrousse, his former companion in prison, at the moment when the latter left the palace of the Count of Monte Fato."
Andurillo had disappeared. All that was ever seen of him again in the hotel was an elegantly handwritten note pinned to a marble statue of a hobbite wearing a toga. The note read: I have been kidnapped and brought away on this idiotic voyage without my consent, and it is hardly my business to get you out of your scrape.
The vast hotel was depopulated with a rapidity like that which the announcement of a plague or an invasion of dragons or a reading of the poetry of Bombadile would have occasioned: in a few minutes, through all the doors, windows, chimneys, stairways, everyone had hastened to retreat, or rather to flee. In their headlong rush, Marquis Jean-Joseph Six-pacques Anguille-Bouillabaisse and Count Générix de Blas-Blablât, whose words were considered canon by the fashionable monde, pronounced it a scandal worse than the mésalliances of Rhyx-Davies de Faux-dwargue-sans-Esprit d'Umb in the feuilletons of Pierre-Jacques.
