In particular, it was a topic for all occasions, one that abolished the invisible frontier between upper town and lower town, between groups that hitherto had no contact with one another, and worked wonders in bringing strangers together. This whole verbal ferment was, in truth, based on few material facts. Thanks to the "no secrets" of small towns it was learned that the search of Golets's home had only brought to light a pistol with a single cartridge in the magazine, a collection of bow ties (some people mistakenly reported this as a collection of bows and arrows), and brief notes written on scraps of paper recording someone's visits to Paris. As for the Princess Ar-byelina, no one had ever seen her in the company of this man. One witness, it is true, had seen them going together into the long shooting gallery, a kind of fairground booth in the big park in the upper town. But this visit, objected others, had only taken place shortly before the boat trip. Suddenly, within the space of a few hours, their adventure had become possible. What action, what word (coming from the man? from the woman?) had made it so?

The alleged rendezvous at the shooting gallery; the collection of bow ties that was so out of keeping with the image of a senior citizen tending his garden; the few rare visits made by a mysterious "Parisian friend" to the heroine of the tragedy: these meager details proved sufficient to unleash an endless avalanche of theories, hypotheses, and conjectures, to which were added some scraps that the preliminary investigation had apparently allowed to filter through. An excited, unquenchable chorus of voices combined in a wild round of truths, fabrications, and absurdities such as can only be trotted out in the course of the verbal orgy that follows a sensational crime in a provincial town.

During those summer months everyone at Villiers-la-Forêt tried out the roles of storyteller and sleuth.