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gentleman I was with last night?’ I asked. ‘Did anybody see him go out this morning?’
    ‘You were alone when you took the room yesterday evening, Monsieur,’ replied the man. ‘Whether you were alone when you returned later in the evening I couldn’t say. We are discreet here, we never question our clientele.’
    Beneath the obsequious tone I caught the note of familiarity, of contempt. The chauffeur was staring at the floor. I saw the hotel clerk or
patron
glance at my tumbled bed, and from the bed to the brandy-flask on the washstand.
    ‘I must get on to the police,’ I said.
    The man looked startled. ‘You have been robbed, Monsieur?’ he asked.
    The chauffeur raised his eyes from the floor, and, still clutching his cap in his hand, came and stood beside me, as though to protect me.
    ‘It would be better not to have any trouble, Monsieur le Comte,’ he said in a low voice. ‘These things are not very pleasant. In an hour or two you will be feeling more like yourself. Let me help you to dress, and then we will drive home as quickly as possible. Any argument in a place like this might be awkward, you know that very well.’
    Suddenly I became angry. I thought what a fool I must look, sitting on the bed in that sordid little room, wearing a pair of pyjamas that was not my own, my identity mistaken as if it were a music-hall farce, the victim of a practical joke that was no doubt funny to my late companion but was certainly not to me. All right. If he wished to make an idiot of me, I would do the same to him. I would put on his clothes, and drive his car to hell – as he was no doubt driving mine – and have myself arrested, and then wait for him to turn up and explain his senseless action as best he could.
    ‘Very well. Clear out and leave me,’ I said to the chauffeur. He went, and the hotel-keeper with him, and with a strange distaste and fury mingled I reached for the vest and pants and began to dress.
    When I was ready, and had shaved with his tackle and brushed my hair with his brushes, my reflection stared back at me from the mirror with a strange indefinable difference. My own self had become submerged. It
was
the man who called himself Jean de Gué who stood there now, just as I had seen him last night for the first time when he brushed against my shoulder in the station buffet. The change of clothes had brought a change of personality: my shoulders looked broader, I seemed to hold my head higher, even the expression in my eyes resembled his. Iforced a smile, and the reflection in the mirror smiled back at me, a casual half-laugh that somehow went with the square padded shoulders of the coat and the bow tie so unlike any tie I had ever worn. Slowly I took his wallet and counted the notes. He had about twenty thousand francs, and some loose change that had been lying on the dressing-table. I searched the wallet carefully in case he had left a word of explanation, some scrawl admitting the joke that he had played upon me. There was nothing, no word, no clue to prove that he had ever been in the room, ever come to the hotel.
    My anger grew. I foresaw the string of explanations that was going to be forced upon me – the rambling, disjointed story to the police, their bored reluctance to come with me to the station buffet and the bistro where we had dined the night before, and to hear confirmation of my evidence that two of us, identical in appearance, had been together there. How he must be laughing at me now, Jean de Gué, with nearly a whole day gone, at the wheel of my car, driving north, east, south, or west, anywhere he pleased, with twenty-five pounds of travellers’ cheques still uncashed and what other money I had, wearing my clothes, perhaps even sitting at some café reading my lecture notes, that look of lazy amusement on his face. He was free to enjoy his joke, to go where he pleased and return when the joke palled; while I sat in a police station or a consulate, trying to make the