On November 22, 1922 Elizabeth Hadley Richardson Hemingway boarded a train at the Gare de Lyon in Paris to join her husband Ernest, then a correspondent for the Toronto Star, in Lausanne, Switzerland. Hadley put her bags up and then left the train for just the time it took her to buy a bottle of water for the trip. When she returned one of her luggage was gone.

Hadley had thought to take Ernest's fictional writing with her so that he could continue on his earliest stories. He was unpublished yet. She had packed the manuscripts in a small valise. She had packed all the copies, including the carbons. It was the valise that was stolen.

She met Hemingway overwrought. He comforted her before she could get out what had happened. When she got it out, when she told him, Hadley's worst nightmare was realized before her eyes. Hemingway did not comfort her. He got on the next train back to Paris to search their flat, unable to believe that it all was gone (including the carbons).

Hemingway wrote of this holocaust in A Moveable Feast. Decades later, living out retirement in Florida, Hadley Richardson Mowrer was interviewed on her life with Hemingway for The Hemingway Project. Hadley was chipper, chatty, witty, upbeat in the interview. Then the interviewer asked about the stolen valise at the Gare de Lyon. Decades later, you can hear the pain come back in Hadley's voice. Her manner of speaking changes completely.
http://www.thehemingwayproject.com/hadley-talks-about-the-lost-manuscripts/

Image: Hadley, Ernest, Chamby Switzerland, Winter 1922. JFKlibrary.