Part 1

Alex Kirstukas

Transcriber's note: _Arsène Lupin: Gentleman-Cambrioleur_ is the first book in Maurice Leblanc's series "Les Aventures Extraordinaires d'Arsène Lupin." This eBook is based on the 1907 edition published in Paris by Pierre Lafitte & Cie. It was created from text and scans generously made available by Wikisource, Google Books, and the Internet Archive.

Note du transcripteur: _Arsène Lupin: Gentleman-Cambrioleur_ est le premier livre dans la série de Maurice Leblanc «Les Aventures Extraordinaires d'Arsène Lupin.» Ce eBook est basé sur l'édition éditée à Paris par Pierre Lafitte & Cie en 1907. Il a été créé du texte et des images généreusement rendues disponibles par Wikisource, Google Books, et l'Internet Archive.

ARSÈNE LUPIN

Gentleman-Cambrioleur

By Maurice Leblanc

Preface by Jules Claretie

of the French Academy

------

To Pierre LAFITTE.

My dear friend,

You set me upon a path where I did not think I should ever venture, and I found there such pleasure and literary delight that it seems right to inscribe your name at the head of this first volume, and to affirm here my feelings of affectionate and faithful gratitude.

M. L.

------

PREFACE

--Do tell us, you who tell tales so well, a story of thieves...

--Very well, said Voltaire (or another philosopher of the eighteenth century, for the anecdote is attributed to several of those incomparable conversationalists).

And he began:

--Once upon a time there was a farmer-general...

The author of the _Adventures of Arsène Lupin_, who also knows how to tell a tale so charmingly, would have begun quite differently:

--Once upon a time, there was a gentleman burglar...

And this paradoxical opening would have made his startled lady listeners prick up their ears. The adventures of Arsène Lupin, as incredible and engrossing as those of Arthur Gordon Pym, have done better. They have not merely interested a salon; they have enthralled the crowd. Since the day this astonishing character made his appearance in _Je sais tout_, he has frightened, charmed, and amused readers by the hundreds of thousands, and, in the new form of a book, he is to enter triumphantly into the library, after having conquered the magazine.

These tales of detectives and apaches of high life or of the street have always held a strange and powerful attraction. Balzac, upon leaving Mme de Morsauf, lived the dramatic existence of a police bloodhound. He left behind the lily of the valley for the runaway of the gutter. Victor Hugo invented Javert, hunting down Jean Valjean as the other "inspector" pursued Vautrin. And both of them thought of Vidocq, that strange lynx turned watch-dog, whose confidences the poet of the _Misérables_ and the novelist of Rubempré were able to gather. Later, and in a lesser order, Monsieur Lecoq had awakened the curiosity of the devotees of the legal novel, and M. de Bismarck and M. de Beust, those two adversaries, one fierce, the other witty, had found, before and after Sadowa, what divided them least: the narratives of Gaboriau.

Thus it comes about that a writer may meet upon his path a character whom he makes into a type and who, in turn, makes the literary fortune of his inventor. Happy is he who creates from whole cloth a being who will soon seem as alive as the living: Delobelle or Priola! The English novelist Conan Doyle popularized Sherlock Holmes. M. Maurice Leblanc has found, for his part, his Sherlock Holmes, and I do believe that since the exploits of the illustrious English detective, no adventure in the world has so keenly excited curiosity as the exploits of this _Arsène Lupin_, this succession of deeds now become a book.

The success of M. Leblanc's stories was, one may say, lightning-like in the monthly review where the reader, who once contented himself with the vulgar intrigues of the serial novel, goes to seek (a significant evolution) a literature that diverts him, but that remains nonetheless literature.

The author had made his debut, some dozen years ago, if I am not mistaken, in the former _Gil Blas_, where his original short stories, spare and powerful, placed him at once among the foremost of storytellers. A Norman, a Rouennais, the author was visibly of the good lineage of Flaubert, of Maupassant, of Albert Sorel (who was, he too, a _novellière_ in his hours). His first novel, _Une Femme_, was much remarked, and, since then, several psychological studies, _L'Oeuvre de Mort_, _Armelle et Claude_, _L'Enthousiasme_, a play in three acts, applauded at Antoine's, _La Pitié_, had come to be added to those little novels in two hundred lines in which M. Maurice Leblanc excels.

One must have a particular gift of imagination to find those dramas in brief, those rapid tales that enclose the very substance of whole volumes, just as certain masterly vignettes contain finished pictures. These rare qualities of invention were bound, one day, to find a larger frame, and the author of _Une Femme_ was soon to concentrate himself after having dispersed his talents across so many original stories.

It was then that he made the acquaintance of the delicious and unexpected Arsène Lupin.

We know the story of that eighteenth-century bandit who robbed people with ruffles, just as Buffon wrote his _Natural History_. Arsène Lupin is a little nephew of that scoundrel who both frightened and smiled upon the frightened and seduced marchionesses.

--You may compare, M. Marcel L'Heureux said to me as he brought me the proofs of his colleague's work and the issues where _Je sais tout_ illustrated the exploits of Arsène Lupin, you may compare Sherlock Holmes to Lupin and Maurice Leblanc to Conan Doyle. It is certain that the two writers have points of contact. Same power of narrative, same skill of plot, same science of mystery, same rigorous linking of facts, same economy of means. But what superiority in the choice of subjects, in the very quality of the drama! And note this tour de force: with Sherlock Holmes one finds oneself each time face to face with a new theft and a new crime; here, we know in advance that Arsène Lupin is the culprit; we know that, when we have untangled the entangled threads of the story, we shall find ourselves face to face with the famous gentleman-burglar! There was a reef there, certainly. It is avoided, it was even impossible to avoid it with more skill than Maurice Leblanc has done. By means that the most informed do not distinguish, he holds you in suspense until the outcome of each adventure. Until the last line one remains in uncertainty, curiosity, anguish, and the coup de théâtre is always unexpected, devastating, and troubling. In truth, Arsène Lupin is a type, an already legendary type, and one that will endure. A living figure, young, full of gaiety, of the unforeseen, of irony. Thief and burglar, swindler and rogue, whatever you will, but so sympathetic, this bandit! He acts with such pretty nonchalance! So much irony, so much charm, and so much wit! He is a dilettante. He is an artist! Mark it well: Arsène Lupin does not steal; he amuses himself by stealing. He chooses. If need be, he returns. He is noble and charming, chivalrous, delicate, and I repeat, so sympathetic, that all he does seems just, and that one cannot help but hope for the success of his enterprises, that one rejoices in it, and that morality itself seems to be on his side. All this, I repeat, because Lupin is the creation of an artist, and because in composing a book where he gave free rein to his imagination, Maurice Leblanc did not forget that he was above all, and in every sense of the term, a writer!"

Thus spoke M. Marcel L'Heureux, so good a judge in such matters and who knows the value of a novel for having written such remarkable ones. And here I am of his opinion after having read these ironically amusing pages, not at all amoral despite the paradox that lends such seduction to the gentleman who robs his contemporaries. Certainly I would not award a Montyon prize to this most seductive Lupin. But would one have crowned for his virtue the Fra Diavolo who charmed our grandmothers at the Opéra-Comique, in the distant time when the symbols of _Ariane and Blue Beard_ were not yet invented?

_See him advance_ _The red plume upon his hat..._

Arsène Lupin is a Fra Diavolo armed not with a blunderbuss, but with a revolver, clad not in a romantic velvet jacket, but in a correctly cut smoking jacket, and I wish him the more than centennial success of the irresistible brigand whom M. Auber made sing.

But what! there is nothing to wish for Arsène Lupin. He has entered living into popularity. And the vogue that the magazine began so well, the book is to continue.

Jules CLARETIE.

------

THE ARREST OF ARSÈNE LUPIN

The strange voyage! And yet it had begun so well! For my part, I never made one that announced itself under happier auspices. The _Provence_ is a swift transatlantic liner, comfortable, commanded by the most affable of men. The most select society was gathered there. Acquaintances were formed, entertainments organized. We had that exquisite impression of being cut off from the world, reduced to ourselves as upon an unknown island, obliged, consequently, to draw closer to one another.

And we drew closer...

Have you ever reflected upon what is original and unforeseen in this assembling of beings who, only the day before, did not know one another, and who, for a few days, between the infinite sky and the immense sea, shall live the most intimate of lives, together shall defy the wrath of the Ocean, the terrifying assault of the waves, the malice of storms and the sneaking calm of the sleeping water?

It is, in essence, lived in a sort of tragic abbreviation, life itself, with its storms and its grandeurs, its monotony and its diversity, and that is perhaps why one savors with a feverish haste and an all the more intense voluptuousness this brief voyage whose end one perceives at the very moment it begins.

But, for several years, something has been happening that singularly adds to the emotions of the crossing. The little floating island still depends upon that world from which one believed oneself emancipated. A link remains, which unties only little by little in mid-Ocean, and little by little, in mid-Ocean, ties itself again. Wireless telegraphy! a call from another universe whence one would receive news in the most mysterious fashion possible! The imagination no longer has the recourse of evoking wires of iron in whose hollow the invisible message glides. The mystery is yet more unfathomable, more poetic too, and it is to the wings of the wind that one must have recourse to explain this new miracle.

Thus, in the first hours, we felt ourselves followed, escorted, even preceded by that distant voice, which, from time to time, whispered to one of us a few words from over there. Two friends spoke to me. Ten others, twenty others sent to all of us, across space, their saddened or smiling farewells.

Now, on the second day, at five hundred miles from the French coast, on a stormy afternoon, the wireless transmitted to us a dispatch of which here is the tenor:

"_Arsène Lupin on board your vessel, first class, blond hair, wound on right forearm, traveling alone, under the name of R..._"

At that precise moment, a violent clap of thunder burst in the dark sky. The electric waves were interrupted. The rest of the dispatch did not reach us. Of the name under which Arsène Lupin hid, only the initial was known.

Had it been a matter of any other news, I do not doubt that the secret would have been scrupulously kept by the employees of the telegraph station, as well as by the ship's commissioner and by the captain. But there are events that seem to force the most rigorous discretion. That same day, without one being able to say how the thing had leaked out, we all knew that the famous Arsène Lupin was hiding among us.

Arsène Lupin among us! the elusive burglar whose exploits they had been relating in all the newspapers for months! the enigmatic character with whom old Ganimard, our best policeman, had engaged that duel to the death whose episodes unfolded in so picturesque a fashion! Arsène Lupin, the whimsical gentleman who operates only in castles and salons, and who, one night, having penetrated into Baron Schormann's house, had departed empty-handed and left his card, adorned with this formula: "Arsène Lupin, gentleman-burglar, will return when the furniture is authentic". Arsène Lupin, the man of a thousand disguises: turn by turn chauffeur, tenor, bookmaker, scion of family, adolescent, old man, Marseillais traveling salesman, Russian doctor, Spanish torero!

Let one clearly realize this: Arsène Lupin going and coming in the relatively restricted frame of a transatlantic liner, what am I saying! in that little corner of the first class where one met at every instant, in that dining room, in that salon, in that smoking room! Arsène Lupin, it was perhaps that gentleman... or that one... my table neighbor... my cabin companion...

--And this is to last another five times twenty-four hours! cried the next day miss Nelly Underdown, but it is intolerable! I hope indeed that they will arrest him.

And addressing herself to me:

--Come now, you, Monsieur d'Andrézy, who are already on the best of terms with the captain, you know nothing?

I should have liked to know something to please miss Nelly! She was one of those magnificent creatures who, wherever they are, at once occupy the most conspicuous place. Their beauty no less than their fortune dazzles. They have a court, devotees, enthusiasts.

Raised in Paris by a French mother, she was rejoining her father, the very rich Underdown, of Chicago. One of her friends, lady Jerland, accompanied her.

From the first hour, I had put forward my candidacy as flirt. But, in the rapid intimacy of the voyage, right away her charm had troubled me, and I felt a little too moved for a flirt when her great black eyes met mine. However, she received my homages with a certain favor. She deigned to laugh at my witticisms and interest herself in my anecdotes. A vague sympathy seemed to answer the attentiveness I showed her.

A single rival perhaps would have worried me, a rather handsome fellow, elegant, reserved, whose taciturn humor she sometimes seemed to prefer to my more "outgoing" ways as a Parisian.

He happened to be part of the group of admirers surrounding miss Nelly, when she questioned me. We were on deck, agreeably installed in rocking-chairs. The storm of the previous day had cleared the sky. The hour was delicious.

--I know nothing precise, mademoiselle, I answered her, but is it impossible to conduct our own inquiry ourselves, just as well as old Ganimard, the personal enemy of Arsène Lupin, would do?

--Oh! oh! you are going rather far!

--In what way? Is the problem so complicated?

--Very complicated.

--That is because you forget the elements we have to solve it.

--What elements?

--1° Lupin calls himself Monsieur R...

--A rather vague description.

--2° He is traveling alone.

--If that particularity suffices you!

--3° He is blond.

--And then?

--Then we have only to consult the list of passengers and proceed by elimination.

I had that list in my pocket. I took it and ran through it.

--I note first that there are only thirteen persons whose initial draws our attention.

--Only thirteen?

--In first class, yes. Of these thirteen gentlemen R..., as you may verify, nine are accompanied by women, children, or servants. There remain four isolated persons: the Marquis de Raverdan...

--Embassy secretary, interrupted miss Nelly, I know him.

--Major Rawson...

--He is my uncle, said someone.

--M. Rivolta...

--Present, cried one of us, an Italian whose face disappeared beneath a beard of the finest black.

Miss Nelly burst out laughing.

--The gentleman is not precisely blond.

--Then, I resumed, we are obliged to conclude that the culprit is the last on the list.

--That is to say?

--That is to say, M. Rozaine. Does anyone know M. Rozaine?

They fell silent. But miss Nelly, interpellating the taciturn young man whose assiduity near her tormented me, said to him:

--Well, Monsieur Rozaine, you do not answer?

We turned our eyes toward him. He was blond.

Let us admit it, I felt a little shock within me. And the embarrassed silence that weighed upon us indicated to me that the other bystanders also experienced that sort of suffocation. It was absurd besides, for after all nothing in this gentleman's bearing permitted one to suspect him.

--Why do I not answer? he said, but because, given my name, my quality as a solitary traveler and the color of my hair, I have already conducted a similar inquiry, and have arrived at the same result. I am therefore of the opinion that I be arrested.

He had a queer air, in pronouncing these words. His thin lips like two inflexible lines grew thinner still and paled. Little threads of blood streaked his eyes.

Certainly, he was joking. Yet his physiognomy, his attitude impressed us. Naively, miss Nelly asked:

--But you have no wound?

--It is true, he said, the wound is lacking.

With a nervous gesture he rolled up his cuff and uncovered his arm. But at once an idea struck me. My eyes met those of miss Nelly: he had shown the left arm.

And faith, I was about to make the remark plainly, when an incident diverted our attention. Lady Jerland, miss Nelly's friend, arrived running.

She was distraught. They crowded around her, and it was only after much effort that she managed to stammer:

--My jewels, my pearls!... they have taken everything!...

No, they had not taken everything, as we learned afterward; something much more curious: they had chosen!

From the diamond star, the pendant in ruby cabochons, the necklaces and broken bracelets, they had removed, not the largest stones, but the finest, the most precious, those, one would have said, that had the most value while taking up the least space. The settings lay there, on the table. I saw them, we all saw them, stripped of their gems like flowers whose beautiful sparkling and colored petals one had plucked.

And to execute this work, it had been necessary, during the hour when lady Jerland was taking tea, it had been necessary, in broad daylight, and in a frequented corridor, to force the door of the cabin, to find a little bag purposely hidden at the bottom of a hatbox, to open it and to choose!

There was but one cry among us. There was but one opinion among all the passengers, when the theft was known: it is Arsène Lupin. And in fact, it was indeed his complicated, mysterious, inconceivable manner... and yet logical, for if it was difficult to conceal the encumbering mass that the whole of the jewels would have formed, how much less the embarrassment with small things independent of one another, pearls, emeralds and sapphires.

And at dinner, this happened: to the right and left of Rozaine, the two places remained empty. And in the evening it was known that he had been summoned by the captain.

His arrest, which no one doubted, caused a veritable relief. One breathed at last. That evening they played parlor games. They danced. Miss Nelly, especially, showed a dizzying gaiety that made me see that, if Rozaine's homages had been agreeable to her at the start, she scarcely remembered them. Her grace finished conquering me. Toward midnight, in the serene light of the moon, I affirmed to her my devotion with an emotion that did not seem to displease her.

But the next day, to general stupefaction, it was learned that, the charges against him not being sufficient, Rozaine was free.

Son of a considerable merchant of Bordeaux, he had exhibited perfectly in-order papers. Moreover, his arms offered not the slightest trace of a wound.

--Papers! birth certificates! cried the enemies of Rozaine, but Arsène Lupin will furnish you as many as you wish! As for the wound, it is that he did not receive one... or that he erased the trace of it!

They were objected that at the hour of the theft, Rozaine--it was demonstrated--was walking on deck. To which they retorted:

--Does a man of Arsène Lupin's stature need to be present at the theft he commits?

And then, apart from any extraneous consideration, there was a point on which the most skeptical could not quibble: Who, save Rozaine, was traveling alone, was blond, and bore a name beginning with R? Whom did the telegram designate, if not Rozaine?

And when Rozaine, a few minutes before luncheon, directed himself audaciously toward our group, miss Nelly and lady Jerland rose and moved away.

It was plainly fear.

An hour later, a handwritten circular passed from hand to hand among the ship's employees, the sailors, the travelers of all classes: M. Louis Rozaine promised a sum of ten thousand francs to whoever unmasked Arsène Lupin, or found the possessor of the stolen stones.

--And if no one comes to my aid against this bandit, declared Rozaine to the captain, I myself will settle his hash.

Rozaine against Arsène Lupin, or rather, according to the word that went around, Arsène Lupin himself against Arsène Lupin, the struggle was not lacking in interest!

It prolonged itself over two days. One saw Rozaine wander from right to left, mix with the crew, question, pry. His shadow was glimpsed, at night, prowling.

For his part, the captain deployed the most active energy. From top to bottom, in every corner, the _Provence_ was searched. They rummaged in all the cabins, without exception, under the perfectly just pretext that the objects were hidden in any place whatsoever, save in the cabin of the culprit.

--We shall end up discovering something, shall we not? miss Nelly asked me. Sorcerer though he be, he cannot make diamonds and pearls become invisible.

--But yes, I answered her, or then one would have to explore the lining of our hats, the padding of our jackets, and all that we carry on us.

And showing her my kodak, a 9 X 12 with which I never tired of photographing her in the most diverse attitudes:

--Merely in an apparatus no larger than this one, do you not think there would be room for all lady Jerland's precious stones. One affects to take views and the trick is done.

--But yet I have heard it said that there is no thief who does not leave behind him some indication.

--There is one: Arsène Lupin.

--Why?

--Why? because he thinks not only of the theft he commits, but of all the circumstances that could denounce him.

--At the beginning you were more confident.

--But, since then, I have seen him at work.

--And then, according to you?

--According to me, one loses one's time.

And in fact, the investigations gave no result, or at least, that which they gave did not correspond to the general effort: the captain's watch was stolen from him.

Furious, he redoubled his ardor and watched Rozaine even more closely, with whom he had had several interviews. The next day, charming irony, the watch was found among the second captain's false collars.

All this had an air of prodigy, and betrayed well the humorous manner of Arsène Lupin, burglar, granted, but also dilettante. He worked from taste and vocation, certainly, but also for amusement. He gave the impression of the gentleman who diverts himself at the play he has staged, and who, in the wings, laughs at the top of his lungs at his witty strokes and the situations he has imagined.

Decidedly, he was an artist in his way, and when I observed Rozaine, gloomy and obstinate, and thought of the double role that this curious personage no doubt played, I could not speak of it without a certain admiration.

Now, the next-to-last night, the officer of the watch heard groans at the most obscure spot on deck. He approached. A man was stretched out, his head wrapped in a very thick gray scarf, his wrists tied with a fine cord.

They freed him from his bonds. They raised him, care was lavished upon him.

This man was Rozaine.

This was Rozaine assailed in the course of one of his expeditions, overthrown and stripped. A visiting card fixed by a pin to his clothing bore these words: "Arsène Lupin accepts with gratitude the ten thousand francs of M. Rozaine."

In reality, the stolen wallet contained twenty thousand-franc notes.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”