The Confessions of Arsène Lupin Read online

  The Confessions of Arsène Lupin

  Maurice Leblanc

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  INTRODUCTION

  Maurice Leblanc

  IF MAURICE LEBLANC (1864–1941) had done nothing except create Arsène Lupin—the rogue who has been wildly popular in France for more than a century—his place in the pantheon of French literature would still have been assured.

  Born in Rouen, he was educated in France; Berlin, Germany; and Manchester, England, and studied law before becoming a hack writer and police reporter for French periodicals. His sister Georgette—a famous actress and singer—was the mistress of Maurice Maeterlinck, the noted dramatist, and it is possible that this relationship influenced Leblanc’s work; some critics claim that his plays are his most polished literary productions.

  In 1906 Leblanc’s previously undistinguished career skyrocketed when he was asked to write a short story for a new journal and produced the first Lupin adventure. His subsequent success and worldwide fame culminated in his induction into the French Legion of Honor.

  Reading his fiction today, one is generally impressed with the fast pace and diversified action, although it borders on burlesque, and the incredible situations and coincidences may be a little difficult to accept.

  Arsène Lupin

  Unlike Fantômas, the other great criminal in French literature, Arsène Lupin is not violent or evil; his unlawful acts center on theft and clever cons rather than murder or anarchy.

  A brilliant rogue, he pursues his career with carefree élan, mocking the law for the sheer joy of it rather than for purely personal gain. Young, handsome, brave, and quick-witted, he has a joie de vivre uniquely and recognizably French. His sense of humor and conceit make life difficult for the police, who attribute most of the major crimes in France to him and his gang of ruffians and urchins.

  Like most French criminals and detectives, Lupin is a master of disguise. His skill is attested to by the fact that he once became Lenormand, chief of the Sûreté, and, for four years, conducted official investigations into his own activities. He employs numerous aliases, including Jim Barnett, Prince Renine, le Duc de Charmerace, Don Luis Perenna, and Ralph de Limezy; his myriad names, combined with his brilliant costumes, make it nearly impossible for the police to identify him (the reader of his exploits sometimes encounters a similar difficulty).

  After a long criminal career of uninterrupted successes, Lupin begins to shift position and aids the police in their work—usually for his own purposes and without their knowledge. Toward the end of his career, he becomes a full-fledged detective, and although he is as successful in his endeavors as ever before, his heart does not seem to be in it.

  The first book about him is Arsène Lupin, gentleman-cambrioleur (1907; US title: The Exploits of Arsène Lupin, 1907; reissued as The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar, 1910; British title: The Seven of Hearts, 1908). One of the stories, “Holmlock Shears Arrives Too Late,” is a parody of Sherlock Holmes. The second book in the series, and the worst, is Arsène Lupin contre Herlock Sholmes (1908; British title: The Fair-haired Lady, 1909; reissued as Arsène Lupin versus Holmlock Shears, 1909; reissued again as The Arrest of Arsène Lupin, 1911; US title: The Blonde Lady, 1910; reissued as Arsène Lupin versus Herlock Sholmes, 1910). Other short story collections about Lupin are The Confessions of Arsène Lupin (1912), The Eight Strokes of the Clock (1922), and Jim Barnett Intervenes (1928; US title: Arsène Lupin Intervenes). Among the best of the novels are 813 (1910), in which Lupin, accused of murder, heads the police investigation to clear himself by finding the true killer, and The Hollow Needle (1910), in which Lupin is shot by a beautiful girl and falls in love with her, vowing to give up his life of crime. Among the other Lupin novels are The Crystal Stopper (1913), The Teeth of the Tiger (1914), The Golden Triangle (1917), and The Memoirs of Arsène Lupin (1925; British title: The Candlesticks with Seven Branches).

  Films

  There are many early screen versions of Arsène Lupin’s basic conflicts with the Paris police, both in the United States, starting in 1917, and in Europe. The Teeth of the Tiger (Paramount, with David Powell) of 1919 is an old-dark-horse murder melodrama with sliding panels, secret passageways, and serial-like thrills. Wedgewood Nowell portrays Lupin in 813 (Robertson-Cole, 1920), in which Lupin impersonates a police officer to clear himself of a murder charge. There are several later European Lupins, notably French, in films even until the 1950s. The most important American Lupin films are given below.

  Arsène Lupin. MGM, 1932. John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Karen Morley, John Miljan. Directed by Jack Conway. Based on the play by Leblanc and Francis de Croisset. When the silk-hatted Lupin announces that he will steal a famous painting from the Louvre under the nose of the police, and does so, the chief of detectives uses a pretty lady crook to lure him into a trap.

  Arsène Lupin Returns. MGM, 1938. Melvyn Douglas, Warren William, Virginia Bruce, Monty Woolley, E. E. Clive. Directed by George Fitzmaurice. The signature of Arsène Lupin, long thought dead, is scrawled across a safe from which a necklace has been stolen; the real Lupin, innocent and now living as a country gentleman, is as perplexed as the police are.

  Enter Arsène Lupin. Universal, 1944. Charles Korvin, Ella Raines, J. Carrol Naish, Gale Sondergaard, Miles Mander. Directed by Ford Beebe. International thief Lupin, on a train from Istanbul to Paris, steals an emerald from a young heiress but returns it when he begins to suspect that the girl’s aunt and uncle plan to murder her.

  I. TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND FRANCS REWARD! …

  “Lupin,” I said, “tell me something about yourself.”

  “Why, what would you have me tell you? Everybody knows my life!” replied Lupin, who lay drowsing on the sofa in my study.

  “Nobody knows it!” I protested. “People know from your letters in the newspapers that you were mixed up in this case, that you started that case. But the part which you played in it all, the plain facts of the story, the upshot of the mystery: these are things of which they know nothing.”

  “Pooh! A heap of uninteresting twaddle!”

  “What! Your present of fifty thousand francs to Nicolas Dugrival’s wife! Do you call that uninteresting? And what about the way in which you solved the puzzle of the three pictures?”

  Lupin laughed:

  “Yes, that was a queer puzzle, certainly. I can suggest a title for you if you like: what do you say to The Sign of the Shadow?”

  “And your successes in society and with the fair sex?” I continued. “The dashing Arsène’s love-affairs! … And the clue to your good actions? Those chapters in your life to which you have so often alluded under the names of The Wedding-ring, Shadowed by Death, and so on! … Why delay these confidences and confessions, my dear Lupin? … Come, do what I ask you! …”

  It was at the time when Lupin, though already famous, had not yet fought his biggest battles; the time that preceded the great adventures of The Hollow Needle and 813. He had not yet dreamt of annexing the accumulated treasures of the French Royal House nor of changing the map of Europe under the Kaiser’s nose: he contented himself with milder surprises and humbler profits, making his daily effort, doing evil from day to day and doing a little good as well, naturally and for the love of the thing, like a whimsical and compassionate Don Quixote.

  He was silent; and I insisted:

  “Lupin, I wish you would!”

  To my astonishment, he replied:

  “Take a sheet of paper, old fellow, and a pencil.”

  I obeyed with alacrity, delighted at the thought that he at last meant to dictate to me some of those pages which he knows how to clothe with such vigour and fancy, pages which I, unfor
tunately, am obliged to spoil with tedious explanations and boring developments.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  “Quite.”

  “Write down, 20, 1, 11, 5, 14, 15.”

  “What?”

  “Write it down, I tell you.”

  He was now sitting up, with his eyes turned to the open window and his fingers rolling a Turkish cigarette. He continued:

  “Write down, 21, 14, 14, 5 …”

  He stopped. Then he went on:

  “3, 5, 19, 19 …”

  And, after a pause:

  “5, 18, 25 …”

  Was he mad? I looked at him hard and, presently, I saw that his eyes were no longer listless, as they had been a little before, but keen and attentive and that they seemed to be watching, somewhere, in space, a sight that apparently captivated them.

  Meanwhile, he dictated, with intervals between each number:

  “18, 9, 19, 11, 19 …”

  There was hardly anything to be seen through the window but a patch of blue sky on the right and the front of the building opposite, an old private house, whose shutters were closed as usual. There was nothing particular about all this, no detail that struck me as new among those which I had had before my eyes for years …

  “1, 2 …”

  And suddenly I understood … or rather I thought I understood, for how could I admit that Lupin, a man so essentially level-headed under his mask of frivolity, could waste his time upon such childish nonsense? What he was counting was the intermittent flashes of a ray of sunlight playing on the dingy front of the opposite house, at the height of the second floor!

  “15, 22 …” said Lupin.

  The flash disappeared for a few seconds and then struck the house again, successively, at regular intervals, and disappeared once more.

  I had instinctively counted the flashes and I said, aloud:

  “5 …”

  “Caught the idea? I congratulate you!” he replied, sarcastically.

  He went to the window and leant out, as though to discover the exact direction followed by the ray of light. Then he came and lay on the sofa again, saying:

  “It’s your turn now. Count away!”

  The fellow seemed so positive that I did as he told me. Besides, I could not help confessing that there was something rather curious about the ordered frequency of those gleams on the front of the house opposite, those appearances and disappearances, turn and turn about, like so many flash signals.

  They obviously came from a house on our side of the street, for the sun was entering my windows slantwise. It was as though some one were alternately opening and shutting a casement, or, more likely, amusing himself by making sunlight flashes with a pocket-mirror.

  “It’s a child having a game!” I cried, after a moment or two, feeling a little irritated by the trivial occupation that had been thrust upon me.

  “Never mind, go on!”

  And I counted away … And I put down rows of figures … And the sun continued to play in front of me, with mathematical precision.

  “Well?” said Lupin, after a longer pause than usual.

  “Why, it seems finished … There has been nothing for some minutes …”

  We waited and, as no more light flashed through space, I said, jestingly:

  “My idea is that we have been wasting our time. A few figures on paper: a poor result!”

  Lupin, without stirring from his sofa, rejoined:

  “Oblige me, old chap, by putting in the place of each of those numbers the corresponding letter of the alphabet. Count A as 1, B as 2 and so on. Do you follow me?”

  “But it’s idiotic!”

  “Absolutely idiotic, but we do such a lot of idiotic things in this life … One more or less, you know! …”

  I sat down to this silly work and wrote out the first letters:

  “Take no …”

  I broke off in surprise:

  “Words!” I exclaimed. “Two English words meaning …”

  “Go on, old chap.”

  And I went on and the next letters formed two more words, which I separated as they appeared. And, to my great amazement, a complete English sentence lay before my eyes.

  “Done?” asked Lupin, after a time.

  “Done! … By the way, there are mistakes in the spelling …”

  “Never mind those and read it out, please … Read slowly.”

  Thereupon I read out the following unfinished communication, which I will set down as it appeared on the paper in front of me:

  “Take no unnecessery risks. Above all, avoid atacks, approach ennemy with great prudance and …”

  I began to laugh:

  “And there you are! Fiat lux! We’re simply dazed with light! But, after all, Lupin, confess that this advice, dribbled out by a kitchen-maid, doesn’t help you much!”

  Lupin rose, without breaking his contemptuous silence, and took the sheet of paper.

  I remembered soon after that, at this moment, I happened to look at the clock. It was eighteen minutes past five.

  Lupin was standing with the paper in his hand; and I was able at my ease to watch, on his youthful features, that extraordinary mobility of expression which baffles all observers and constitutes his great strength and his chief safeguard. By what signs can one hope to identify a face which changes at pleasure, even without the help of make-up, and whose every transient expression seems to be the final, definite expression? … By what signs? There was one which I knew well,an invariable sign: Two little crossed wrinkles that marked his forehead whenever he made a powerful effort of concentration. And I saw it at that moment, saw the tiny tell-tale cross, plainly and deeply scored.

  He put down the sheet of paper and muttered:

  “Child’s play!”

  The clock struck half-past five.

  “What!” I cried. “Have you succeeded? … In twelve minutes? …”

  He took a few steps up and down the room, lit a cigarette and said:

  “You might ring up Baron Repstein, if you don’t mind, and tell him I shall be with him at ten o’clock this evening.”

  “Baron Repstein?” I asked. “The husband of the famous baroness?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Quite serious.”

  Feeling absolutely at a loss, but incapable of resisting him, I opened the telephone-directory and unhooked the receiver. But, at that moment, Lupin stopped me with a peremptory gesture and said, with his eyes on the paper, which he had taken up again:

  “No, don’t say anything … It’s no use letting him know … There’s something more urgent … a queer thing that puzzles me … Why on earth wasn’t the last sentence finished? Why is the sentence …”

  He snatched up his hat and stick:

  “Let’s be off. If I’m not mistaken, this is a business that requires immediate solution; and I don’t believe I am mistaken.”

  He put his arm through mine, as we went down the stairs, and said:

  “I know what everybody knows. Baron Repstein, the company-promoter and racing man, whose colt Etna won the Derby and the Grand Prix this year, has been victimized by his wife. The wife, who was well known for her fair hair, her dress and her extravagance, ran away a fortnight ago, taking with her a sum of three million francs, stolen from her husband, and quite a collection of diamonds, pearls and jewellery which the Princesse de Berny had placed in her hands and which she was supposed to buy. For two weeks the police have been pursuing the baroness across France and the continent: an easy job, as she scatters gold and jewels wherever she goes. They think they have her every moment. Two days ago, our champion detective, the egregious Ganimard, arrested a visitor at a big hotel in Belgium, a woman against whom the most positive evidence seemed to be heaped up. On enquiry, the lady turned out to be a notorious chorus-girl called Nelly Darbal. As for the baroness, she has vanished. The baron, on his side, has offered a reward of two hundred thousand francs to whosoever finds his wife. The money
is in the hands of a solicitor. Moreover, he has sold his racing-stud, his house on the Boulevard Haussmann and his country-seat of Roquencourt in one lump, so that he may indemnify the Princesse de Berny for her loss.”

  “And the proceeds of the sale,” I added, “are to be paid over at once. The papers say that the princess will have her money to-morrow. Only, frankly, I fail to see the connection between this story, which you have told very well, and the puzzling sentence …”

  Lupin did not condescend to reply.

  We had been walking down the street in which I live and had passed some four or five houses, when he stepped off the pavement and began to examine a block of flats, not of the latest construction, which looked as if it contained a large number of tenants:

  “According to my calculations,” he said, “this is where the signals came from, probably from that open window.”

  “On the third floor?”

  “Yes.”

  He went to the portress and asked her:

  “Does one of your tenants happen to be acquainted with Baron Repstein?”

  “Why, of course!” replied the woman. “We have M. Lavernoux here, such a nice gentleman; he is the baron’s secretary and agent. I look after his flat.”

  “And can we see him?”

  “See him? … The poor gentleman is very ill.”

  “Ill?”

  “He’s been ill a fortnight … ever since the trouble with the baroness … He came home the next day with a temperature and took to his bed.”

  “But he gets up, surely?”

  “Ah, that I can’t say!”

  “How do you mean, you can’t say?”

  “No, his doctor won’t let any one into his room. He took my key from me.”

  “Who did?”

  “The doctor. He comes and sees to his wants, two or three times a day. He left the house only twenty minutes ago … an old gentleman with a grey beard and spectacles … Walks quite bent … But where are you going sir?”

  “I’m going up, show me the way,” said Lupin, with his foot on the stairs. “It’s the third floor, isn’t it, on the left?”