The Confessions of Arsène Lupin Read online

  Lupin took his stand right in the middle of the clump. I joined him and, like him, pushed aside the branches of one of the shrubs. And the sight which presented itself to my eyes was so unexpected that I was unable to suppress an exclamation, while Lupin, on his side, muttered, between his teeth:

  “By Jupiter! This is a funny job!”

  We saw before us, within the confined space that lay between the two windowless houses, the identical scene represented in the old picture which I had bought at a second-hand dealer’s!

  The identical scene! At the back, against the opposite wall, the same Greek rotunda displayed its slender columns. In the middle, the same stone benches topped a circle of four steps that ran down to a fish-pond with moss-grown flags. On the left, the same well raised its wrought-iron roof; and, close at hand, the same sun-dial showed its slanting gnomon and its marble face.

  The identical scene! And what added to the strangeness of the sight was the memory, obsessing Lupin and myself, of that date of the 15th of April, inscribed in a corner of the picture, and the thought that this very day was the 15th of April and that sixteen or seventeen people, so different in age, condition and manners, had chosen the 15th of April to come together in this forgotten corner of Paris!

  All of them, at the moment when we caught sight of them, were sitting in separate groups on the benches and steps; and all were eating. Not very far from my neighbour and her daughter, the workman’s family and the beggar couple were sharing their provisions; while the footman, the gentleman in the soiled suit, the infantry corporal and the two lean sisters were making a common stock of their sliced ham, their tins of sardines and their gruyère cheese.

  The lady with the little dog alone, who had brought no food with her, sat apart from the others, who made a show of turning their backs upon her. But Louise d’Ernemont offered her a sandwich, whereupon her example was followed by the two sisters; and the corporal at once began to make himself as agreeable to the young person as he could.

  It was now half-past one. The beggar-man took out his pipe, as did the fat gentleman; and, when they found that one had no tobacco and the other no matches, their needs soon brought them together. The men went and smoked by the rotunda and the women joined them. For that matter, all these people seemed to know one another quite well.

  They were at some distance from where we were standing, so that we could not hear what they said. However, we gradually perceived that the conversation was becoming animated. The young person with the dog, in particular, who by this time appeared to be in great request, indulged inmuch voluble talk, accompanying her words with many gestures, which set the little dog barking furiously.

  But, suddenly, there was an outcry, promptly followed by shouts of rage; and one and all, men and women alike, rushed in disorder toward the well. One of the workman’s brats was at that moment coming out of it, fastened by his belt to the hook at the end of the rope; and the three other urchins were drawing him up by turning the handle. More active than the rest, the corporal flung himself upon him; and forthwith the footman and the fat gentleman seized hold of him also, while the beggars and the lean sisters came to blows with the workman and his family.

  In a few seconds the little boy had not a stitch left on him beyond his shirt. The footman, who had taken possession of the rest of the clothes, ran away, pursued by the corporal, who snatched away the boy’s breeches, which were next torn from the corporal by one of the lean sisters.

  “They are mad!” I muttered, feeling absolutely at sea.

  “Not at all, not at all,” said Lupin.

  “What! Do you mean to say that you can make head or tail of what is going on?”

  He did not reply. The young lady with the little dog, tucking her pet under her arm, had started running after the child in the shirt, who uttered loud yells. The two of them raced round the laurel-clump in which we stood hidden; and the brat flung himself into his mother’s arms.

  At long last, Louise d’Ernemont, who had played a conciliatory part from the beginning, succeeded in allaying the tumult. Everybody sat down again; but there was a reaction in all those exasperated people and they remained motionless and silent, as though worn out with their exertions.

  And time went by. Losing patience and beginning to feel the pangs of hunger, I went to the Rue Raynouard to fetch something to eat, which we divided while watching the actors in the incomprehensible comedy that was being performed before our eyes. They hardly stirred. Each minute that passed seemed to load them with increasing melancholy; and they sank into attitudes of discouragement, bent their backs more and more and sat absorbed in their meditations.

  The afternoon wore on in this way, under a grey sky that shed a dreary light over the enclosure.

  “Are they going to spend the night here?” I asked, in a bored voice.

  But, at five o’clock or so, the fat gentleman in the soiled jacket-suit took out his watch. The others did the same and all, watch in hand, seemed to be anxiously awaiting an event of no little importance to themselves. The event did not take place, for, in fifteen or twenty minutes, the fat gentleman gave a gesture of despair, stood up and put on his hat.

  Then lamentations broke forth. The two lean sisters and the workman’s wife fell upon their knees and made the sign of the cross. The lady with the little dog and the beggar-woman kissed each other and sobbed; and we saw Louise d’Ernemont pressing her daughter sadly to her.

  “Let’s go,” said Lupin.

  “You think it’s over?”

  “Yes; and we have only just time to make ourselves scarce.”

  We went out unmolested. At the top of the lane, Lupin turned to the left and, leaving me outside, entered the first house in the Rue Raynouard, the one that backed on to the enclosure.

  After talking for a few seconds to the porter, he joined me and we stopped a passing taxi-cab:

  “No. 34 Rue de Turin,” he said to the driver.

  The ground-floor of No. 34 was occupied by a notary’s office; and we were shown in, almost without waiting, to Maître Valandier, a smiling, pleasant-spoken man of a certain age.

  Lupin introduced himself by the name of Captain Jeanniot, retired from the army. He said that he wanted to build a house to his own liking and that some one had suggested to him a plot of ground situated near the Rue Raynouard.

  “But that plot is not for sale,” said Maître Valandier.

  “Oh, I was told …”

  “You have been misinformed, I fear.”

  The lawyer rose, went to a cupboard and returned with a picture which he showed us. I was petrified. It was the same picture which I had bought, the same picture that hung in Louise d’Ernemont’s room.

  “This is a painting,” he said, “of the plot of ground to which you refer. It is known as the Clos d’Ernemont.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Well, this close,” continued the notary, “once formed part of a large garden belonging to d’Ernemont, the farmer-general, who was executed during the Terror. All that could be sold has been sold, piecemeal, by the heirs. But this last plot has remained and will remain in their joint possession … unless …”

  The notary began to laugh.

  “Unless what?” asked Lupin.

  “Well, it’s quite a romance, a rather curious romance, in fact. I often amuse myself by looking through the voluminous documents of the case.”

  “Would it be indiscreet, if I asked …?”

  “Not at all, not at all,” declared Maître Valandier, who seemed delighted, on the contrary, to have found a listener for his story. And, without waiting to be pressed, he began: “At the outbreak of the Revolution, Louis Agrippa d’Ernemont, on the pretence of joining his wife, who was staying at Geneva with their daughter Pauline, shut up his mansion in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, dismissed his servants and, with his son Charles, came and took up his abode in his pleasure-house at Passy, where he was known to nobody except an old and devoted serving-woman. He remained there in hiding for th
ree years and he had every reason to hope that his retreat would not be discovered, when, one day, after luncheon, as he was having a nap, the old servant burst into his room. She had seen, at the end of the street, a patrol of armed men who seemed to be making for the house. Louis d’Ernemont got ready quickly and, at the moment when the men were knocking at the front door, disappeared through the door that led to the garden, shouting to his son, in a scared voice, to keep them talking, if only for five minutes. He may have intended to escape and found the outlets through the garden watched. In any case, he returned in six or seven minutes, replied very calmly to the questions put to him and raised no difficulty about accompanying the men. His son Charles, although only eighteen years of age, was arrested also.”

  “When did this happen?” asked Lupin.

  “It happened on the 26th day of Germinal, Year II, that is to say, on the …”

  Maître Valandier stopped, with his eyes fixed on a calendar that hung on the wall, and exclaimed:

  “Why, it was on this very day! This is the 15th of April, the anniversary of the farmer-general’s arrest.”

  “What an odd coincidence!” said Lupin. “And considering the period at which it took place, the arrest, no doubt, had serious consequences?”

  “Oh, most serious!” said the notary, laughing. “Three months later, at the beginning of Thermidor, the farmer-general mounted the scaffold. His son Charles was forgotten in prison and their property was confiscated.”

  “The property was immense, I suppose?” said Lupin.

  “Well, there you are! That’s just where the thing becomes complicated. The property, which was, in fact, immense, could never be traced. It was discovered that the Faubourg Saint-Germain mansion had been sold, before the Revolution, to an Englishman, together with all the country-seats and estates and all the jewels, securities and collections belonging to the farmer-general. The Convention instituted minute inquiries, as did the Directory afterward. But the inquiries led to no result.”

  “There remained, at any rate, the Passy house,” said Lupin.

  “The house at Passy was bought, for a mere song, by a delegate of the Commune, the very man who had arrested d’Ernemont, one Citizen Broquet. Citizen Broquet shut himself up in the house, barricaded the doors, fortified the walls and, when Charles d’Ernemont was at last set free and appeared outside, received him by firing a musket at him. Charles instituted one law-suit after another, lost them all and then proceeded to offer large sums of money. But Citizen Broquet proved intractable. He had bought the house and he stuck to the house; and he would have stuck to it until his death, if Charles had not obtained the support of Bonaparte. Citizen Broquet cleared out on the 12th of February, 1803; but Charles d’Ernemont’s joy was so great and his brain, no doubt, had been so violently unhinged by all that he had gone through, that, on reaching the threshold of the house of which he had at last recovered the ownership, even before opening the door he began to dance and sing in the street. He had gone clean off his head.”

  “By Jove!” said Lupin. “And what became of him?”

  “His mother and his sister Pauline, who had ended by marrying a cousin of the same name at Geneva, were both dead. The old servant-woman took care of him and they lived together in the Passy house. Years passed without any notable event; but, suddenly, in 1812, an unexpected incident happened. The old servant made a series of strange revelations on her death-bed, in the presence of two witnesses whom she sent for. She declared that the farmer-general had carried to his house at Passy a number of bags filled with gold and silver and that those bags had disappeared a few days before the arrest. According to earlier confidences made by Charles d’Ernemont, who had them from his father, the treasures were hidden in the garden, between the rotunda, the sun-dial and the well. In proof of her statement, she produced three pictures, or rather, for they were not yet framed, three canvases, which the farmer-general had painted during his captivity and which he had succeeded in conveying to her, with instructions to hand them to his wife, his son and his daughter. Tempted by the lure of wealth, Charles and the old servant had kept silence. Then came the law-suits, the recovery of the house, Charles’s madness, the servant’s own useless searches; and the treasures were still there.”

  “And they are there now,” chuckled Lupin.

  “And they will be there always,” exclaimed Maître Valandier. “Unless … unless Citizen Broquet, who no doubt smelt a rat, succeeded in ferreting them out. But this is an unlikely supposition, for Citizen Broquet died in extreme poverty.”

  “So then …?”

  “So then everybody began to hunt. The children of Pauline, the sister, hastened from Geneva. It was discovered that Charles had been secretly married and that he had sons. All these heirs set to work.”

  “But Charles himself?”

  “Charles lived in the most absolute retirement. He did not leave his room.”

  “Never?”

  “Well, that is the most extraordinary, the most astounding part of the story. Once a year, Charles d’Ernemont, impelled by a sort of subconscious will-power, came downstairs, took the exact road which his father had taken, walked across the garden and sat down either on the steps of the rotunda, which you see here, in the picture, or on the curb of the well. At twenty-seven minutes past five, he rose and went indoors again; and until his death, which occurred in 1820, he never once failed to perform this incomprehensible pilgrimage. Well, the day on which this happened was invariably the 15th of April, the anniversary of the arrest.”

  Maître Valandier was no longer smiling and himself seemed impressed by the amazing story which he was telling us.

  “And, since Charles’s death?” asked Lupin, after a moment’s reflection.

  “Since that time,” replied the lawyer, with a certain solemnity of manner, “for nearly a hundred years, the heirs of Charles and Pauline d’Ernemont have kept up the pilgrimage of the 15th of April. During the first few years they made the most thorough excavations. Every inch of the garden was searched, every clod of ground dug up. All this is now over. They take hardly any pains. All they do is, from time to time, for no particular reason, to turn over a stone or explore the well. For the most part, they are content to sit down on the steps of the rotunda, like the poor madman; and, like him, they wait. And that, you see, is the sad part of their destiny. In those hundred years, all these people who have succeeded one another, from father to son, have lost—what shall I say?—the energy of life. They have no courage left, no initiative. They wait. They wait for the 15th of April; and, when the 15th of April comes, they wait for a miracle to take place. Poverty has ended by overtaking every one of them. My predecessors and I have sold first the house, in order to build another which yields a better rent, followed by bits of the garden and further bits. But, as to that corner over there,” pointing to the picture, “they would rather die than sell it. On this they are all agreed: Louise d’Ernemont, who is the direct heiress of Pauline, as well as the beggars, the workman, the footman, the circus-rider and so on, who represent the unfortunate Charles.”

  There was a fresh pause; and Lupin asked:

  “What is your own opinion, Maître Valandier?”

  “My private opinion is that there’s nothing in it. What credit can we give to the statements of an old servant enfeebled by age? What importance can we attach to the crotchets of a madman? Besides, if the farmer-general had realized his fortune, don’t you think that that fortune would have been found? One could manage to hide a paper, a document, in a confined space like that, but not treasures.”

  “Still, the pictures? …”

  “Yes, of course. But, after all, are they a sufficient proof?”

  Lupin bent over the copy which the solicitor had taken from the cupboard and, after examining it at length, said:

  “You spoke of three pictures.”

  “Yes, the one which you see was handed to my predecessor by the heirs of Charles. Louise d’Ernemont possesses another. As for the t
hird, no one knows what became of it.”

  Lupin looked at me and continued:

  “And do they all bear the same date?”

  “Yes, the date inscribed by Charles d’Ernemont when he had them framed, not long before his death … The same date, that is to say the 15th of April, Year II, according to the revolutionary calendar, as the arrest took place in April, 1794.”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” said Lupin. “The figure 2 means …”

  He thought for a few moments and resumed:

  “One more question, if I may. Did no one ever come forward to solve the problem?”

  Maître Valandier threw up his arms:

  “Goodness gracious me!” he cried. “Why, it was the plague of the office! One of my predecessors, Maître Turbon, was summoned to Passy no fewer than eighteen times, between 1820 and 1843, by the groups of heirs, whom fortune-tellers, clairvoyants, visionaries, impostors of all sorts had promised that they would discover the farmer-general’s treasures. At last, we laid down a rule: any outsider applying to institute a search was to begin by depositing a certain sum.”

  “What sum?”

  “A thousand francs.”

  “And did this have the effect of frightening them off?”

  “No. Four years ago, an Hungarian hypnotist tried the experiment and made me waste a whole day. After that, we fixed the deposit at five thousand francs. In case of success, a third of the treasure goes to the finder. In case of failure, the deposit is forfeited to the heirs. Since then, I have been left in peace.”

  “Here are your five thousand francs.”

  The lawyer gave a start:

  “Eh? What do you say?”

  “I say,” repeated Lupin, taking five bank-notes from his pocket and calmly spreading them on the table, “I say that here is the deposit of five thousand francs. Please give me a receipt and invite all the d’Ernemont heirs to meet me at Passy on the 15th of April next year.”

  The notary could not believe his senses. I myself, although Lupin had accustomed me to these surprises, was utterly taken back.