“A hundred thousand francs! Two hundred thousand! Five hundred thousand! A million! A two fig for your millions! What’s the use of millions? One loses them. They disappear… They go…. There’s only one thing that counts: luck. It’s on your side or else against you. And luck has been on my side these last nine years. It has never betrayed me; and you expect me to betray it? Why? Out of fear? Prison? My son? Bosh!… No harm will come to me so long as I compel luck to work on my behalf. It’s my servant, it’s my friend. It clings to the clasp. How? How can I tell? It’s the cornelian, no doubt…. There are magic stones, which hold happiness, as others hold fire, or sulphur, or gold….”
Rénine kept his eyes fixed upon him, watching for the least word, the least modulation of the voice. The curiosity-dealer was now laughing, with a nervous laugh, while resuming the self-control of a man who feels sure of himself: and he walked up to Rénine with jerky movements that revealed an increasing resolution:
“Millions? My dear sir, I wouldn’t have them as a gift. The little bit of stone which I possess is worth much more than that. And the proof of it lies in all the pains which you are at to take it from me. Aha! Months devoted to looking for it, as you yourself confess! Months in which you turned everything topsy-turvy, while I, who suspected nothing, did not even defend myself! Why should I? The little thing defended itself all alone…. It does not want to be discovered and it shan’t be…. It likes being here…. It presides over a good, honest business that satisfies it…. Pan-caldi’s luck! Why, it’s known to all the neighbourhood, among all the dealers! I proclaim it from the house-tops: ‘I’m a lucky man!’ I even made so bold as to take the god of luck, Mercury, as my patron! He too protects me. See, I’ve got Mercuries all over my shop! Look up there, on that shelf, a whole row of statuettes, like the one over the front-door, proofs signed by a great sculptor who went smash and sold them to me…. Would you like one, my dear sir? It will bring you luck too. Take your pick! A present from Pancaldi, to make up to you for your defeat! Does that suit you?”
He put a stool against the wall, under the shelf, took down a statuette and plumped it into Rénine’s arms. And, laughing heartily, growing more and more excited as his enemy seemed to yield ground and to fall back before his spirited attack, he explained:
“Well done! He accepts! And the fact that he accepts shows that we are all agreed! Madame Pancaldi don’t distress yourself. Your son’s coming back and nobody’s going to prison! Good-bye, Mile. Hortense! Good-day, sir! Hope to see you again! If you want to speak to me at any time, just give three thumps on the ceiling. Good-bye… don’t forget your present… and may Mercury be kind to you! Good-bye, my dear Prince! Good-bye, Mile. Hortense!…”
He hustled them to the iron staircase, gripped each of them by the arm in turn and pushed them up to the little door hidden at the top of the stairs.
And the strange thing was that Rénine made no protest. He did not attempt to resist. He allowed himself to be led along like a naughty child that is taken up to bed.
Less than five minutes had elapsed between the moment when he made his offer to Pancaldi and the moment when Pancaldi turned him out of the shop with a statuette in his arms.
The dining-room and drawing-room of the flat which Rénine had taken on the first floor looked out upon the street. The table in the dining-room was laid for two.
“Forgive me, won’t you?” said Rénine, as he opened the door of the drawing-room for Hortense. “I thought that, whatever happened, I should most likely see you this evening and that we might as well dine together. Don’t refuse me this kindness, which will be the last favour granted in our last adventure.”
Hortense did not refuse him. The manner in which the battle had ended was so different from everything that she had seen hitherto that she felt disconcerted. At any rate, why should she refuse, seeing that the terms of the contract had not been fulfilled?
Rénine left the room to give an order to his manservant. Two minutes later, he came back for Hortense. It was then a little past seven.
There were flowers on the table; and the statue of Mercury, Pancaldi’s present, stood overtopping them.
“May the god of luck preside over our repast,” said Rénine.
He was full of animation and expressed his great delight at having her sitting opposite him:
“Yes,” he exclaimed, “I had to resort to powerful means and attract you by the bait of the most fabulous enterprises. You must confess that my letter was jolly smart! The three rushes, the blue gown; simply irresistible! And, when I had thrown in a few puzzles of my own invention, such as the seventy-five beads of the necklace and the old woman with the silver rosary, I knew that you were bound to succumb to the temptation. Don’t be angry with me. I wanted to see you and I wanted it to be today. You have come and I thank you.”
He next told her how he had got on the track of the stolen trinket:
“You hoped, didn’t you, in laying down that condition, that I shouldn’t be able to fulfill it? You made a mistake, my dear. The test, at least at the beginning, was easy enough, because it was based upon an undoubted fact: the talismanic character attributed to the clasp. I had only to hunt about and see whether among the people around you, among your servants, there was ever any one upon whom that character may have excercised some attraction. Now, on the list of persons which I succeeded in drawing up I at once noticed the name of Mile. Lucienne, as coming from Corsica. This was my starting-point. The rest was a mere concatenation of events.”
Hortense stared at him in amazement. How was it that he was accepting his defeat with such a careless air and even talking in a tone of triumph, whereas really he had been soundly beaten by Pancaldi and even made to look just a trifle ridiculous?
She could not help letting him feel this; and the fashion in which she did so betrayed a certain disappointment, a certain humiliation:
“Everything is a concatenation of events: very well. But the chain is broken, because, when all is said, though you know the thief, you did not succeed in laying hands upon the stolen clasp.”
The reproach was obvious. Rénine had not accustomed her to failure. And furthermore she was irritated to see how heedlessly he was accepting a blow which, after all, entailed the ruin of any hopes that he might have entertained.
He did not reply. He had filled their two glasses with champagne and was slowly emptying his own, with his eyes fixed on the statuette of Mercury. He turned it about on its pedestal and examined it with the eye of a delighted connoisseur:
“What a beautiful thing is a harmonious line! Colour does not uplift me so much as outline, proportion, symmetry and all the wonderful properties of form. Look at this little statue. Pan-caldi’s right: it’s the work of a great artist. The legs are both slender and muscular; the whole figure gives an impression of buoyancy and speed. It is very well done. There’s only one fault, a very slight one: perhaps you’ve not noticed it?”
“Yes, I have,” said Hortense. “It struck me the moment I saw the sign, outside. You mean, don’t you, a certain lack of balance? The god is leaning over too far on the leg that carries him. He looks as though he were going to pitch forward.”
“That’s very clever of you,” said Rénine. “The fault is almost imperceptible and it needs a trained eye to see it. Really, however, as a matter of logic, the weight of the body ought to have its way and, in accordance with natural laws, the little god ought to take a header.”
After a pause be continued:
“I noticed that flaw on the first day. How was it that I did not draw an inference at once? I was shocked because the artist had sinned against an aesthetic law, whereas I ought to have been shocked because he had overlooked a physical law. As though art and nature were not blended together! And as though the laws of gravity could be disturbed without some fundamental reason!”
“What do you mean?” asked Hortense, puzzled by these reflections, which seemed so far removed from their secret thoughts. “What do you mean?”
<
br /> “Oh, nothing!” he said. “I am only surprised that I didn’t understand sooner why Mercury did not plump forward, as he should have done.”
“And what is the reason?”
“The reason? I imagine that Pancaldi, when pulling the statuette about to make it serve his purpose, must have disturbed its balance, but that this balance was restored by something which holds the little god back and which makes up for his really too dangerous posture.”
“Something, you say?”
“Yes, a counterweight.”
Hortense gave a start. She too was beginning to see a little light. She murmured:
“A counterweight?… Are you thinking that it might be… in the pedestal?”
“Why not?”
“Is that possible? But, if so, how did Pancaldi come to give you this statuette?”
“He never gave me this one,” Rénine declared. “I took this one myself.”
“But where? And when?”
“Just now, while you were in the drawing-room. I got out of that window, which is just over the signboard and beside the niche containing the little god. And I exchanged the two, that is to say, I took the statue which was outside and put the one which Pancaldi gave me in its place.”
“But doesn’t that one lean forward?”
“No, no more than the others do, on the shelf in his shop. But Pancaldi is not an artist. A lack of equilibrium does not impress him; he will see nothing wrong; and he will continue to think himself favoured by luck, which is another way of saying that luck will continue to favour him. Meanwhile, here’s the statuette, the one used for the sign. Am I to break the pedestal and take your clasp out of the leaden sheath, soldered to the back of the pedestal, which keeps Mercury steady?”
“No, no, there’s no need for that,” Hortense hurriedly murmured.
Rénine’s intuition, his subtlety, the skill with which he had managed the whole business: to her, for the moment, all these things remained in the background. But she suddenly remembered that the eighth adventure was completed, that Rénine had surmounted every obstacle, that the test had turned to his advantage and that the extreme limit of time fixed for the last of the adventures was not yet reached.
He had the cruelty to call attention to the fact:
“A quarter to eight,” he said.
An oppressive silence fell between them. Both felt its discomfort to such a degree that they hesitated to make the least movement. In order to break it, Rénine jested:
“That worthy M. Pancaldi, how good it was of him to tell me what I wished to know! I knew, however, that by exasperating him, I should end by picking up the missing clue in what he said. It was just as though one were to hand some one a flint and steel and suggest to him that he was to use it. In the end, the spark is obtained. In my case, what produced the spark was the unconscious but inevitable comparison which he drew between the cornelian clasp, the element of luck, and Mercury, the god of luck. That was enough. I understood that this association of ideas arose from his having actually associated the two factors of luck by embodying one in the other, or, to speak more plainly, by hiding the trinket in the statuette. And I at once remembered the Mercury outside the door and its defective poise…”
Rénine suddenly interrupted himself. It seemed to him that all his remarks were falling on deaf ears. Hortense had put her hand to her forehead and, thus veiling her eyes, sat motionless and remote.
She was indeed not listening. The end of this particular adventure and the manner in which Rénine had acted on this occasion no longer interested her. What she was thinking of was the complex series of adventures amid which she had been living for the past three months and the wonderful behaviour of the man who had offered her his devotion. She saw, as in a magic picture, the fabulous deeds performed by him, all the good that he had done, the lives saved, the sorrows assuaged, the order restored wherever his masterly will had been brought to bear. Nothing was impossible to him. What he undertook to do he did. Every aim that he set before him was attained in advance. And all this without excessive effort, with the calmness of one who knows his own strength and knows that nothing can resist it.
Then what could she do against him? Why should she defend herself and how? If he demanded that she should yield, would he not know how to make her do so and would this last adventure be any more difficult for him than the others? Supposing that she ran away: did the wide world contain a retreat in which she would be safe from his pursuit? From the first moment of their first meeting, the end was certain, since Rénine had decreed that it should be so.
However, she still cast about for weapons, for protection of some sort; and she said to herself that, though he had fulfilled the eight conditions and restored the cornelian clasp to her before the eighth hour had struck, she was nevertheless protected by the fact that this eighth hour was to strike on the clock of the Châateau de Halingre and not elsewhere. It was a formal compact. Rénine had said that day, gazing on the lips which he longed to kiss:
“The old brass pendulum will start swinging again; and, when, on the fixed date, the clock once more strikes eight, then…”
She looked up. He was not moving either, but sat solemnly, patiently waiting.
She was on the point of saying, she was even preparing her words:
“You know, our agreement says it must be the Halingre clock. All the other conditions have been fulfilled… but not this one. So I am free, am I not? I am entitled not to keep my promise, which, moreover, I never made, but which in any case falls to the ground?… And I am perfectly free… released from any scruple of conscience?…”
She had not time to speak. At that precise moment, there was a click behind her, like that of a clock about to strike.
A first stroke sounded, then a second, then a third.
Hortense moaned. She had recognized the very sound of the old clock, the Halingre clock, which three months ago, by breaking in a supernatural manner the silence of the deserted château, had set both of them on the road of the eight adventures.
She counted the strokes. The clock struck eight.
“Ah!” she murmured, half swooning and hiding her face in her hands. “The clock… the clock is here… the one from over there… I recognize its voice….”
She said no more. She felt that Rénine had his eyes fixed upon her and this sapped all her energies. Besides, had she been able to recover them, she would have been no better off nor sought to offer him the least resistance, for the reason that she did not wish to resist. All the adventures were over, but one remained to be undertaken, the anticipation of which wiped out the memory of all the rest. It was the adventure of love, the most delightful, the most bewildering, the most adorable of all adventures. She accepted fate’s decree, rejoicing in all that might come, because she was in love. She smiled in spite of herself, as she reflected that happiness was again to enter her life at the very moment when her well-beloved was bringing her the cornelian clasp.
The clock struck the hour for the second time.
Hortense raised her eyes to Rénine. She struggled a few seconds longer. But she was like a charmed bird, incapable of any movement of revolt; and at the eighth stroke she fell upon his breast and offered him her lips….
Notes
Stories from
Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar
“THE ARREST OF ARSÈNE LUPIN”
For details of this first story’s publication, see the introduction.
1. The wireless telegraph was a revolutionary invention that is con sidered to have begun the modern communications revolution, by freeing it from physical ties to the earth. Advances in understanding electricity and magnetism had led scientists to explore this avenue for decades, and as early as 1832 there was a classroom demonstra tion of wireless communication. The first well-publicized public demonstration of the new technology had been at St. Louis in 1893. Just as earlier expositions had featured incandescent lighting and the telephone, the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 wi
dely publicized the wireless telegraph only a year before Leblanc was writing.
2. It is interesting to compare the Lupin resumé in this story with the judge’s recitation of his even more outrageous list of jobs in “The Escape of Arsène Lupin.”
3. Ganimard will reappear throughout the series, and at least once he will actually outsmart his adversary.
4. “Between Arsène Lupin himself and Arsène Lupin” will be a re curring theme. In a later story in this volume, Lupin enlists the aid of the police to chase another man whom he has identified to them as Lupin; in one of the novels he disguises himself and works his way up through the police ranks until he is assigned to investigate himself.
5. George Eastman, an American bank clerk turned photographic tycoon, had begun producing his Kodak camera in 1888, making photography available to amateurs. In 1900 Kodak began producing small box cameras and promoting photography as a leisure hobby.
6. This kind of shift in narrator will recur often, taking us into Lupin’s point of view for awhile and then away again, but very often we will be misled, no matter who is telling the story.
“ARSÈNE LUPIN IN PRISON”
1. Founded in the seventh century, the Abbaye de Jumièges—the ruins of which have been described as the most romantically beautiful of all Norman abbeys—and the nearby Abbaye de Saint-Wandrille were important medieval religious centers. The consecration of the larger abbey at Jumièges in 1067 was so sig nificant that William the Conqueror attended. They are situated in Normandy, near the Belgian border, where the Seine meanders lazily from Rouen toward the Channel coast at Le Havre; Leblanc was already writing about his home turf and favorite region of France.
2. The Caux region, roughly between Le Havre and Dieppe and Rouen, lies atop a limestone plateau that ends in the steep lay ered cliffs on the coast. Leblanc’s description of the wild geology of this area is accurate; nearby stands the sea-carved cliffs of Falaise d’Aval, one of which famously resembles a rather square-headed elephant dipping his trunk into the sea. The scene is typical of Leblanc’s journalistically convincing style, placing his fictional sites amid real ones. Later Georges Simenon would take this method a step further, writing many of his Inspector Maigret novels, as well as other books, on the scene that he was de scribing.
Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-thief (Penguin Classics) Page 31
