Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-thief (Penguin Classics)

by Leblanc, Maurice

  3. The Prison de la Santé was (and still is) a real facility, notorious for its crowded and dirty conditions and for the brutal treatment of inmates. It was infamously difficult to escape from. As recently as 2.000, a former prison doctor caused a furor when she revealed the ongoing abuse of prisoners at the Prison de la Santé.

  4. The Echo de France was a Parisian newspaper for which Leblanc himself wrote.

  5. Spondulics was a British slang term for money, thought to have evolved somehow from the Greek spondylos, a kind of sea shell once used as money.

  “THE ESCAPE OF ARSÈNE LUPIN”

  1. Thomas Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero-worship originated as a lec ture in 1840. Besides Lupin’s identification with heroic figures, he may also have appreciated Carlyle’s denunciation in his other writings of the corruptions and charades of modern European so ciety. Or it may simply have struck Leblanc as an amusing title for Lupin to have around.

  2. The Elzivirs were a family of printers from Amsterdam, Ley den, and elsewhere. Beginning in the late sixteenth century, they pro duced beautiful editions of classic works primarily from Italy and France. An Elzivir book in his cell announces both Lupin’s secret wealth and his aesthetic tastes.

  3. Epictetus was a first-century Stoic philosopher. His ethic of self-renunciation seems unlikely to appeal to Lupin, but his resigna tion to unavoidable circumstances might be comforting during imprisonment.

  4. The Henry Clay cigar, named for the nineteenth-century American politician, was (and still is) considered to appeal to smokers with a refined taste in tobacco. They still exist, although since the United States’ Cuban Trade embargo they are also produced in the Do minican Republic.

  5. Bouvier is the magistrate from whom Lupin lifted the watch that he is showing to Ganimard in the final scene of the preceding story.

  6. Most of these names will appear in succeeding stories, because Leblanc enjoyed intertwining the adventures. The Chateau du Malaquis is the home of Baron Cahorn in “Arsène Lupin in Prison.”

  7. As if it weren’t already outrageous enough, Lupin’s resumé will actually grow over the years as more species of genius are identi fied with him.

  8. The anthropometrical test was better known, as it is later de scribed in this story, as the “Bertillon system.” Alphonse Bertillon was a Parisian police officer who died in 1914, eight years after this adventure appeared. His system of identification comprised a combination of many measurements of facial features and other parts of the body, a complex and faulty system that was soon re placed by fingerprints.

  9. Jiu-jitsu, now usually spelled jujitsu, is a Japanese martial art that emphasizes moral and ethical standards as well as knowledge of self-defense. Like a forerunner of Batman or some other superhero, Lupin has trained himself mentally and physically for every eventuality.

  “THE MYSTERIOUS RAILWAY PASSENGER”

  1. Again Leblanc writes about his home region, always setting Lupin’s fantasy adventures in the reality of his own everyday life.

  2. The Gare Saint-Lazare is Paris’s largest and busiest station of the Metro trains. It was opened in 1834 and by Leblanc’s time was a bustling and essential terminal. Monet famously painted a train belching a cloud of smoke under its cathedral-like arches.

  3. En-tout-cas: an elegant parasol for fashionable women. The French phrase means literally “in any event.”

  4. Lupin’s thirty-five-horsepower Moreau-Lepton would be a priceless antique if it weren’t imaginary. There was no such automobile.

  “THE QUEEN’S NECKLACE”

  1. In these opening paragraphs Leblanc is playing his favorite game of interweaving reality and fantasy. Uaffaire du Collier, as it has been called ever since, took place as Leblanc describes—up to a point. The second paragraph is factual, the third sliding offhand edly into fiction. As far as anyone knows, the necklace was not re constructed later. This saga of intrigue and deception had already fascinated historians and scandal fans for more than a century when Leblanc was writing, and it is still doing so today, having in spired a dreadful movie as recently as 2001.

  2. Now that the story is over, it isn’t unfair to mention that occasion ally in his later aliases Lupin uses his actual given name, Raoul, without identifying it as such.

  “SHERLOCK HOLMES ARRIVES TOO LATE”

  This story heralded an entire series of feeble parodies, gathered together in Arsène Lupin contre Herlock Sholmes, published in 1907. In the opinion of the present editor, this one is by far the best.

  1. Fais ce que veulx is a motto from Rabelais’ Gargantua, published in 1534—or rather it is the modern French version of the Renaissance Latin, Faictz ce que voudras. It means “Do what you wish.”

  2. Benedictine: a brandy liqueur originally made by Benedictine monks in France.

  3. “The ax whirls in the air that shudders, but the wing opens and one goes all the way to God.”

  4. Translator Alexander Teixeira de Mattos added a footnote here in his English edition: “It can hardly be necessary to explain to mod ern English readers that, in French, the letter H is pronounced hache, an axe; R, air, the air; and L, aile, a wing.”

  Stories from

  The Confessions of Arsène Lupin

  “FLASHES OF SUNLIGHT”

  1. The story that Leblanc does indeed title “The Sign of the Shadow” has been omitted from the present collection.

  2. “Shadowed by Death” has been omitted.

  3. A reference to The Hollow Needle, published in 1909.

  4. A reference to 813, published in 1910.

  5. Fiat lux: Latin, “Let there be light.”

  6. Another of Lupin’s Sherlockian axioms. The more of a detective he became, the more he spoke like one.

  7. The French poet and dramatist Alfred de Musset died in 1857, and these oft-quoted lines from one of his poems are still familiar to anyone who passes his tomb in the famous Pere Lachaise Ceme tery in Paris.

  “THE WEDDING-RING”

  1. Velmont’s address is at his club. The Cercle (the usual French name for a social club) de la Rue Royale offered impressive social status and luxurious surroundings in which barons of finance could discuss business deals and politics. It would have been the perfect place for Lupin to stay aware of which people in Paris had money and how they were spending it.

  2. See “The Escape of Arsène Lupin.”

  3. See “Sherlock Holmes Arrives Too Late.”

  “THE RED SILK SCARF”

  1. The “Dugrival business” takes place in the story “The Infernal Trap,” which precedes “The Red Silk Scarf” in the original Confessions of Arsène Lupin, but which has been omitted from the present volume.

  2. Leblanc always has so much French history on tap in his brain that it spills over. The Pont-Neuf (New Bridge) arches across the Seine to connect the Paris of the Right and Left Banks. Along with draining swamps and encouraging education and building roads and commanding other improvements, King Henry IV commissioned the Pont-Neuf. Today a visitor can’t cross it without seeing a statue of Henry’s bearded figure astride a bronze horse that is rather more handsome than His Majesty.

  3. With these convincing deductions, so much more reasonable than most of his antics, Lupin bests Sherlock Holmes at his own game without Holmes having to appear.

  4. 36, Quai des Orfevres, as readers will have come to expect, was indeed the address of the Paris police. Today it is still the head quarters of the Police Judiciare (criminal police). The address has become shorthand (as in “10 Downing Street” or “1600 Pennsyl vania Avenue”) for the Direction Centrale de la Police Judiciare (Central Directorate of Judicial Police). In 2004 the French direc tor Olivier Marchal used the address alone as the title of a thriller.

  “EDITH SWAN-NECK”

  1. Verbum sap. is short for verbum sapiente (“a word to the wise”), sometimes shortened even more to verb. sap.

  2. Again Leblanc saturates a story with historical tidbits. Only months after his coronation and his marriage
to Edith Swan-neck in 1066, the young Saxon king fell to the Norman invader, William the Conqueror, at the Battle of Hastings.

  3. A reference to the play Arsène Lupin (mentioned in the introduction), which Leblanc along with the English writer Edgar Jepson had turned into a novel in 1909.

  4. Victoire appeared first in the Lupin novel 813.

  Stories from

  The Eight Strokes of the Clock

  Leblanc prefaced these eight stories with the following note:

  These adventures were told to me in the old days by Arsène Lupin, as though they had happened to a friend of his, named Prince Renine. As for me, considering the way in which they were conducted, the actions, the behaviour and the very character of the hero, I find it very difficult not to identify the two friends as one and the same person. Arsène Lupin is quite capable of attributing to himself adventures which are not his at all and of disowning those which are really his. The reader will judge for himself.

  M. L.

  “ON THE TOP OF THE TOWER”

  1. This, the first story in the series, sets up the relationship between Lupin and Hortense Daniel that will provide the framework for the volume The Eight Strokes of the Clock. Like his infatuation with Nellie Underdown in “The Arrest of Arsène Lupin” and “Sherlock Holmes Arrives Too Late,” his unsolicited attachment to Hortense Daniel seems nowadays considerably less romantic than Leblanc imagined at the time. Naturally when Lupin decides to help people, he does so in his usual domineering way.

  2. “A mighty hunter before the Lord” is a phrase from the King James version of Genesis 10:9, referring to Nimrod but apparently employing an already familiar phrase.

  3. The Suisse Normande, Little Switzerland, is also in Normandy, southwest of Leblanc’s summer home near Honfleur. See the In troduction for more information on the author’s affectionate rela tionship to Normandy, especially the coast near his birthplace in Rouen.

  “THÉRÈSE AND GERMAINE”

  1. Étretat on the Norman coast is famous for its towering cliffs and the dramatic formations that the ocean has carved from them. Victor Hugo called these natural formations “the grandest architecture that ever existed.”

  2. The Needle is a geological formation that features prominently in the adventurous Lupin novel The Hollow Needle, which had proven enormously popular when published a decade before this story collection. To this day, various sites on the Norman coast still advertise their relationship with Maurice Leblanc, including the Arsène Lupin Museum in Etretat.

  “AT THE SIGN OF MERCURY”

  1. The Roman god Mercury, usually identified with the Greek Hermes, was the patron deity of travellers, but especially of merchants and travelling merchants, as his frequent portrayal with a money pouch indicates. He had winged sandals because he was the messenger of the gods.

  2. As he does in “On the Top of the Tower,” Lupin reveals a great deal of the troubled psychology behind his criminal career, and fully explains why he has made the transition to detective. It may also suggest why he sees romance as a contest of wills.

  Acknowledgments

  My heartfelt thanks to three scholars of crime fiction who critiqued my introduction to this volume: Otto Penzler, editor of the Best American Mystery series and founder of Mysterious Books in New York City; Roger Johnson, BSI, editor of The Sherlock Holmes Journal in England; and Douglas G. Greene, professor of history at Old Dominion University, biographer, and anthologist. I welcome this opportunity to thank my wife, Laura Sloan Patterson, who encouraged this project and critiqued the introduction; my mother, Ruby Sims, who provided an endless parade of mystery novels to entertain my teenage imagination; the fine staff of the Greensburg and Hempfield Area Library in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, especially director Cesare Muccari and reference librarian Jim Vikartosky; the Carnegie Public Library in Pittsburgh and the Hillman Library at the University of Pittsburgh; and the many libraries participating in the AccessPennsylvania system of interlibrary loans. I particularly want to thank the meticulous and affable crew at Penguin Classics, especially former executive editor Michael Millman, assistant editor Carolyn Horst, production editor Jennifer Tait, and cover designer Jasmine Lee—the people who do all the taken-for-granted work behind the scenes.