It was half-past four; M. Desmalions, the Prefect of Police, was not yet back at the office. His private secretary laid on the desk a bundle of letters and reports which he had annotated for his chief...

The declaration was followed by a silence of some length. The Secretary of the American Embassy and the Peruvian attaché had followed the conversation with eager interest. Major d’Astrignac nodded his...

The door was opened by a manservant. Mazeroux sent in his card. Hippolyte received the two visitors in his study. The table, on which stood a movable telephone, was littered with books, pamphlets, and...

It was about nine o’clock in the morning when the Prefect of Police entered the study in which the incomprehensible tragedy of that double murder had been enacted. He did not even bow to Don Luis; and...

It is sometimes an ungrateful task to tell the story of Arsène Lupin’s life, for the reason that each of his adventures is partly known to the public, having at the time formed the subject of much eag...

A group consisting of Deputy Chief Detective Weber, Chief Inspector Ancenis, Sergeant Mazeroux, three inspectors, and the Neuilly commissary of police stood outside the gate of No. 8 Boulevard Richard...

Two lodges, belonging to the same old-time period as the house itself, stood at the extreme right and left of the low wall that separated the front courtyard from the Place du Palais-Bourbon. These lo...

Of all these events the public knew only of the attempted suicide of Mme. Fauville, the capture and escape of Gaston Sauverand, the murder of Chief Inspector Ancenis, and the discovery of a letter wri...

He remained for one moment motionless and speechless. Above was a perfect clatter of things being pushed about, as though the besieged were building themselves a barricade. But to the right of the ele...

Gaston Sauverand! Instinctively, Don Luis took a step back, drew his revolver, and aimed it at the criminal: “Hands up!” he commanded. “Hands up, or I fire!” Sauverand did not appear to be put out. He...

Don Luis had certainly expected this formidable blow; and yet it appeared to take him unawares, and he repeated more than once: “Ah, Weber is here! Weber is here!” All his buoyancy left him, and he fe...

When Lupin afterward told me this episode of the tragic story, he said, not without a certain self-complacency: “What astonished me then, and what astonishes me still, as one of the most amazing victo...

The fourth mysterious letter! The fourth of those letters “posted by the devil and delivered by the devil,” as one of the newspapers expressed it! We all of us remember the really extraordinary agitat...

M. Desmalions looked at him without understanding, and looked from him to the ceiling. Perenna said: “Oh, there’s no witchcraft about it; and, though no one has thrown that letter from above, though t...

On the fourth evening after the tragic events related, an old cabdriver, almost entirely hidden in a huge greatcoat, rang at Perenna’s door and sent up a letter to Don Luis. He was at once shown into ...

Don Luis was for one moment amazed. Florence Levasseur here! Florence, whom he had left in the train under Mazeroux’s supervision and for whom it was physically impossible to be back in Paris before e...

In spite of his usual facility for sleep, Don Luis slept for three hours at most. He was racked with too much anxiety; and, though his plan of conduct was worked out mathematically, he could not help ...

Don Luis ceased. A smile of amusement played round his lips. The recollection of those four minutes seemed to divert him immensely. Valenglay and the Prefect of Police, who were neither of them men to...

The power that had impelled Don Luis to battle and victory was so intense that it suffered, so to speak, no cheek. Disappointment, rage, humiliation, torture, were all swallowed up in an immediate des...

It was time for the second act of the tragedy. Don Luis Perenna’s death was to be followed by that of Florence. Like some monstrous butcher, the cripple passed from one to the other with no more compa...

Next morning, a little before eight o’clock, Valenglay was talking in his own flat to the Prefect of Police, and asked: “So you think as I do, my dear Prefect? He’ll come?” “I haven’t the least doubt ...