Arsène Lupin

Arsène Lupin contre Herlock Sholmès est un recueil de deux histoires écrites par Maurice Leblanc, sur les aventures opposant Arsène Lupin et Herlock Sholmès. Il fait suite à Arsène Lupin, gentleman-cambrioleur, notamment à l'antépénultième nouvelle, Herlock Sholmes arrive trop tard. Cette aventure d'Arsène Lupin, au scénario et au ton humoristiques, tranche avec des œuvres plus sombres de Leblanc.   Contenu du recueil LA DAME BLONDE Le numéro 514 — série 23 L’histoire du diamant bleu Herlock Sholmès ouvre les hostilités Quelques lueurs dans les ténèbres Un enlèvement La seconde arrestation d’Arsène Lupin LA LAMPE JUIVE Résumé Dans La Lampe juive, le baron d'Imblevalle, à qui on a volé une lampe contenant un bijou précieux, fait appel à Herlock Sholmès pour la retrouver. Lupin envoie une lettre au détective, le priant de ne pas intervenir. Sholmès n'en tient aucun compte et se rend à Paris avec Wilson. Il réussit finalement à retrouver la lampe juive mais découvre que son enquête a eu le résultat inverse de celui escompté. Elle a en effet perturbé les plans de Lupin qui voulait en réalité aider la famille du baron. |Wikipedia|

On the eighth day of last December, Mon. Gerbois, professor of mathematics at the College of Versailles, while rummaging in an old curiosity–shop, unearthed a small mahogany writing–desk which pleased him very much on account of the multiplicity of its drawers. "Just the thing for Suzanne's birthday present," thought he. And as he always tried to furnish some simple pleasures for his daughter, consistent with his modest income, he enquired the price, and, after some keen bargaining, purchased it for sixty–five francs. As he was giving his address to the shopkeeper, a young man, dressed with elegance and taste, who had been exploring the stock of antiques, caught sight of the writing–desk, and immediately enquired its price.

It was a strange ending to a voyage that had commenced in a most auspicious manner. The transatlantic steamship `La Provence' was a swift and comfortable vessel, under the command of a most affable man. The passengers constituted a select and delightful society. The charm of new acquaintances and improvised amusements served to make the time pass agreeably. We enjoyed the pleasant sensation of being separated from the world, living, as it were, upon an unknown island, and consequently obliged to be sociable with each other. Have you ever stopped to consider how much originality and spontaneity emanate from these various individuals who, on the preceding evening, did not even know each other, and who are now, for several days, condemned to lead a life of extreme intimacy, jointly defying the anger of the ocean, the terrible onslaught of the waves, the violence of the tempest and the agonizing monotony of the calm and sleepy water? Such a life becomes a sort of tragic existence, with its storms and its grandeurs, its monotony and its diversity; and that is why, perhaps, we embark upon that short voyage with mingled feelings of pleasure and fear.

The rays of the September sun flooded the great halls of the old chateau of the Dukes of Charmerace, lighting up with their mellow glow the spoils of so many ages and many lands, jumbled together with the execrable taste which so often afflicts those whose only standard of value is money. The golden light warmed the panelled walls and old furniture to a dull lustre, and gave back to the fading gilt of the First Empire chairs and couches something of its old brightness. It illumined the long line of pictures on the walls, pictures of dead and gone Charmeraces, the stern or debonair faces of the men, soldiers, statesmen, dandies, the gentle or imperious faces of beautiful women. It flashed back from armour of brightly polished steel, and drew dull gleams from armour of bronze. The hues of rare porcelain, of the rich inlays of Oriental or Renaissance cabinets, mingled with the hues of the pictures, the tapestry, the Persian rugs about the polished floor to fill the hall with a rich glow of colour. But of all the beautiful and precious things which the sun–rays warmed to a clearer beauty, the face of the girl who sat writing at a table in front of the long windows, which opened on to the centuries–old turf of the broad terrace, was the most beautiful and the most precious.

Raymonde listened. The noise was repeated twice over, clearly enough to be distinguished from the medley of vague sounds that formed the great silence of the night and yet too faintly to enable her to tell whether it was near or far, within the walls of the big country–house, or outside, among the murky recesses of the park. She rose softly. Her window was half open: she flung it back wide. The moonlight lay over a peaceful landscape of lawns and thickets, against which the straggling ruins of the old abbey stood out in tragic outlines, truncated columns, mutilated arches, fragments of porches and shreds of flying buttresses. A light breeze hovered over the face of things, gliding noiselessly through the bare motionless branches of the trees, but shaking the tiny budding leaves of the shrubs.

Mr. Kesselbach stopped short on the threshold of the sitting–room, took his secretary's arm and, in an anxious voice, whispered: "Chapman, some one has been here again." "Surely not, sir," protested the secretary. "You have just opened the hall–door yourself; and the key never left your pocket while we were lunching in the restaurant." "Chapman, some one has been here again," Mr. Kesselbach repeated. He pointed to a traveling–bag on the mantelpiece. "Look, I can prove it. That bag was shut. It is now open." Chapman protested. "Are you quite sure that you shut it, sir? Besides, the bag contains nothing but odds and ends of no value, articles of dress. . . ."

The two boats fastened to the little pier that jutted out from the garden lay rocking in its shadow. Here and there lighted windows showed through the thick mist on the margins of the lake. The Enghien Casino opposite blazed with light, though it was late in the season, the end of September. A few stars appeared through the clouds. A light breeze ruffled the surface of the water. Arsene Lupin left the summer–house where he was smoking a cigar and, bending forward at the end of the pier: "Growler?" he asked. "Masher?…Are you there?" A man rose from each of the boats, and one of them answered: "Yes, governor." "Get ready. I hear the car coming with Gilbert and Vaucheray."

It was close upon half–past six and the evening shadows were growing denser when two soldiers reached the little space, planted with trees, opposite the Musée Galliéra, where the Rue de Chaillot and the Rue Pierre–Charron meet. One wore an infantryman's sky–blue great–coat; the other, a Senegalese, those clothes of undyed wool, with baggy breeches and a belted jacket, in which the Zouaves and the native African troops have been dressed since the war. One of them had lost his right leg, the other his left arm. They walked round the open space, in the center of which stands a fine group of Silenus figures, and stopped. The infantryman threw away his cigarette. The Senegalese picked it up, took a few quick puffs at it, put it out by squeezing it between his fore–finger and thumb and stuffed it into his pocket. All this without a word. Almost at the same time two more soldiers came out of the Rue Galliéra. It would have been impossible to say to what branch they belonged, for their military attire was composed of the most incongruous civilian garments. However, one of them sported a Zouave's chechia, the other an artilleryman's képi. The first walked on crutches, the other on two sticks. These two kept near the newspaper–kiosk which stands at the edge of the pavement.

"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!…"

"Suppose I were to tell you," said Paul Delroze, "that I once stood face to face with him on French. . . ." Élisabeth looked up at him with the fond expression of a bride to whom the least word of the man she loves is a subject of wonder: "You have seen William II. in France?" "Saw him with my own eyes; and I have never forgotten a single one of the details that marked the meeting. And yet it happened very long ago." He was speaking with a sudden seriousness, as though the revival of that memory had awakened the most painful thoughts in his mind. "Tell me about it, won't you, Paul?" asked Élisabeth. "Yes, I will," he said. "In any case, though I was only a child at the time, the incident played so tragic a part in my life that I am bound to tell you the whole story." The train stopped and they got out at Corvigny, the last station on the local branch line which, starting from the chief town in the department, runs through the Liseron Valley and ends, fifteen miles from the frontier, at the foot of the little Lorraine city which Vauban, as he tells us in his "Memoirs," surrounded "with the most perfect demilunes imaginable."

The war has led to so many upheavals that not many people now remember the Hergemont scandal of seventeen years ago. Let us recall the details in a few lines. One day in July 1902, M. Antoine d'Hergemont, the author of a series of well–known studies on the megalithic monuments of Brittany, was walking in the Bois with his daughter Véronique, when he was assaulted by four men, receiving a blow in the face with a walking–stick which felled him to the ground. After a short struggle and in spite of his desperate efforts, Véronique, the beautiful Véronique, as she was called by her friends, was dragged away and bundled into a motor–car which the spectators of this very brief scene saw making off in the direction of Saint–Cloud.

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, rang the bell and said to the messenger who entered by the main door: "Monsieur le Préfet has sent for a number of people to see him at five o'clock. Here are their names. Show them into separate waiting–rooms, so that they can't communicate with one another, and let me have their cards when they come." The messenger went out. The secretary was turning toward the small door that led to his room, when the main door opened once more and admitted a man who stopped and leaned swaying over the back of a chair. "Why, it's you, Vérot!" said the secretary. "But what's happened? What's the matter?" Inspector Vérot was a very stout, powerfully built man, with a big neck and shoulders and a florid complexion. He had obviously been upset by some violent excitement, for his face, streaked with red veins and usually so apoplectic, seemed almost pale. "Oh, nothing. Monsieur le Secrétaire!" he said. "Yes, yes; you're not looking your usual self. You're gray in the face…. And the way you're perspiring…."

Hortense Daniel pushed her window ajar and whispered: "Are you there, Rossigny?" "I am here," replied a voice from the shrubbery at the front of the house. Leaning forward, she saw a rather fat man looking up at her out of a gross red face with its cheeks and chin set in unpleasantly fair whiskers. "Well?" he asked. "Well, I had a great argument with my uncle and aunt last night. They absolutely refuse to sign the document of which my lawyer sent them the draft, or to restore the dowry squandered by my husband." "But your uncle is responsible by the terms of the marriage–settlement." "No matter. He refuses." "Well, what do you propose to do?" "Are you still determined to run away with me?" she asked, with a laugh. "More so than ever." "Your intentions are strictly honourable, remember!"