Arsène Lupin

Arsène Lupin is a gentleman thief who is known for his chivalry, class, and charm as he steals expensive things from people.

“La pendule égrenait le chapelet infini des secondes.”

“What a pity that I am not an honest man!”

“Arsène Lupin, the eccentric gentleman who operates only in the chateaux and salons, and who, one night, entered the residence of Baron Schormann, but emerged empty-handed, leaving, however, his card on which he had scribbled these words: “Arsène Lupin, gentleman-burglar, will return when the furniture is genuine.”

“It was a strange ending to a voyage that had commenced in a most auspicious manner.”

“Life itself, in fact, with its storms and its greatnesses, its monotony and its variety, becomes a sort of tragic epitome; and that, perhaps, is why we enjoy with a fevered haste and an intensified delight this short voyage of which we see the end at the very moment when we embark upon”

“Allí donde la fuerza fracasa - se dijo-, la astucia triunfa.”

“I shall not be present at my trial.”

“So much the better if no one can ever say with absolute certainty: There is Arsene Lupin! The essential point is that the public may be able to refer to my work and say, without fear of mistake: Arsene Lupin did that!”

“Now!” exclaimed Lupin. “I am going to take a rest, feed myself up, and gradually become myself again. It’s all very well to be Baudru or another, to change your personality as you would your boots, and to select your appearance, your voice, your expression, your handwriting. But there comes a time when you cease to know yourself amid all these changes, and that is very sad. I feel at present as the man must have felt who lost his shadow. I am going to look for myself… and to find myself”

“His likeness? How can I trace it? I have seen Arsène Lupin a score of times, and each time a different being has stood before me… or rather the same being under twenty distorted images reflected by as many mirrors, each image having its special eyes, its particular facial outline, its own gestures, profile, and character.

“I myself,” he once said to me, “have forgotten what I am really like. I no longer recognize myself in a glass.”

A paradoxical whim of the imagination, no doubt; and yet true enough as regards those who come into contact with him, and who are unaware of his infinite resources, his patience, his unparalleled skill in make-up, and his prodigious faculty for changing even the proportions of his face and altering the relations of his features one to the other.

“Why,” he asked, “should I have a definite, fixed appearance? Why not avoid the dangers attendant upon a personality that is always the same? My actions constitute my identity sufficiently.”

And he added, with a touch of pride:

“It is all the better if people are never able to say with certainty: ‘There goes Arsène Lupin.’ The great thing is that they should say without fear of being mistaken: ‘That action was performed by Arsène Lupin.”

“He acted like a ruined man whose only hope is suicide.”