The Hollow Needle, Maurice Leblanc [fiction novels to read .TXT] 📗

that his father, before returning to his mountains in Savoy, should take a few months’ rest in the sunshine, and himself escorted him and Mlle. de Saint-Véran to the outskirts of Nice, where the Comte de Gesvres and his daughter Suzanne were already settled for the winter. Two days later, Valméras brought his mother to see his new friends and they thus composed a little colony grouped around the Villa de Gesvres and watched over day and night by half a dozen men engaged by the comte.

Early in October, Beautrelet, once more the sixth-form pupil, returned to Paris to resume the interrupted course of his studies and to prepare for his examinations. And life began again, calmer, this time, and free from incident. What could happen, for that matter. Was the war not over?

Lupin, on his side, must have felt this very clearly, must have felt that there was nothing left for him but to resign himself to the accomplished fact; for, one fine day, his two other victims, Ganimard and Holmlock Shears, made their reappearance. Their return to the life of this planet, however, was devoid of any sort of glamor or fascination. An itinerant rag-man picked them up on the Quai des Orfèvres, opposite the headquarters of police. Both of them were gagged, bound and fast asleep.

After a week of complete bewilderment, they succeeded in recovering the control of their thought and told⁠—or rather Ganimard told, for Shears wrapped himself in a fierce and stubborn silence⁠—how they had made a voyage of circumnavigation round the coast of Africa on board the yacht Hirondelle, a voyage combining amusement with instruction, during which they could look upon themselves as free, save for a few hours which they spent at the bottom of the hold, while the crew went on shore at outlandish ports.

As for their landing on the Quai des Orfèvres, they remembered nothing about it and had probably been asleep for many days before.

This liberation of the prisoners was the final confession of defeat. By ceasing to fight, Lupin admitted it without reserve.

One incident, moreover, made it still more glaring, which was the engagement of Louis Valméras and Mlle. de Saint-Véran. In the intimacy created between them by the new conditions under which they lived, the two young people fell in love with each other. Valméras loved Raymonde’s melancholy charm; and she, wounded by life, greedy for protection, yielded before the strength and energy of the man who had contributed so gallantly to her preservation.

The wedding day was awaited with a certain amount of anxiety. Would Lupin not try to resume the offensive? Would he accept with a good grace the irretrievable loss of the woman he loved? Twice or three times, suspicious-looking people were seen prowling round the villa; and Valméras even had to defend himself one evening against a so-called drunken man, who fired a pistol at him and sent a bullet through his hat. But, in the end, the ceremony was performed at the appointed hour and day and Raymonde de Saint-Véran became Mme. Louis Valméras.

It was as though Fate herself had taken sides with Beautrelet and countersigned the news of victory. This was so apparent to the crowd that his admirers now conceived the notion of entertaining him at a banquet to celebrate his triumph and Lupin’s overthrow. It was a great idea and aroused general enthusiasm. Three hundred tickets were sold in less than a fortnight. Invitations were issued to the public schools of Paris, to send two sixth-form pupils apiece. The press sang paeans. The banquet was what it could not fail to be, an apotheosis.

But it was a charming and simple apotheosis, because Beautrelet was its hero. His presence was enough to bring things back to their due proportion. He showed himself modest, as usual, a little surprised at the excessive cheering, a little embarrassed by the extravagant panegyrics in which he was pronounced greater than the most illustrious detectives⁠—a little embarrassed, but also not a little touched.

He said as much in a few words that pleased all his hearers and with the shyness of a child that blushes when you look at it. He spoke of his delight, of his pride. And really, reasonable and self-controlled as he was, this was for him a moment of never-to-be-forgotten exultation. He smiled to his friends, to his fellow-Jansonians, to Valméras, who had come specially to give him a cheer, to M. de Gesvres, to his father.

When he had finished speaking; and while he still held his glass in his hand, a sound of voices came from the other end of the room and someone was gesticulating and waving a newspaper. Silence was restored and the importunate person sat down again; but a thrill of curiosity ran round the table, the newspaper was passed from hand to hand and, each time that one of the guests cast his eyes upon the page at which it was opened, exclamations followed:

“Read it! Read it!” they cried from the opposite side.

The people were leaving their seats at the principal table. M. Beautrelet went and took the paper and handed it to his son.

“Read it out! Read it out!” they cried, louder.

And others said:

“Listen! He’s going to read it! Listen!”

Beautrelet stood facing his audience, looked in the evening paper which his father had given him for the article that was causing all this uproar and, suddenly, his eyes encountering a heading underlined in blue pencil, he raised his hand to call for silence and began in a loud voice to read a letter addressed to the editor by M. Massiban, of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres. His voice broke and fell, little by little, as he read those stupefying revelations, which reduced all his efforts to nothing, upset his notions concerning the Hollow Needle and proved the vanity of his struggle with Arsène Lupin:

Sir:

On the 17th of March, 1679, there appeared a little book with