Arsène Lupin: In the 1905 Story, the Narrator Is Lupin

Who tells “L'Arrestation d'Arsène Lupin”?

The story is told in the first person by a passenger on the liner Provence. The other passengers call him Monsieur d'Andrézy, and he is on good terms with the captain. When Nelly Underdown, a Chicago heiress raised in Paris, asks whether he knows anything about Lupin, he offers to run the inquiry himself.

« Je ne sais rien de précis, mademoiselle, lui répondis-je, mais est-il impossible de conduire nous-mêmes notre enquête, tout aussi bien que le ferait le vieux Ganimard, l'ennemi personnel d'Arsène Lupin ? »

written by Maurice Leblanc · Je sais tout, no. 6, July 1905, p. 709

In this site's rendering, he tells her that he knows nothing definite, but asks why the passengers should not run their own inquiry as well as old Ganimard, Lupin's personal enemy, would. Then he takes the passenger list from his pocket and narrows thirteen first-class names beginning with R down to one: Rozaine, a quiet young man.

The narrator tells all this after the events. As the liner reaches port, he says that if he lived a hundred years he would not forget the smallest detail of that moment, which places the telling after the crossing. So the voice already knows how the story ends. It belongs to the man the whole ship is hunting, and the reader has nothing else to go on.

He also gives himself a past. On page 713, as the American coast comes into view, he explains that the Andrézy family comes of good Poitou stock with a slightly faded coat of arms, and that a gentleman may fairly dream of restoring its lustre. Every word of that family history comes from a man whose name, by Ganimard's account a few paragraphs later, belonged to someone who died three years earlier in Macedonia.

Which printings are checked here?

The first printing is in Je sais tout, a monthly magazine published in Paris by Pierre Lafitte. Its catalogue record at the Bibliothèque nationale de France starts the numbering with no. 1, dated 15 February 1905, so the sixth issue falls in July 1905. The table of contents of the magazine's 1905 volume lists “L'Arrestation d'Arsène Lupin” on page 708, and the story runs to page 714. French Wikisource's list of Leblanc's work in the magazine agrees with that count: no. 6, dated 15 July 1905.

The second printing is the book Arsène Lupin, gentleman-cambrioleur, published by Pierre Lafitte et Cie in 1907 with a preface by Jules Claretie. The BnF records it as one volume of 307 pages, and the book collects nine stories, the first of which is “L'Arrestation d'Arsène Lupin.” Claretie's preface says the character first appeared in Je sais tout, and French Wikisource's list of Leblanc's work there has no Lupin title before this one, so it is the earliest Lupin story known to this page.

The book is read here in the Project Gutenberg text, which follows the 1907 edition. Leblanc lived from 1864 to 1941 and Claretie from 1840 to 1913, according to the German national authority file.

The five dates and their sources, as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: Five printings, Once Upon a Version, 2026-11-03

The Lupin quotations are in French, from the 1905 pages or the 1907 book text, each followed by this site's English rendering; Hornung's are from the Project Gutenberg text of The Amateur Cracksman. The 1909 novel appears only through its frontispiece, which is used above because no illustration of the 1905 story could be used here: the 1905 drawing is signed Georges Leroux, and a painter of that name in the German authority file died in 1957, so the drawing may still be under copyright in France and Germany.

What does the passenger keep in his pocket?

This site uses the narrator's pocket for whatever a story has not yet handed to the reader, and each item is sorted into one of three kinds. Not yet known means the narrator does not know it yet either; delayed means the narrator knows it by the time of telling but lets it arrive in the order he met it; concealed means he knew it at the time and keeps it back on purpose.

Seven items are tracked in “L'Arrestation d'Arsène Lupin,” from the wireless message to the arrest. Six are concealed: the narrator knew each one while the crossing was going on. One is delayed: the choice Nelly makes on the gangway, which he could not know until she made it. None is not yet known.

The seven pocket items, with French wording and pages, as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: The passenger's pocket, Once Upon a Version, 2026-11-03

Several of the concealed items are in plain sight: the wireless message on page 709 says the thief has a wound on his right forearm, and Ganimard strikes the narrator there on page 713. On page 712 the narrator shows Nelly his camera and asks whether a box no bigger than “un appareil pas plus grand que celui-ci” could not hold all of Lady Jerland's jewels. In this site's rendering, he asks whether a camera no bigger than this one could not hold them, and in the end it does.

Whether the story plays fair with its reader depends on which kind of item a clue belongs to. The wound and the camera are true and are given early, so a careful reader holds them as long as the narrator does. On page 710 the narrator even notices that Rozaine has shown his left arm, not his right, and then lets a sudden commotion carry the point away. The clues are on the page, but the voice that reports them never says what they mean.

Other items are steered. On page 712 the narrator says that when he watched Rozaine, he thought of the “double rôle que tenait sans doute ce curieux personnage,” the double part this odd man was no doubt playing, although he knew that Rozaine was playing no part at all. That sentence is the clearest case of concealment in the story, because it is the narrator's own comment, not a line spoken to deceive Nelly.

The same device works the other way in Poe's “Rue Morgue,” where the narrator's pocket holds delayed facts, not concealed ones. Poe's unnamed narrator knows the answer only because he tells the case afterwards, and the page on that story counts no concealed items among the 16 it traces. Leblanc's narrator is the culprit, so the facts he keeps back were his from the start.

What did the 1907 book add?

Set the two printings side by side and the narration is close to identical. The edges are not. The 1905 page stops on Lupin's last words to Ganimard, followed by the author's name. The 1907 book keeps that line and then lets a new voice speak.

The frame runs on for seven more paragraphs, three of them short lines spoken by Lupin, in which the friend says he has seen Lupin twenty times and seen a different man each time, and he ends by calling the book's adventures ones he is trying to piece together from Lupin's confidences.

The first of Lupin's three lines is “Moi-même, me dit-il, je ne sais plus bien qui je suis.” In this site's rendering, Lupin tells the friend that even he no longer quite knows who he is. The question of identity that the passenger kept hidden for the length of a crossing is handed to Lupin himself, and the frame leaves it open.

The 1905 printing has no frame at all. Apart from picture captions and one subheading, the only words outside the passenger's narration are a headnote that the magazine printed in bold under the title, calling the piece “le récit que nous publions,” the account we are publishing. Only these two printings are compared here, and the later Lupin stories in the magazine are not checked, so this page does not say whether the frame was printed anywhere before 1907.

Other changes are smaller. In the opening, after a first paragraph that both printings share, the magazine needs 48 more words to reach the wireless message and the book needs 334, much of it on the strangeness of a ship still tied to land by wireless.

Lupin's calling card, left at a baron's house, reads « Reviendrai quand les meubles seront authentiques » in 1905, and gains a signature in 1907: « Arsène Lupin, gentleman-cambrioleur, reviendra quand les meubles seront authentiques », borrowing the phrase that is also the book's subtitle. In this site's rendering, the 1905 card says he will come back when the furniture is genuine, and the 1907 card has Arsène Lupin, gentleman burglar, say the same.

Neither printing is “the” story, since each is what this site calls a one-evening text, a dated witness with its own wording. All seven pocket items appear in both. In this site's studio terms, the book is a second pressing with one new voice on it.

Who tells the other eight stories in the 1907 book?

After the first story, the book does not keep Lupin in the narrator's seat. Two of the nine stories are told by Lupin in the first person, one is told by the friend, and six are told by a voice outside the action. In three of those six, the friend still steps in to say “I,” in an aside or a closing frame.

The nine stories and who tells them, as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: Who tells the nine Lupin stories of 1907, Once Upon a Version, 2026-11-03

Lupin narrates again in “Le Mystérieux Voyageur,” the fourth story, but gives himself away early: bound and robbed on a train, he says “moi, Arsène Lupin!” In this site's rendering, he marvels that the man left tied up on the seat was he, Arsène Lupin. The line comes 26.7 percent of the way into the story's words. In the first story, Ganimard's question comes 82.2 percent of the way in, so only the first story keeps its teller hidden into the last fifth of its words.

The friend tells “Le Sept de cœur” himself, and it opens with a question he says he has often been asked, namely how he came to know Arsène Lupin. He calls himself Lupin's “historiographe,” his historian, and only near the end does he say that his club friend Jean Daspry was Lupin. The ninth story brings an English detective named Herlock Sholmès to a château, where Lupin goes by the name Velmont.

In two of the third-person stories, “Le Coffre-fort de Madame Imbert” and “La Perle noire,” Lupin's own voice comes back after the events, inside quotation marks. The friend says he had the story of the safe from Lupin himself, “un jour qu'il était en veine de confidence,” on a day when Lupin was in a confiding mood. The pearl story closes with Lupin explaining to the friend how the affair was done, so the book keeps letting Lupin tell, but from inside the friend's frame.

Claretie's preface quotes the writer Marcel L'Heureux on one difference between the Lupin stories and those of Sherlock Holmes.

« ici, nous savons d'avance qu'Arsène Lupin est le coupable »

written by Jules Claretie, quoting Marcel L'Heureux · preface to Arsène Lupin, gentleman-cambrioleur (Paris: Pierre Lafitte, 1907)

In this site's rendering: here, we know in advance that Arsène Lupin is the guilty one. Once readers know that, a narrator who turns out to be the thief can no longer surprise them in the same way, and in the book the hidden teller appears only once.

Motif grid: who tells the thief's story

The grid compares the ten Lupin texts checked here with Hornung's Raffles book on four features of the telling. Each feature has a written rule, in the definitions file, for what counts as present and what counts as transformed.

The grid, cell by cell with evidence, as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: Who tells the thief's story, Once Upon a Version, 2026-11-03

n = 11 texts checked: “L'Arrestation d'Arsène Lupin” in Je sais tout (1905) and in the 1907 book, the other eight stories of the 1907 book, and Hornung's The Amateur Cracksman (1899) as one row. Of the 44 cells, 13 are present, 8 transformed and 23 absent in the checked text; none is undetermined.

The four feature definitions, as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: Feature definitions, Once Upon a Version, 2026-11-03

What the texts do not share

The grid shows as many differences as likenesses: Hornung's friend, Bunny, narrates all eight Raffles stories; Leblanc's friend narrates one of nine. Raffles never narrates a whole story in the checked book, while Lupin narrates two. Only Leblanc's first story hides its teller, and it does so in both printings.

Both of Hornung's men have names, Raffles and Bunny, while the friend who speaks at the end of Leblanc's first story has none. The Lupin texts checked here never mention Raffles or Hornung, and none of the printings named here says that one writer borrowed from the other.

Raffles and Bunny, 1899: a thief told by his friend

Hornung's The Amateur Cracksman collects eight stories about Raffles, a gentleman cricketer who is also a burglar. They are told by Bunny, who was Raffles's junior at school and becomes his partner in the thefts. Hornung dedicated the book “TO A. C. D. THIS FORM OF FLATTERY.” In all eight stories, Bunny is the one who says “I” in the narration.

The first story begins with Bunny himself in trouble: “It was half-past twelve when I returned to the Albany as a last desperate resort.” He has come back to Raffles's rooms after losing at cards, and by the end of the night he has helped with a burglary. From the first page, then, this friend is a partner in the thefts rather than a bystander.

Bunny narrates as Watson does, from beside the central figure, and Raffles tells some of his own cases inside Bunny's narration. In one story Raffles even teases him about the future: “if ever you write my memoirs, you won't have any difficulty in working up that chase.” Leblanc's friend says much the same of himself in 1907: he is trying to piece Lupin's adventures together. In the book, though, he narrates only one of them himself.

Hornung's book came six years before Leblanc's 1905 story, and the two stories are compared here only as two arrangements of a thief and a friend. For how far the friend's role reaches beyond thieves, the Watson page on this site counts it across sixty Holmes stories.

In the July 1905 pages of Je sais tout, Maurice Leblanc gave the last word of “L'Arrestation d'Arsène Lupin” to the thief himself, a sigh to Ganimard that it is a pity not to be an honest man. Two years later, in the Lafitte book, Leblanc let an unnamed friend speak after that sigh and claim the story as something Lupin had told him.