My excuse for repeating these stories at this time is the fact that I produce the key to the enigma. Those adventures have always been enveloped in a certain degree of obscurity, which I now remove. I reproduce old newspaper articles, I relate old-time interviews, I present ancient letters; but I have arranged and classified all that material and reduced it to the exact truth. My collaborators in this work have been Arsène Lupin himself, and also the ineffable Wilson, the friend and confidant of Herlock Sholmes.
Every one will recall the tremendous burst of laughter which greeted the publication of those two telegrams. The name “Arsène Lupin” was in itself a stimulus to curiosity, a promise of amusement for the gallery. And, in this case, the gallery means the entire world.
An investigation was immediately commenced by the Crédit Foncier, which established these facts: That ticket No. 514, series 23, had been sold by the Versailles branch office of the Lottery to an artillery officer named Bessy, who was afterward killed by a fall from his horse. Some time before his death, he informed some of his comrades that he had transferred his ticket to a friend.
“And I am that friend,” affirmed Mon. Gerbois.
“Prove it,” replied the governor of the Crédit Foncier.
“Of course I can prove it. Twenty people can tell you that I was an intimate friend of Monsieur Bessy, and that we frequently met at the Café de la Place-d’Armes. It was there, one day, I purchased the ticket from him for twenty francs—simply as an accommodation to him.”
“Have you any witnesses to that transaction?”
“No.”
“Well, how do you expect to prove it?”
“By a letter he wrote to me.”