But before everything he told himself, the repose and happiness of Clarice! He respected his wife. That she should be, and that she should know herself to be the wife of a thief, that he could not allow.
Their happiness lasted five years; at the beginning of the sixth year Clarice died in giving birth to a son called Jean.
The very day after her death that son disappeared, without the slightest clue which allowed Ralph to discover who had entered the little house at Auteuil in which he lived or how they had been able to enter it.
As for the matter of guessing whose hand had struck the blow, there was no need to hesitate about that. Ralph, who had never doubted that the drowning of the two cousins had been brought about by the Countess of Cagliostro, Ralph, who yet later had learned that Dominique had died of poison, Ralph regarded it as settled that the Countess of Cagliostro was the author of the abduction. His grief transformed him. Having no longer either wife or son to restrain him, he flung himself with all his heart into the course to which so many forces impelled him. From that day on he was Arsène Lupin. There was no longer any reservation, any compromise. On the contrary: scandals, challenges, arrogance, an unbridled display of vanity and mockery, his name written on the walls, his visiting-card in strong-rooms. Arsène Lupin, what!
But whether he was passing under this name or under any other of the different names it pleased him to assume, whether he called himself Count Bernard d’Andresy (he had stolen the papers of a cousin of his family, who had died abroad) or Horace Velmont, or Colonel Sparmiento, or the Duke of Charmerace, or Prince Sernine, or Don Luis Perenna, always and everywhere, in all his avatars and beneath all his masks, he hunted for the Countess of Cagliostro, he hunted for his son Jean. He did not find his son. He never saw Josephine again. Was she still alive? Did she dare to risk entering France? Did she continue to persecute and to kill? Could he admit, considering what she was, that the menace eternally held over him since the very moment of their rupture would not take effect in some vengeance yet more cruel than the abduction of his son?
All the life of Arsène Lupin, wild enterprises, superhuman trials, unheard of triumphs, unmeasured passions extravagant ambitions, all these had to run their course before events permitted him to answer this formidable question.
And so it came about that his first adventure linked itself, more than a quarter of a century later, to the adventure which it pleases him to consider to-day his last.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] The first enigma was solved by a young girl (see “The Secret Tomb,” by Maurice Leblanc). The two next were solved by Arsène Lupin (see “The Island of the Thirty Shrouds” and “The Hollow Needle”). The solving of the fourth is the theme of this book.
[B] Hitherto none of the biographies of Josephine have given any explanation of the fact that she in a way fled from Fontainebleau. Only Monsieur Frederic Masson, scenting the truth, writes: “Perhaps one day some letter will be found which will demonstrate the physical necessity of this departure.”