"I am Arsène Lupin. You must know the best part of what has happened from reading about it in the papers. Well, Florence Levasseur was kidnapped last night. I want to save her. What's your price?"
"Nothing."
"That's too much!"
"Perhaps, but the adventure amuses me. It will be an advertisement."
"Very well. But your silence is necessary until to-morrow. I'll buy it.
Here's twenty thousand francs."
Ten minutes later Don Luis was dressed in an airman's suit, cap, and goggles; and an aeroplane rose to a height of two thousand five hundred feet to avoid the air currents, flew above the Seine, and darted due west across France.
Versailles, Maintenon, Chartres….
Don Luis had never been up in an aeroplane. France had achieved the conquest of the air while he was fighting with the Legion and in the plains of the Sahara. Nevertheless, sensitive though he was to new impressions—and what more exciting impression could he have than this?—he did not experience the heavenly delight of the man who for the first time soars above the earth. What monopolized his thoughts, strained his nerves, and excited his whole being to an exquisite degree was the as yet impossible but inevitable sight of the motor which they were pursuing.
Amid the tremendous swarm of things beneath them, amid the unexpected din of the wings and the engine, in the immensity of the sky, in the infinity of the horizon, his eyes sought nothing but that, and his ears admitted no other sound than the hum of the invisible car. His were the mighty and brutal sensations of the hunter chasing his game. He was the bird of prey whom the distraught quarry has no chance of escaping.
Nogent-le-Rotrou, La Ferté-Bernard, Le Mans….