Piratical capitalists were becoming a popular mark. Jeff Peters maintains that his partner is so dishonest he couldn’t trace his family tree any farther back than a corporation. By the 1920s another deft disguise artist, Edgar Wallace’s Four Square Jane, was robbing “people with bloated bank balances” and donating “very large sums to all kinds of charities.” Lupin laments the greediness of the middle class and sometimes claims to be performing a public service.

“Take him for all in all,” said Leblanc of his character, “there is more good in him than in some rich lords and barons.” In one of these stories—it would be unfair to name it, because the discovery arrives toward the end—we glimpse the formative youth of our hero. Naturally he began his career with a spectacular burglary at a precocious age, and naturally we sympathize with his motive.

On the slippery slope of morality, just downhill from disrespect for bourgeois values lies disdain for authority. Wallace’s clever Jane doesn’t hesitate to taunt the police with telegrams a la Lupin: “Please take all precautions. Don’t let me escape this time.” Clearly men were not the only ones having unlawful fun. Frederick Irving Anderson’s protagonists include the jewel thief Sophie Lang, who was incarnated in three 1930s movies before the Hays Office declared that no criminals would profit from their crimes on wholesome American screens. Roy Vick-ers, now remembered mostly for his Department of Dead Ends stories, wrote of his thief character Fidelity Dove, “There was a spirit of sportsmanship, of fun, even in Fidelity’s most hazardous exploits.”

Perhaps the best statement of felonious bravado was made in the 1930s, by Leslie Charteris, creator of Simon Templar, alias the Saint—the only fictional character worthy of inheriting the mantle of Lupin. Charteris’s remark could have been about his French ancestor: “The Law, in the Saint’s opinion, was a stodgy and elephantine institution which was chiefly justified in its existence by the pleasantly musical explosive noises it made when he broke it.”

It is worth noting, however, that such outlaw notions were not exclusive to criminals. Their opponents could be equally autonomous. In the first Sherlock Holmes story, Holmes asks Watson, “You don’t mind breaking the law?”

And his sidekick casually replies, “Not in the least.”

ALMOST LITERATURE

By the second decade of the century, the already famous Leblanc was spending most of his year in Passy, an exclusive Right Bank neighborhood in the affluent Sixteenth Arrondisement. He wrote in a shed in his garden. It held a work table and chairs, an inkwell and pens, and had only three walls, leaving the fourth side open to the elements. Even in cold weather, gloved, muffled to the ears, Leblanc could be found in the shed writing. But no one was supposed to go looking for him there; he was not to be disturbed.

Summers Leblanc spent near Honfleur on the Normandy coast, across the narrow mouth of the Seine estuary from the larger and more bustling Le Havre. A medieval port, Honfleur had become over the last half-century a favorite haunt of Courbet, Renoir, and other painters. Just upriver was Tancar-ville, where Leblanc stayed at the chateau with his wife and son. The area boasted Norman towers and a Roman amphitheater, and not far away were the Bayeux tapestry and Rouen Cathedral—and the site, three decades later, of the D-Day invasions. Leblanc loved this history-drenched region of apple orchards and half-timbered houses. “I have some Italian blood in my veins,” he sighed, “but here at Tancarville I am Norman— only Norman.” He set many Lupin adventures in Normandy.

At the chateau Leblanc kept his muse obedient by following the routine he had established in Paris. He went so far as to have a shed built like the one he used in his city garden, and of course he surrounded it with the same strict privacy. In Normandy, however, his view extended across the fields and marsh to the slowly meandering river. When not working he still avoided most of the chateau life. His bedroom was in an isolated building, the Tour de l’Aigle, the “Eagle’s Tower,” which had been constructed a century before out of stones from the castle. About five every afternoon he went into his bedroom and closed the curtains and—in total darkness, he claimed—thought through his next day’s work.

But the popular author was no recluse. In August 1912 the English critic and dramatist Charles Henry Meltzer journeyed across the channel to meet with Leblanc at his summer home, and the following spring he described this encounter in the British magazine Cosmopolitan. Meltzer is careful to establish from his opening sentence that an interest in fictional roguery is not unworthy of a cultured gentleman. “Crime,” he intones, “has at all times charmed the loftiest minds.” As evidence he invokes Macbeth and Crime and Punishment and even Shelley’s Cenci, although each involves homicide rather than larceny. He could have cited even Daniel’s astute cross-examination of the elders who slander Susannah. We have always written about crime; the Code of Hammurabi is older than the Odyssey.

By the time that Meltzer visited him, Leblanc had already published two collections—Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar in 1907 and Arsène Lupin Contre Herlock Sholmes in 1908.