NE LUPIN

"Whose name will figure after ours?" he continued. "Alas, the list is
closed! From Caesar to Lupin--and there it ends. Soon the nameless mob
will come to visit the strange citadel. And to think that, but for
Lupin, all this would have remained for ever unknown to men! Ah
Beautrelet, what a feeling of pride was mine on the day when I first
set foot on this abandoned soil. To have found the lost secret and
become its master, its sole master! To inherit such an inheritance! To
live in the Needle, after all those kings!--"

He was interrupted by a gesture of his wife's. She seemed greatly
agitated.

"There is a noise," she said. "Underneath us.--You can hear it."

"It's the lapping of the water," said Lupin.

"No, indeed it's not. I know the sound of the waves. This is something
different."

"What would you have it be, darling?" said Lupin, smiling. "I invited
no one to lunch except Beautrelet." And, addressing the servant,
"Charolais, did you lock the staircase doors behind the gentleman?"

"Yes, sir, and fastened the bolts."

Lupin rose:

"Come, Raymonde, don't shake like that. Why, you're quite pale!"

He spoke a few words to her in an undertone, as also to the servant,
drew back the curtain and sent them both out of the room.

The noise below grew more distinct. It was a series of dull blows,
repeated at intervals. Beautrelet thought:

"Ganimard has lost patience and is breaking down the doors."

Lupin resumed the thread of his conversation, speaking very calmly and
as though he had really not heard:

"By Jove, the Needle was badly damaged when I succeeded in discovering
it! One could see that no one had possessed the secret for more than a
century, since Louis XVI. and the Revolution. The tunnel was
threatening to fall in. The stairs were in a shocking state. The water
was trickling in from the sea. I had to prop up and strengthen and
rebuild the whole thing."

Beautrelet could not help asking:

"When you arrived, was it empty?"

"Very nearly. The kings did not use the Needle, as I have done, as a
warehouse."

"As a place of refuge, then?"

"Yes, no doubt, in times of invasion and during the civil wars. But its
real destination was to be--how shall I put it?--the strong-room or the
bank of the kings of France."

The sound of blows increased, more distinctly now. Ganimard must have
broken down the first door and was attacking the second. There was a
short silence and then more blows,