“You appear to me, my dear fellow, to be enjoying yourself just like the fashionable folk, and you are the most ungrateful chap on earth to go on talking about ‘the cruelty of Fate’ and ‘the stings of Fortune’ and a heap of other unpleasant things. After all said and done, what is your present outlook? It is the month of May, surely, it is ten in the evening, the scene is as pretty as a picture, the night warm and fragrant, in one word it is the hour when the restaurants in the Bois are crammed with gay customers, the hour when it is exquisite to sup beneath the budding foliage, to roam the deserted walks, to saunter in this magnificent Bois de Boulogne, a park such as no other capital in the world possesses. Now, what have you been doing? what are you going to do? Halloa, my friend, I feel something in your pocket, hard and crumbly at the same time, that gives me all the impression of a crust of bread. So you’ve been dining in the Bois, my lad! And now what do you propose to do? Walk round the lake? Evidently you’ve forgotten your carriage and you’re going on foot; evidently again there’s every chance that, an hour from now, it won’t be a little, stuffy hotel you go back to, but the vast caravansérail that is lit by the stars of heaven. Still, you’re beginning your evening the same as the fashionables—dinner, promenade! And what’s to stop you dreaming, like any other innocent, that you are destined to-night to wed the fairest princess in all the world.”

As a matter of fact, the journalist’s condition showed no improvement. Since his interview with Tom Bob, he had had no occasion to renew acquaintance with the American detective, who, as the object of a hundred flattering attentions on the part of the Parisian population, seemed to him, all things considered, a decidedly dangerous personage to see much of, in view of the close relations maintained between him and the authorities. Fandor was now making a living by all sorts of queer odd jobs—risking his life opening carriage doors on the occasion of grand weddings at fashionable churches, of selling evening papers on the boulevards, picking up a few sous by casual labour at the Halles, just enough to keep body and soul together. Nevertheless, he would not have been over and above disquieted by his precarious situation but for the fact that public opinion had little by little come round to the preposterous belief that he, Fandor, was, if not Fantômas, at any rate one of the chief accomplices of that dangerous criminal, now a prisoner in the Santé. This easy, blockhead theory the whole police force had adopted, and every journal was proclaiming.

At a time when Fantômas, with unheard-of effrontery, was committing crime after crime, when the most appalling murders had grown so common that the public, seriously alarmed, were asking themselves if it was not best to pay Fantômas the tithes he claimed, at such a time Fandor told himself that the view which represented him as the guilty party had every chance of finding favour, just because it possessed the merit of being simple to the last degree!

“Once let them catch me,” he thought, “and it’ll be short shrift and no mercy for me!”

But what precisely was Tom Bob doing? On what lines was he pursuing his investigations against Fantômas? As to this, Fandor was very much in the dark. Like the general public, he had read in the newspapers of the sensational discovery of the bank collector’s body which the American detective had succeeded in making in Elisabeth Dollon’s flat. Fandor, like everybody else, more perhaps than most, for he knew the difficulties that beset police researches, had felt a profound admiration for the astuteness the American had given proof of on that occasion.

“No doubt,” Fandor said to himself, “I put him on the scent when I told him about Moche, but all said and done, I had no information to give him of a sort to lead him to the discovery of the victim. The line of reasoning that took him to Elisabeth’s, that brought about the finding of the ‘wall that bleeds,’ after rousing his suspicions of Paulet, this reasoning was purely his own and it is marvellous in all respects.”

He had even added in his self-communings:

“If my fine fellow goes on as he has begun, I verily believe Fantômas will have found his match!”

It was the sole gleam of hope still left to Jérôme Fandor.

“Ho there! my man.”

“M’sieu?”

“What d’ye mean, strolling about like that? You’re a gentleman of means, eh?”

“No, m’sieu, I’m strolling because ...”

“Right oh! D’ye care to earn six sous an hour? you know how to hold a shovel?”

“Yes, m’sieu; yes, I’m willing.”

“Come with me then!”

The man who had hailed Fandor, as the journalist was finishing his circuit of the lake and had now reached the Racing Club enclosure, was evidently a roadman of the city of Paris. He wore the flat, silver-laced cap of the roads department, he had the heavy gait of an employé in that service, and the same good-natured look:

“There’s a fête to-morrow?” Fandor asked.

“And a smart one, I can tell you, my lad! a fête on the lake in honour of I don’t know what good Dutch folks, who are paying an official visit to Paris. Seems they’re going to take ’em on the water. It’s the municipality gives the show. Now I got my notice only just in time; so I’ve not been able to get my men together, and I’m glad enough to find outsiders like you to give a hand.”

“What is it you want done?” queried Fandor, delighted at the opportunity that offered of earning a few sous.

“You’ll soon see,” the other replied with a shrug. “It’s not difficult and it’s not fatiguing. At this end of the road coming from the Pré Catalan—you know, the road that joins the one round the lake yonder—we’re removing the wire fencing that divides the avenue from the grass lawns that border the lake all round. We’re taking up the curb of the roadway, too. The turf’s to be dug up and laid down again at the sides; in fact, we’re making a road, so to say, going straight down to the water’s edge, so as the grandees may get out of their carriages at the very same spot where they’re to get into the boats. You see, don’t you, we couldn’t begin the works yesterday evening, nor yet this morning, nor even this afternoon, because that would block the regular road.”

What cared Jérôme Fandor for these details? He followed the head roadman and soon reached the roadway that was to be carried on right up to the very edge of the lake. There, by the light of acetylene lamps fixed on tall standards, a whole crew of labourers was busily engaged.

“Stand to!” shouted the ganger, “I’m bringing you a new chum, find him some easy work.” A second ganger came running up, and looked Fandor up and down, then:

“You’re not a roadman? no? You don’t understand gardening, neither? so much the worse! I am going to use you for digging up the road then. Come this way.” He led Fandor to the middle of the causeway that goes round the lake.

Fandor nodded his comprehension and waiting till the other had finished, asked:

“Then my job is to pick up the sods and lay ’em down side by side across the road round the lake? so as to extend the grass lawn?”

“That’s the ticket, my lad! and try to work lively, won’t you?”

Fandor had been at work ten minutes when another man, an engineer most likely, appeared from behind a clump of trees; he was elegantly, yet quietly dressed. Hailing one of the gangers:

“You’ve got men enough now?” he asked.

The other looked doubtful: “H’m; it’s a near thing, especially as we’ve got to be finished by midnight! I’ve had to enlist casual labour—chaps that were getting ready for a night under the trees. There’s nothing wrong about that, I suppose?”

“Let me have a look at them!”

A second or two later the ganger who had enlisted Fandor came up to the journalist, who was working away very hard and conscientiously, all alone, away from the other roadmen. He stared at him for a minute without a word.

“You don’t know how to work, my man,” he said at last, “it’s not worth twopence, what you’re doing!”

“But, sir,” protested Fandor, very much surprised; “I’m doing my best.”

“No, you’re no good at all and now the chief has been jawing me for taking on outsiders. Here, here’s forty sous; clear out!”

There was nothing to be said; moreover, the instant he had fingered his forty sous, a fortune in his present plight, Fandor lost all interest in the work on hand, good, bad or indifferent.

“Right you are, sir!” was all he said, “I’m off; many thanks all the same”—and slipping the two franc piece in his pocket, he walked away, pursued by the foreman’s scrutinizing and suspicious gaze.

Scarcely had he disappeared before the engineer—it was evidently he who had ordered his dismissal—again appeared from among the shadows. He advanced to the shore of the lake, nodding familiarly to the men working there, and on reaching the water’s edge, gave a shrill, short, sharp whistle, then stood quite still, waiting. The night was dark, without moon or stars. In a few seconds after he had blown his whistle, there showed up on the dark waters of the lake a shadowy, fantastic shape. It was indistinctly seen at first, but it approached so rapidly that very soon it became easy to make out what it was—a boat of rubber, a collapsible boat such as explorers use. A man was on board, rowing silently and soundlessly. Soon the figure grew plainer and its outline could be vaguely discerned, the boat was entering the zone illuminated by the acetylene flares.

Then the mysterious rower rose to his feet. What would Fandor’s feelings have been, had he been there to see? The man who stood in this mysterious craft, who was approaching this scene of impromptu road-making, issuing from the impenetrable shadows of the lake, was clad from head to foot in a suit of black-close-fitting tights. His shoulders were draped in a dark cloak, the face was invisible behind a cowl, a black mask!

A figure of horror, a very incarnation of crime, a form of terror without a name! It was the form of Fantômas, come in the night to inspect the work of the roadmen engaged in preparations for to-morrow’s fête!

This evening the place was even more brilliantly lighted than usual. The papers had made much of the coming festivity; in celebration of a treaty of Commerce signed the previous week, the English Ambassador was paying this compliment to his colleague the Ambassador of Russia. Dinner was served at separate little tables. It was past midnight, the meal was almost over and conversation was more animated than ever.

Apart from the other guests, at a table set at a distance from the others, sat dining quite alone a very beautiful woman, of an irreproachable elegance and one who, better still than Sonia Danidoff, could claim the rank of Royal Highness. The waiters named her to each other with baited breath: “Her Highness the Grand Duchess Alexandra.” It was in fact the haughty great lady, friend of Frederick Christian IV, King of Hesse-Weimar, the proud lady whom Juve and Fandor, and they alone, knew to be in reality the enigmatic Lady Beltham, the mistress of Fantômas!

Already the grand duchess was thinking of taking her departure when of a sudden, as if drawn by some surprising vision, she half sprang up, then with a quick recoil threw herself back into the shadows, as though terrified and yet more anxious than before to shun observation. Bowing low in courteous greeting to one and another acquaintance, a man of slim, well-knit figure and elegant bearing had joined the circle formed by the official guests. His name passed from lip to lip, and he was welcomed with a chorus of friendly and admiring exclamations, sometimes marked by just a touch of raillery:

“Tom Bob! why how late you are. What, have you been hunting till this hour of the night for your strange enemy, the ever evasive Fantômas?”

But while the sound of that dreaded name still broke the stillness of the summer evening, while the Grand Duchess Alexandra, Lady Beltham in reality, still shuddered to hear her lover’s name pronounced, gaiety quickly resumed its sway among the other guests.

“My dear,” remarked a tall young woman, a trifle eccentric in appearance and manner, a Russian who, report said, had been involved in a highly diverting scandal, “My dear, you are sad?” But the Princess Sonia Danidoff, to whom the words were spoken, shook her head with a smile:

“No, you are mistaken; I am not sad, but I am thinking.”

“Thinking of what?”

At the little table where the two pretty women were conversing, there sat, among several attachés of the Embassies, the wealthy young Englishman, Mr. Ascott, who now followed up the question addressed to the beautiful princess.

“Princess,” he said, “we cannot long allow you to remain so self-absorbed, so serious, on so lovely a night as this and at so delightful a fête.”

“So, sir, if you can prevent my being sad, for it appears I am sad, I gladly give you my permission to try. But I am very much afraid you will find it difficult to make me merry.”

“That depends,” returned the Englishman; “tell us, if it may be, the wish you have in your mind. All here, I make bold to say, are gallant gentlemen. At the risk of attempting the impossible, we will use every effort to give it satisfaction. I even notice by the smile on my friend Tom Bob’s face, and you know a police-officer rarely smiles, he admits that to please you nothing is impossible. It is a guarantee that, if we fail in our desire to banish your depression, it will be no fault of ours.”

The Princess Danidoff was opening her lips to reply when her friend stopped her.

“Gentlemen,” she said, “I think Sonia will forgive me for my indiscretion, if I betray the secret of her melancholy; Sonia Danidoff, kinswoman of the Tsar, enormously rich, pretty enough to make all the women on this earth jealous, Sonia Danidoff, good sirs, is preoccupied simply and solely because she is ... bored! Nay, do not protest; it is not that your society has displeased her! But Sonia, I know, finds life flat, stale and unprofitable; Sonia dreams of a great passion, of romantic love, such love as is hardly to be found in our times, such as she has hardly a chance of inspiring. And so Sonia is profoundly homesick. Now you are fairly warned!” With a wave of her slim, white hand: “Never believe that scatterbrain,” the princess protested; “I am not so ... romantic.”

A burst of laughter had greeted the statements of the young Russian; now all were listening to a charming, an exquisite Neapolitan boat-song.

But Tom Bob’s attention was not with the music. Quitting his seat—it was nearly two in the morning and the men were trifling with Egyptian cigarettes—he had come to lean over the back of the fair princess’s chair.

“Princess,” he was saying, “why do you refuse to seek a love a little more original, which means a little more real, than that commonly met with? I do not think that so absurd a quest.”

“Sir,” she made answer, “you speak strangely. So you believe in love?”

“I do, madam,” replied the American, “and the more profoundly, and it may be the more sadly, as this very evening I have been a witness of the birth of two sentiments, one a half indifferent attraction, the other a genuine passion.”

“What reason for sadness in that, sir?”

“Every reason, for I am much afraid that these two sentiments will end in sadness and disillusionment.”

For a moment the princess sat silent, puzzled, hesitating. At last she spoke with an affectation of haughtiness such as every woman knows how to assume:

“I do not understand you very well, sir. You speak in riddles. I am a Russian, you an American. I beg you use some other dialect than Parisian ‘blague’; be more explicit.”

With a quick glance, Tom Bob made sure there was no listener to pay heed to his talk with the fascinating princess. The Neapolitan singers had been succeeded by a bevy of quaint step-dancers, whom all the company was attentively watching.

Reassured on this point, Tom Bob, intoxicated perhaps by the beauty of the night, perhaps crazed by Sonia Danidoff’s loveliness, charmed no doubt by the sympathy she had never ceased to lavish on him throughout this after-dinner talk, resolved to burn his boats:

“You do not understand, madam,” he resumed, “you surprise me! I imagine you have not failed to notice the marked attentions, to say no more, paid you by our common friend, M. Ascott? Oh! never deny it, madam! To-night, as indeed he does habitually, M. Ascott has made the most determined efforts to win your favour.”

There was almost a touch of mockery in the words, and Sonia Danidoff was too quick-witted not to catch the other’s drift.

“I do not think, madam ... I hope.”

And with these two little words which meant so much, which were equivalent to the most formal of declarations, Tom Bob, like a well-advised suitor, aware that a man must never demand an answer but always wait till it is offered, made his bow to the princess and walked away.

“I am going to call your carriage,” he said.

The company was, in fact, rising from table; it was growing very chilly and the time was come to think of quitting the Bois for the city. Everywhere the guests were exchanging farewells, then the women of fashion, escorted by their cavaliere servente, made for their elegant broughams or sumptuous automobiles. All were leaving, and leaving all at the same time, to return together as far as the barrier of the Porte Dauphine, when the final adieux would be exchanged.

All together? No, not so. There was one fair lady, at any rate, who did not intend to make one of the merry crowd. Indeed, the Grand Duchess Alexandra showed not the slightest desire to quit the table at which she had sat from the very beginning of the evening, isolated, sullen almost! She had never ceased her watch of the official guests, and above all had not failed to mark the flattering attentions and manifestations of sympathy lavished everywhere on Tom Bob. Now her eyes were fixed askance on the Princess Sonia Danidoff, the acknowledged queen of the festivity, as she took the arm the detective offered. The white teeth of the Grand Duchess Alexandra were nervously biting her lip. The noble lady was doubtless thinking with acute agitation how she was the mistress of Fantômas and that this hero of the hour was the very same man who had sworn to bring her lover to the scaffold!

But it was high time to be gone, and the grand duchess summoned her chasseur.

“Call up my car,” she ordered, “but tell my chauffeur he is carefully to avoid returning with the rest of the company; he is to drive by the less frequented roads. I do not care to be compelled to greet all these folks, who, luckily, have so far neither seen nor recognized me.”

“Your Highness’s chauffeur,” he said, “has to inform your Highness that an accident has happened to the car; he is busy repairing the damage, but it will take a good half-hour. Your Highness does not wish me to go for a hired carriage?”

The Grand Duchess Alexandra, or rather Lady Beltham, seemed to hesitate a few moments. She cast a dark and venomous look of suddenly awakened anger in the direction of the last lingering guests mounting their vehicles, then quickly:

“No, I am in no hurry. Tell the chauffeur to do the repairs, and come and tell me when all’s ready”—and the footman vanished once more.

“You are infinitely obliging, madam, to offer to drive me back to Paris. Instead of sitting sad and solitary in a hired conveyance, it is no small happiness for me to journey a few minutes in your company and enjoy, with no unbearable third party present, the favour you are so amiable as to show me.”

In fact, as Sonia Danidoff was on the way to her limousine, hanging on Tom Bob’s arm, the princess had observed that the latter, having no conveyance of his own, would be obliged to get back to Paris alone as best he might, and there and then she had made the offer: “Come, won’t you get into my car? You can drive with me to the house, then they’ll set you down at your destination.”

Tom Bob, needless to say, jumped at the offer, delighted to seize the opportunity of so charming a tête à tête. And soon the princess and he were talking amicably together, while their car sped through the deserted Bois along the road, lit up for a dozen yards ahead by the glare of the acetylene lamps on the bonnet. They talked, let it be said, of indifferent subjects, the American carefully avoiding any reference, however casual, to the declaration of love he had ventured to make a moment before, and Sonia feigning not to have understood his meaning.

“You ...”

But at the very instant Sonia Danidoff was in act to reply, a cry of horror and anguished fear escaped her lips, while for his part, Tom Bob could hardly restrain a startled oath.

What had happened? Impossible for the occupants of the cars to perceive in the bewilderment of the moment! What blunder had the chauffeur made to provoke the accident? Suddenly, without any diminution of speed, without even any application of the brakes to slow up the pace, the four first cars following the road from the Pré Catalan had plunged into the lake of the Bois de Boulogne!

Fortunately the lake is not very deep. Still, the danger was serious that confronted those who found themselves thus involved in so sudden a shipwreck. The women were muffled in their cloaks, the men hampered with their great coats; moreover, the cars had been pitched almost one on top of the other, and cries of terrified bewilderment rose on all sides.

Inside Sonia’s limousine events followed each other with dramatic swiftness. Tom Bob, a marvel of presence of mind, a miracle of coolness, had not lost his head for an instant. The moment the princess broke off to scream, the moment he felt the ground slip from under the wheels, he realized what was happening. In a flash he concluded at first that the princess’s driver, deceived by the darkness, had misjudged his turn, and cried out instinctively:

“We are over.”

But the limousine itself was struck heavily by the car behind, and the detective and the princess were thrown forward and bruised against the sides. Then the whole horror of the situation was revealed. Sonia had fainted, and the dark, surging waters of the lake were pouring into the vehicle in icy torrents through the broken windows. The limousine was sinking!

There, the wildest confusion reigned. The first four cars had plunged in one on top of the other; fortunately those following, being a short distance behind, had been able to brake and pull up in time. At the cries of the drivers all with one accord had sprung to the ground, and were now asking names, counting numbers, uttering exclamations of surprise and fear. The panic was indescribable.

It was indeed a most lucky chance there was no fatality to deplore. Sonia’s car, the first in the line, was as a matter of fact the only one that, by reason of its speed, had rolled far enough into the lake to be half submerged. The drivers of the vehicles behind, seeing the accident, had sheered off to one side, had more or less jammed down their brakes and, thanks to their reduced speed, had been able, not indeed to avoid the disaster altogether, but at any rate to diminish its ill consequences. The cars had come to a stand on the very verge of the water.

Help was soon organized, and brave men sprang into the lake to the rescue. Half an hour after the catastrophe, it could be said for certain that it would have no very serious sequel, apart of course, from any effects that might ensue on the violent agitation all had experienced, and the painful bruises some of these “shipwrecked mariners” had received. Only the Princess Sonia Danidoff, imprisoned in a vehicle that had actually sunk, was ever in positive danger of death; and so, when the first bewilderment was over, it was round the young Russian lady that the crowd gathered thickest, questioning and congratulating.

Meanwhile Tom Bob, his brow knit in anxious thought, had drawn some of the men apart and was demonstrating to them the causes of the accident.

Tom Bob was going to say more when suddenly a cry burst on the silence of the night, a cry of stupefaction, of tearful distress. The detective flew to a group standing round the Princess Danidoff, who still lay on the ground inhaling a restorative.

“What ... what is it? what is happening now?”

The English Ambassador replied to the American detective’s question.

“It is atrocious,” he cried, “the Princess Sonia Danidoff has just discovered she has been robbed of articles of very considerable value.”

For the moment the American stood stock still, as if paralysed with amazement.

“What,” he exclaimed, “what is that you say?”

“I say, my good sir,” returned the Ambassador, “that the Princess Sonia has been stripped of all her jewels, all her jewels—do you hear what I say?—rings, bracelets, necklaces, hair ornaments. Some hundreds of thousands of francs gone!”

In his bewilderment Tom Bob could only repeat himself: “But the thing’s past belief; it’s impossible! When did it happen? and how?”

He darted to the princess’s side, while the Ambassador, turning to a young attaché, finished what he was saying for his benefit.

“For my part,” he declared, “I consider the whole catastrophe had but one object—this theft! It must have been done while the princess lay in a faint and Tom Bob had left her to help in saving life. Tom Bob, police-detective as he is, never saw the wood for the trees!”

The attaché nodded: “You are doubtless right, sir; but who can have organized this daring, this audacious plot?”

It was in a hushed voice, almost in a whisper, that the Ambassador made answer:

“Who? Egad! I think there is only one man in all the world ... and you know his name!”

“Fantômas?”

“Yes, Fantômas.”

“Fantômas! Fantômas! he and no other must have planned all this!”

And through the night, more grim than ever the three tragic syllables re-echoed, spreading consternation—Fantômas!