The Eight Strokes of the Clock quotes

“Can I demand anything I like, however difficult and impossible?”

“Everything is easy and everything is possible to the man who is bent on winning you.”

“I demand that you shall restore to me a small, antique clasp, made of a cornelian set in a silver mount. It came to me from my mother and everyone knew that it used to bring her happiness and me too.

I know, as certainly as I know that I exist, that you would save me, whatever the obstacles might be. There is no limit to the power of your will.”

“There is no limit to my wish to please you.”

… was unknown and would never have been known, had not circumstances in the cruellest fashion obliged Prince Rénine—or should I say, Arsène Lupin?—to take up the matter and had I not been able today to tell the true story from the details supplied by him.

Let me recite the facts. In a space of eighteen months, five women disappeared, five women of different stations in life, all between twenty and thirty years of age and living in Paris or the Paris district.

I will give their names: Madame Ladoue, the wife of a doctor; Mlle. Ardant, the daughter of a banker; Mlle. Covereau, a washerwoman of Courbevoie; Mlle. Honorine Vernisset, a dressmaker; and Madame Grollinger, an artist.

I need not describe the public excitement at this stage nor the shudder of horror which passed through the crowd when it read this list, written without a doubt in the murderer’s own hand.

What could be more frightful than such a record, kept up to date like a careful tradesman’s ledger:

“On such a day, I killed so-and-so; on such a day so-and-so!”

And it was only natural that, on the morning of that day, Prince Rénine and Hortense, when making an appointment by telephone for the evening, should allude to the newspaper-articles which they had both been reading:

“Look out!” said Rénine, laughing. “If you meet the lady with the hatchet, take the other side of the road!”

“And, if the good lady carries me off, what am I to do?”

She is struck by an identical blow, with the same instrument, in the same place, the middle of the forehead, producing an absolutely vertical wound. An ordinary murderer displays some variety. His trembling hand swerves aside and strikes awry.

The lady with the hatchet does not tremble.

It is as though she had taken measurements; and the edge of her weapon does not swerve by a hair’s breadth. Need I give you any further proofs or examine all the other details with you? Surely not.

“And if that truth conflicts with the facts observed?”

“It means that the facts are wrong, Mr. Deputy.”

“As you please. But, until the day when the police are able to make them agree with your statements, you will understand that I am obliged to keep you under arrest.”

“In what other way can one go ahead?”

“By walking backwards, Mr. Deputy.”

These few words, spoken very simply, but in a clear tone which gave full value to every syllable, produced a profound silence.

He called and asked for her at her cousin Ermelin’s. Hortense sent down word asking him to excuse her: she was feeling a little tired and was lying down.

“Capital!” thought Rénine. “Capital! She avoids me, therefore she loves me. The end is not far off.”

“

Breaking in is allowed, when there’s a fellow-creature to be rescued.

”