"At the end, eh? After I had dotted all the i's. So here is a crime which accident causes to be repeated, under quite different conditions, it is true, but still with the same sort of hero; and your eyes had to be opened, as well as other people's. It needed the assistance of my letter, the letter in which I amused myself--apart from the exigencies of the facts--by employing the argument and sometimes the identical words used by the American poet in a story which everybody has read. So you see that my letter was not absolutely useless and that one may safely venture to repeat to people things which they have learnt only to forget them." Wherewith Lupin turned on his heel and burst out laughing in the face of an old monkey, who sat with the air of a philosopher, gravely meditating. VIII LUPIN'S MARRIAGE "Monsieur Arsene Lupin has the honour to inform you of his approaching marriage with Mademoiselle Angelique de Sarzeau-Vendome, Princesse de Bourbon-Conde, and to request the pleasure of your company at the wedding, which will take place at the church of Sainte-Clotilde...." "The Duc de Sarzeau-Vendome has the honour to inform you of the approaching marriage of his daughter Angelique, Princesse de Bourbon-Conde, with Monsieur Arsene Lupin, and to request...." Jean Duc de Sarzeau-Vendome could not finish reading the invitations which he held in his trembling hand. Pale with anger, his long, lean body shaking with tremors: "There!" he gasped, handing the two communications to his daughter. "This is what our friends have received! This has been the talk of Paris since yesterday! What do you say to that dastardly insult, Angelique? What would your poor mother say to it, if she were alive?" Angelique was tall and thin like her father, skinny and angular like him. She was thirty-three years of age, always dressed in black stuff, shy and retiring in manner, with a head too small in proportion to her height and narrowed on either side until the nose seemed to jut forth in protest against such parsimony. And yet it would be impossible to say that she was ugly, for her eyes were extremely beautiful, soft and grave, proud and a little sad: pathetic eyes which to see once was to remember. She flushed with shame at hearing her father's words, which told her the scandal of which she was the victim. But, as she loved him, notwithstanding his harshness to her, his injustice and despotism, she said: "Oh, I think it must be meant for a joke, father, to which we need pay no attention!" "A joke? Why, every one is gossiping about it! A dozen papers have printed the confounded notice this morning, with satirical comments. They quote our pedigree, our ancestors, our illustrious dead. They pretend to take the thing seriously...." "Still, no one could believe...." "Of course not. But that doesn't prevent us from being the by-word of Paris." "It will all be forgotten by to-morrow."