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, nearer still. It was the third door. Two remained. Through one of the windows, Beautrelet saw a number of fishing-smacks sailing round the Needle and, not far away, floating on the waters like a great black fish, the torpedo-boat. “What a row!” exclaimed Lupin. “One can’t hear one’s self speak! Let’s go upstairs, shall we? It may interest you to look over the Needle.” They climbed to the floor above, which was protected, like the others, by a door which Lupin locked behind him. “My picture gallery,” he said. The walls were covered with canvases on which Beautrelet recognized the most famous signatures. There were Raphael’s _Madonna of the Agnus Dei_, Andrea del Sarto’s _Portrait of Lucrezia Fede_, Titian’s _Salome_, Botticelli’s _Madonna and Angels_ and numbers of Tintorettos, Carpaccios, Rembrandts, Velasquez. “What fine copies!” said Beautrelet, approvingly. Lupin looked at him with an air of stupefaction: “What! Copies! You must be mad! The copies are in Madrid, my dear fellow, in Florence, Venice, Munich, Amsterdam.” “Then these—” “Are the original pictures, my lad, patiently collected in all the museums of Europe, where I have replaced them, like an honest man, with first-rate copies.” “But some day or other—” “Some day or other, the fraud will be discovered? Well, they will find my signature on each canvas—at the back—and they will know that it was I who have endowed my country with the original masterpieces. After all, I have only done what Napoleon did in Italy.—Oh, look, Beautrelet: here are M. de Gesvres’s four Rubenses!—” The knocking continued within the hollow of the Needle without ceasing. “I can’t stand this!” said Lupin. “Let’s go higher.” A fresh staircase. A fresh door. “The tapestry-room,” Lupin announced.