This is not all. The abduction must not be known. All search, all surmises, all hope, even, must be cut short. Mlle. de Saint-Véran must pass for dead. There is a mock murder: proofs are supplied for the police inquiries. There is doubt about the crime, a crime, for that matter, not unexpected, a crime foretold by the accomplices, a crime perpetrated to revenge the chief’s death. And, through this very fact—observe the marvelous ingenuity of the conception—through this very fact, the belief in this death is, so to speak, stimulated. It is not enough to suggest a belief; it is necessary to compel a certainty. Lupin foresees my interference. I am sure to guess the trickery of the chapel. I am sure to discover the crypt. And, as the crypt will be empty, the whole scaffolding will come to the ground. _The crypt shall not be empty._ In the same way, the death of Mlle. de Saint-Véran will not be definite, unless the sea gives up her corpse. _The sea shall give up the corpse of Mlle. de Saint-Véran._ The difficulty is tremendous. The double obstacle seems insurmountable. Yes, to any one but Lupin, but not to Lupin. As he had foreseen, I guess the trickery of the chapel, I discover the crypt and I go down into the lair where Lupin has taken refuge. His corpse is there! Any person who had admitted the death of Lupin as possible would have been baffled. But I had not admitted this eventuality for an instant (first, by intuition and, secondly, by reasoning). Pretense thereupon became useless and every scheme vain. I said to myself at once that the block of stone disturbed by the pickaxe had been placed there with a very curious exactness, that the least knock was bound to make it fall and that, in falling, it must inevitably reduce the head of the false Arsène Lupin to pulp, in such a way as to make it utterly irrecognizable. Another discovery: half an hour later, I hear that the body of Mlle. de Saint-Véran has been found on the rocks at Dieppe—or rather a body which is considered to be Mlle. de Saint-Véran’s, for the reason that the arm has a bracelet similar to one of that young lady’s bracelets. This, however, is the only mark of identity, for the corpse is irrecognizable. Thereupon I remember and I understand. A few days earlier, I happened to read in a number of the _Vigie de Dieppe_ that a young American couple staying at Envermeu had committed suicide by taking poison and that their bodies had disappeared on the very night of the death. I hasten to Envermeu. The story is true, I am told, except in so far as concerns the disappearance, because the brothers of the victims came to claim the corpses and took them away after the usual formalities. The name of these brothers, no doubt, was Arsène Lupin & Co.