"Read it! Read it!" they cried from the opposite side.
The people were leaving their seats at the principal table. M. Beautrelet went and took the paper and handed it to his son.
"Read it out! Read it out!" they cried, louder.
And others said:
"Listen! He's going to read it! Listen!"
Beautrelet stood facing his audience, looked in the evening paper which his father had given him for the article that was causing all this uproar and, suddenly, his eyes encountering a heading underlined in blue pencil, he raised his hand to call for silence and began in a loud voice to read a letter addressed to the editor by M. Massiban, of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres. His voice broke and fell, little by little, as he read those stupefying revelations, which reduced all his efforts to nothing, upset his notions concerning the Hollow Needle and proved the vanity of his struggle with Arsene Lupin:
On the 17th of March, 1679, there appeared a little book with the following title: The Mystery of the Hollow Needle. The Whole Truth now first exhibited. One hundred copies printed by myself for the instruction of the Court.
At nine o'clock on the morning of that day, the author, a very young man, well-dressed, whose name has remained unknown, began to leave his book on the principal persons at court. At ten o'clock, when he had fulfilled four of these errands, he was arrested by a captain in the guards, who took him to the king's closet and forthwith set off in search of the four copies distributed.
When the hundred copies were got together, counted, carefully looked through and verified, the king himself threw them into the fire and burnt them, all but one, which he kept for his own purposes.
Then he ordered the captain of the guards to take the author of the book to M. de Saint-Mars, who confined his prisoner first at Pignerol and then in the fortress of the Ile Sainte-Marguerite. This man was obviously no other than the famous Man with the Iron Mask.
The truth would never have been known, or at least a part of the truth, if the captain in the guards had not been present at the interview and if, when the king's back was turned, he had not been tempted to withdraw another of the copies from the chimney, before the fire got to it.
Six months later, the captain was found dead on the highroad between Gaillon and Mantes. His murderers had stripped him of all his apparel, forgetting, however, in his right boot a jewel which was discovered there afterward, a diamond of the first water and of considerable value.
Among his papers was found a sheet in his handwriting, in which he did not speak of the book snatched from the flames, but gave a summary of the earlier chapters. It referred to a secret which was known to the Kings of England, which was lost by them when the crown passed from the poor fool, Henry VI., to the Duke of York, which was revealed to Charles VII., King of France, by Joan of Arc and which, becoming a State secret, was handed down from sovereign to sovereign by means of a letter, sealed anew on each occasion, which was found in the deceased monarch's death-bed with this superscription: "For the King of France."
This secret concerned the existence and described the whereabouts of a tremendous treasure, belonging to the kings, which increased in dimensions from century to century.
One hundred and fourteen years later, Louis XVI., then a prisoner in the Temple, took aside one of the officers whose duty it was to guard the royal family, and asked:
"Monsieur, had you not an ancestor who served as a captain under my predecessor, the Great King?"
"Yes, sire."
"Well, could you be relied upon—could you be relied upon—"
He hesitated. The officer completed the sentence:
"Not to betray your Majesty! Oh, sire!—"
"Then listen to me."
He took from his pocket a little book of which he tore out one of the last pages. But, altering his mind:
"No, I had better copy it—"
He seized a large sheet of paper and tore it in such a way as to leave only a small rectangular space, on which he copied five lines of dots, letters and figures from the printed page. Then, after burning the latter, he folded the manuscript sheet in four, sealed it with red wax, and gave it to the officer.
"Monsieur, after my death, you must hand this to the Queen and say to her, 'From the King, madame—for Your Majesty and for your son.' If she does not understand—
"If she does not understand, sire—
"You must add, 'It concerns the secret, the secret of the Needle.' The Queen will understand."
When he had finished speaking, he flung the book into the embers glowing on the hearth.
He ascended the scaffold on the 21st of January.
It took the officer several months, in consequence of the removal of the Queen to the Conciergerie, before he could fulfil the mission with which he was entrusted. At last, by dint of cunning intrigues, he succeeded, one day, in finding himself in the presence of Marie Antoinette.
Speaking so that she could just hear him, he said:
"Madame, from the late King, your husband, for Your Majesty and your son."
And he gave her the sealed letter.
She satisfied herself that the jailers could not see her, broke the seals, appeared surprised at the sight of those undecipherable lines and then, all at once, seemed to understand.
She smiled bitterly and the officer caught the words:
"Why so late?"
She hesitated. Where should she hide this dangerous document? At last, she opened her book of hours and slipped the paper into a sort of secret pocket contrived between the leather of the binding and the parchment that covered it.
"Why so late?" she had asked.
It is, in fact, probable that this document, if it could have saved her, came too late, for, in the month of October next, Queen Marie Antoinette ascended the scaffold in her turn.
Now the officer, when going through his family papers, came upon his ancestor's manuscript. From that moment, he had but one idea, which was to devote his leisure to elucidating this strange problem. He read all the Latin authors, studied all the chronicles of France and those of the neighboring countries, visited the monasteries, deciphered account-books, cartularies, treaties; and, in this way, succeeded in discovering certain references scattered over the ages.
In Book III of Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War (MS. edition, Alexandria), it is stated that, after the defeat of Veridovix by G. Titullius Sabinus, the chief of the Caleti was brought before Caesar and that, for his ransom, he revealed the secret of the Needle—
The Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte, between Charles the Simple and Rollo, the chief of the Norse barbarians, gives Rollo's name followed by all his titles, among which we read that of Master of the Secret of the Needle.
The Saxon Chronicle (Gibson's edition, page 134), speaking of William the Conqueror, says that the staff of his banner ended in a steel point pierced with an eye, like a needle.
In a rather ambiguous phrase in her examination, Joan of Arc admits that she has still a great secret to tell the King of France. To which her judges reply, "Yes, we know of what you speak; and that, Joan, is why you shall die the death."
Philippe de Comines mentions it in connection with Louis XI., and, later, Sully in connection with Henry IV.: "By the virtue of the Needle!" the good king sometimes swears.
Between these two, Francis I., in a speech addressed to the notables of the Havre, in 1520, uttered this phrase, which has been handed down in the diary of a Honfleur burgess; "The Kings of France carry secrets that often decide the conduct of affairs and the fate of towns."
All these quotations,