Character guide

Arsène Lupin

major

Also known as Arsène Lupin, Prince Lupin, Prince Sernine, Sernine, Paul Sernine, M. Lupin

Lupin moves through Paris as Prince Sernine, André Beauny, or whatever name suits the hour, commanding devoted lieutenants and taunting the Sûreté with letters to the press. Yet the Kesselbach affair unsettles him: he mourns a friend, spares a poet, and catches his own eyes watering at a woman's grief. His vanity, his code, and his hunger for the grand gesture make him both the mystery's engine and its most unreliable narrator.

M. Lenormand

major

Also known as M. Gourel, Gourel, Lenormand

Lenormand is the one policeman Lupin genuinely respects, which is precisely why the prefect and the deputy-chief Weber are content to see him fail. Struck down by illness at the moment the Kesselbach case demands him most, he watches from the margins as the investigation frays into disorder. His feud with Weber and his uneasy intimacy with Lupin's methods make him the story's second intelligence — and its most precarious career.

Rudolf Kesselbach

major

Also known as Kesselbach, Mr. Kesselbach, Rudolf

Kesselbach arrives in Paris chasing a young man named Pierre Leduc and a grand-duchy called Veldenz, carrying a plan he shares with no one — not even the wife he adores. His trust in Dolores is total, inscribed on every gift he gives her, and that trust is what kills him. His death is the novel's first fact and its deepest knot: everything Lupin and Lenormand uncover is really an attempt to read the man's intentions backward.

Dolores Kesselbach

major

Also known as Dolores, Kesselbach, Dolores de Malreich

To Paris she is the pitiable Mrs. Kesselbach, prostrate on her sofa, too frail to be questioned; to her accomplices she is Letitia, the joy of Rudolf's life and the author of his death. She moves between the two selves with an actress's discipline, stabbing when discovery threatens and vanishing into her own mourning. Her obsession with Pierre Leduc and the lost throne of Veldenz drives the murders forward — and her brother Altenheim's shadow follows wherever she goes.

Pierre Leduc

supporting

Also known as Leduc, young Leduc, Master Pierre Leduc

Leduc is startled on a Paris street by a man who remembers him from Versailles and informs him, cheerfully, that he belongs body and soul to Arsène Lupin. He is the Pierre Leduc whom Kesselbach was seeking and Dolores was hunting — a claimant to Veldenz, or an impostor, depending on who is speaking. His blank, bewildered presence is the hinge on which the whole conspiracy turns, and he has no idea.

Baron Altenheim

supporting

Also known as Altenheim

Altenheim operates from a room at the Palace Hotel and a villa in the suburbs, orchestrating kidnappings — old Steinweg snatched from the Palais de Justice itself — with a baron's calm. He is Dolores's brother, bound to her by blood and by the Malreich name, and his loyalty to her costs him everything. His murder removes the one witness who could have explained the family's grievance against Kesselbach, leaving Lupin to reconstruct it from fragments.

M. Weber

supporting

Also known as Weber, L. M.

Weber is the detective-service functionary whose identity Lupin borrows after dismissing him in a mocking open letter signed with his own name. His professional humiliation becomes one of the novel's slyest running jokes: the man whose post Lupin resumes is never quite present to defend it. He matters because his erasure is the first proof that Lupin can wear the police like a suit, and that the Kesselbach case will be fought with disguises as much as clues.

Count von Waldemar

supporting

Also known as Waldemar, Count de Waldemar

Waldemar moves through the intrigue as a figure of almost operatic size, trusted enough to ride beside an emperor and answer for a donkey's temper as for his own. His presence ties the Kesselbach affair to grand-duchy politics and the vanished realm of Veldenz, where thrones are traded and marriages arranged. He matters because he embodies the respectable, heavyweight world Lupin means to manipulate, and because his steadiness makes the betrayals around him land harder.

Steinweg

supporting

Also known as Mr. Steinweg, old Steinweg, Master Steinweg

Steinweg is Kesselbach's old confidant, a poor, hunted-looking man who has been three months abroad and knows nothing of the murder. His reunion with Mrs. Kesselbach is one of the novel's cruelest scenes: he greets her cheerfully, asks after "our dear Rudolf," and watches her collapse. He matters because he alone holds the secret of Pierre Leduc, the name everyone is circling, and because his loyalty to a dead friend makes him a target the moment he starts talking.

Louis de Malreich

supporting

Also known as Malreich, de Malreich, Louis

Malreich belongs to the ruined clan of de Malreich, brother to Altenheim and Isilda, and his conduct during the ambush at Mrs. Kesselbach's house shows a mind that plans in ambushes rather than moves. He is the ghost Lupin cannot name, the adversary whose motives stay illegible even after six months of fighting. He matters because the initials L. M. and the whole architecture of the mystery keep folding back toward him, and because his silence is more dangerous than any confession.

Isilda de Malreich

supporting

Also known as Isilda, Little Isilda, Malreich

Isilda is sister to Altenheim and to Dolores de Malreich, part of a family driven from the little realm of Veldenz and consumed by the scheme to return. She is remembered as "Little Isilda," which makes her fate in the novel's ledger of killings feel disproportionately cold. She matters because she is one of the bodies the plot keeps producing, and because her death measures how far the Malreich obsession will go.

Chapman

supporting

Chapman serves Kesselbach in the ordinary way of a private secretary, close enough to the household to know its rhythms and its visitors. His murder, coming so soon after his employer's, turns a single crime into a pattern and forces Lenormand to ask who benefits from removing everyone who could speak. He matters because he is the case's second corpse, the one that proves the killer is not finished and that the Kesselbach secrets are worth killing twice for.

Marco

supporting

Marco belongs to the rough crew Lupin assembles for the night's work, muscle rather than mind, the kind of man who lifts a marble chimneypiece on command and asks no questions. His loyalty is transactional and his nerve thin, so when Lupin's improbable story collapses into two revolvers and four bodies on the floor, Marco is among the survivors left staring at their own bound leader. He matters because his obedience, and then his terror, measures exactly how completely Lupin controls a room.

Geneviève Ernemont

supporting

Also known as ve Ernemont, Geneviève

Geneviève moves through the affair as a woman alone in a house full of watching strangers, confessing to a visitor that she is afraid of everything, of today and tomorrow and the day after. Her fear is not vague: she has tracked a headwaiter to a wine-shop, seen a shadow cross her garden, and knows the enemy is closing in. She matters because Lupin's feeling for her sharpens from vague attraction into something like devotion, and because her safety becomes the stake around which his whole scheme turns.

M. Formerie

supporting

Also known as Formerie

Formerie sits at the official center of the Kesselbach-Altenheim investigation, the man whose signatures and interrogations are supposed to give the affair a shape. But the evidence keeps sliding, witnesses keep vanishing, and the detective service itself keeps changing hands beneath him, so his authority is constantly outrun by events he cannot see. He matters because his bafflement is the reader's: the machinery of justice grinding uselessly while Lupin and his shadowy adversary settle things by other means.

Valenglay

supporting

Also known as M. Valenglay

Valenglay stands at the top of the official pyramid, the minister to whom the police and the magistrates ultimately answer, and therefore the person most embarrassed when Arsène Lupin announces he is resuming the post of chief of the detective-service. He is not a fool, but he is a politician, which means he can be managed by anyone who understands what a scandal costs. He matters because his tolerance, or his helplessness, is what allows Lupin to operate inside the state rather than against it.

Jean Doudeville

supporting

Also known as Jean, Doudeville, the brothers Doudeville

Jean Doudeville is the respectable face of Lupin's operation, the man who can sit in a fashionable restaurant with the serious air of a magistrate and attract no attention at all. He takes his orders, shares the cigars, and watches his chief unravel an ambush over dinner, which is exactly the kind of work he is kept for. He matters because Lupin's schemes need men who can pass, and the Doudeville brothers are the quiet machinery that makes the flamboyance possible.

Jacques Doudeville

supporting

Also known as Jacques, Doudeville

Jacques Doudeville belongs to the handful of men Lupin keeps close, the ones who are sent on errands, posted as guards, and trusted with the parts of a plan that cannot be written down. He is not a name the newspapers know, which is precisely his value: he can move through the city while Lupin is being watched. He matters because the Doudeville brothers together represent the invisible infrastructure of loyalty that keeps a hunted man one step ahead.

Octave

supporting

Octave belongs to the small circle of attendants who follow Lupin into the crumbling Renaissance palace and the tense interview with the Emperor. His role is quiet but constant: he is the pair of hands and eyes that Lupin can rely on while others, like Isilda, communicate only in riddles. He matters because the early mystery depends on patient observation, and Octave embodies the disciplined, unglamorous work behind Lupin's flashes of insight.

Leon Massier

minor

Also known as Leon, Massier

A friend of Kesselbach.

Sergeant Gourel

minor

Also known as Gourel

Police sergeant working under Lenormand.

Grand-Duke Hermann III

minor

Also known as Hermann, Hermann III

A German grand-duke involved in the plot.

Dominique Lecas

minor

Also known as Dominique

A character in the story.

Herlock Sholmes

minor

Also known as Sholmes

The famous English detective, briefly mentioned.

Gertrude

minor

A maid at the Palace Hotel.

Edwards

minor

Kesselbach's valet.

Dieuzy

minor

Also known as Inspector Dieuzy

A police inspector.

Gérard

minor

Also known as Gérard

A character in the story.

Auguste Maximin Philippe Daileron

minor

Also known as Auguste, Philippe

A lawyer involved in the case.

Mme. Ernemont

minor

Also known as Mme, Mme . Ernemont

Geneviève's mother.

Gustave Beudot

minor

Also known as Gustave, Beudot

A character in the story.

Maître Quimbel

minor

A lawyer.

Major Parbury

minor

Also known as Parbury

A British officer involved in the plot.

Ribeira

minor

Also known as M. Ribeira, Parbury-Ribeira

A Portuguese diamond merchant.

Victoire

minor

Lupin's old nurse.

Barbareux

minor

Also known as one Barbareux

A criminal associate.

Charolais

minor

Also known as old Charolais, Daddy Charolais

An old accomplice of Lupin.

Suzanne

minor

A character in the story.

Raoul de Malreich

minor

A member of the Malreich family.