# The Crystal Stopper — Character guide

> Key figures in The Crystal Stopper by Maurice Leblanc.

- [Arsène Lupin](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_crystal_stopper_se/characters/arsene_lupin.md): Lupin moves through Paris in disguises — retired tradesman, muffled idler on a park bench — while the police close in and his own men betray him. What unbalances him is not danger but affection: he likes Gilbert, the car
- [Alexis Daubrecq](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_crystal_stopper_se/characters/alexis_daubrecq.md): Daubrecq collects deputies the way other men collect stamps, and he keeps his grip through a bundle of documents tied to the Canal scandal. Twenty-five years ago Clarisse Darcel chose another man over him, and he has spe
- [Clarisse Mergy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_crystal_stopper_se/characters/clarisse_mergy.md): Clarisse was Clarisse Darcel when three young men in Nice loved her; she married Victorien Mergy, and Daubrecq's revenge has been unfolding ever since — her husband dead by his own hand, her son Gilbert raised into crime
- [Gilbert](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_crystal_stopper_se/characters/gilbert.md): Gilbert is the boy Daubrecq stole from his parents and trained toward the scaffold, and the boy Lupin took on afterward and could not quite save. He is frank, funny, careless with his life, and utterly loyal — he would d
- [Prasville](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_crystal_stopper_se/characters/prasville.md): Prasville is the respectable face of the pursuit — a former barrister and explorer, now a senior official with the power to move police and press. But his friend Vorenglade, a penniless ex-deputy, holds documents proving
- [Vaucheray](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_crystal_stopper_se/characters/vaucheray.md): Vaucheray is the older, harder partner in the job that went wrong, and his fate is bound to Gilbert's by a single verdict. The police are in no mood to untangle who did what at the villa; they want a conviction quickly, 
- [Victoire](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_crystal_stopper_se/characters/victoire.md): Victoire moves between Daubrecq's counters and Lupin's whispered instructions, an aging servant whose access to the enemy's bedroom is worth more than any disguise. She is loyal but not fearless: when Lupin tells her to 
- [Sébastiani](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_crystal_stopper_se/characters/sebastiani.md): Sébastiani serves the Marquis d'Albufex as a kind of domestic instrument of cruelty, obeyed by his own sons and unflinching at the bedside where Daubrecq is bound. He is the hand, not the will: he tightens, loosens, band
- [Masher](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_crystal_stopper_se/characters/masher.md): The Masher arrives in a chauffeur's uniform to carry a trunk down from a hotel room and drive it toward Paris at thirty miles an hour, turn and turn about. He is the practical arm of Lupin's schemes, trusted with Daubrec
- [Stanislas Vorenglade](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_crystal_stopper_se/characters/vorenglade.md): Vorenglade belongs to the circle around Clarisse Mergy, one of the few figures whose loyalty is not bought or coerced. He assists in the efforts to save Gilbert and to counter Daubrecq's hold over the Twenty-Seven, provi
- [Jacques](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_crystal_stopper_se/characters/jacques.md): Little Jacques is the reason Clarisse cannot simply walk away from Daubrecq, and the reason Lupin's promise to her carries such weight. When Lupin warns her that ruining herself would make the boy "the brother of a man c
- [D'Albufex](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_crystal_stopper_se/characters/d_albufex.md): D'Albufex holds Daubrecq bound and questions him for the fourth and final time, ordering Sébastiani to turn the stick while he leans close with the lamp. He is not a brute by temperament — he calls the business "dirty" a
- [Growler](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_crystal_stopper_se/characters/growler.md): Lupin's loyal dog, used in the investigation.
- [Victorien Mergy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_crystal_stopper_se/characters/victorien_mergy.md): Clarisse Mergy's deceased husband, mentioned in backstory.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_crystal_stopper_se/characters