Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Burglar.

Step into the Belle Époque and match wits with Arsène Lupin, the gentleman burglar who defined the heist genre. Leblanc's prose is brisk, witty and conversational — an entertaining doorway into early-twentieth-century literary French — and this volume presents the exact, unmodified words that first appeared in print in 1907.

A strictly literal English gloss sits beneath every line, preserving the French word order so your brain absorbs reflexive pronouns, idioms and the rhythms of formal and casual dialogue as you read. Each story closes with an epilogue on the language and the era — from the shifts between vous and tu to the wordplay that keeps Lupin popular a century on.