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It is many years now since this colossus of crime suddenly ceased
keeping the world in a turmoil; and when he ceased, as they said after
the death of Roland, there was a great quiet upon the earth. But in
his best days (I mean, of course, his worst) Flambeau was a figure as
statuesque and international as the Kaiser. Almost every morning the
daily paper announced that he had escaped the consequences of one
extraordinary crime by committing another. He was a Gascon of gigantic
stature and bodily daring; and the wildest tales were told of his
outbursts of athletic humour; how he turned the juge d'instruction
upside down and stood him on his head, "to clear his mind"; how he ran
down the Rue de Rivoli with a policeman under each arm. It is due to him
to say that his fantastic physical strength was generally employed in
such bloodless though undignified scenes; his real crimes were chiefly
those of ingenious and wholesale robbery. But each of his thefts was
almost a new sin, and would make a story by itself. It was he who ran
the great Tyrolean Dairy Company in London, with no dairies, no cows, no
carts, no milk, but with some thousand subscribers. These he served by
the simple operation of moving the little milk cans outside people's
doors to the doors of his own customers. It was he who had kept up an
unaccountable and close correspondence with a young lady whose whole
letter-bag was intercepted, by the extraordinary trick of photographing
his messages infinitesimally small upon the slides of a microscope. A
sweeping simplicity, however, marked many of his experiments. It is said
that he once repainted all the numbers in a street in the dead of night
merely to divert one traveller into a trap. It is quite certain that
he invented a portable pillar-box, which he put up at corners in quiet
suburbs on the chance of strangers dropping postal orders into it.
Lastly, he was known to be a startling acrobat; despite his huge figure,
he could leap like a grasshopper and melt into the tree-tops like a
monkey. Hence the great Valentin, when he set out to find Flambeau, was
perfectly aware that his adventures would not end when he had found him. The
sound of children playing was in the area. There were sounds of birds chirping in the park.
Also, there were sounds of a waterfall nearby.