À Paris, en 1907, un enlèvement est commis à l'Opéra durant un défilé de haute couture : la belle chanteuse Régine Aubry est conduite par deux individus dans une maison non identifiée où on la dépouille de son corselet de diamants. Puis elle est relâchée, sans sa parure évidemment, au grand dam du diamantaire véreux Van Houben qui avait conçu la robe.
Quelque temps après, s'opère une étrange répétition des évènements. Un petit mannequin d'origine modeste, Arlette, se voit kidnappée par les mêmes individus et amenée au même endroit. Elle s'échappe d'elle-même...

Maurice Le Blanc, a fictitious gentleman thief and detective who is sometimes compared to Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, was created by Maurice Marie Émile Leblanc (11 December 1864 - 6 November 1941), a French novelist and short story writer. Leblanc may have also read Octave Mirbeau's Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique (1901), which contains a gentleman thief by the name of Arthur Lebeau, and seen Mirbeau's comedy Scrupules (1902), whose primary character is a gentleman thief. By 1907, Leblanc had advanced to penning full-length Lupin novels, and thanks to favorable reviews and strong sales, he practically devoted the remainder of his career to producing Lupin tales. Leblanc also seems to have disliked Lupin's popularity, much like Conan Doyle, who frequently felt embarrassed or constrained by the success of Sherlock Holmes and seemed to regard his success in the field of crime fiction as a detraction from his more "respectable" artistic objectives. He made several attempts to develop additional characters, such as the PI Jim Barnett, but in the end, combined them with Lupin. He wrote Lupin stories all the way into the 1930s.