Work Text:
The thing about Ganimard, the bit that everyone forgets, is that he’s honest.
It’s easy to see why people forget it, Arsène Lupin is the hero after all: Lupin always wins.
So of course Ganimard gets angry, of course he gets frustrated. He’s made a fool of over and over again. Why in the case of Number 514 Series 233 Lupin goes so far as to imply he has slept with Madam Ganimard.
Anyone would be tested by this cocksure renegade who, despite it all, always has an answer and is always laughing.
But the thing about Ganimard is that he’s a good man.
Oh he’ll chase Lupin to the ends of the earth and he’ll dream of the day they find an Arsène-proof cell. But he is still, fundamentally, a good man.
When Lupin is finally arrested, cornered and forced to his knees, his hands cuffed tight behind his back: the police beat him. And Ganimard is the one who steps in. Ganimard is the one who shoulders him, helps him walk.
Ganimard is the one who can be trusted when real evil crosses Lupin’s path. Because he will put his enmity aside, always, when innocents are on the line.
Ganimard cannot be bought and he cannot be dissuaded from his path. He will help others. He will be merciful.
And he will pursue justice.
Someone who isn’t a real fan wouldn’t see all the layers of meaning when Assane calls Youssef ‘Ganimard’. They’d only see the surface. The policeman versus the robber.
There’s more to it then that.
Assane knows that even thieves need justice sometimes. Youssef knows that even the people he chases have lives worth preserving.
It should not be rare. And yet-
Maurice Leblanc knew it was rare when he first put pen to paper in 1905. And he was, Assane and Youssef both know, a man of his time. Leblanc would not live long enough to see Henri Alleg turn truth against French colonialism. He would not hear Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth.
Lupin’s stories have flaws more obvious to a black boy in 1995 than to the reading French public of the 1910s.
And yet there is Ganimard.
Youssef doesn’t tell Sofia that Assane Diop called him ‘Ganimard’. He doesn’t tell Captain Romain either. They are not fans and so they won’t understand the depth of the compliment Assane has paid him.
But Youssef understands and so does Assane.
In a world of dazzling corruption and inequality Ganimard remains an honest man.
And the thing about Youssef is that despite everything, he is starting to believe that he can be a Ganimard after all.