The World of Aristide Valentin

An Evening at the Home of Aristide Valentin, Chief of the Paris Police

• Aristide Valentin, Chief of the Paris Police, is late for his dinner party.
• Valentin's house is peculiar and celebrated for its architecture, with no ultimate exit except through the front door guarded by Ivan and the armoury.
• Valentin is ruthless in the pursuit of criminals but uses his influence for the mitigation of sentences and the purification of prisons.
• Valentin is a great humanitarian French freethinker but makes mercy even colder than justice.
• Valentin is dressed in black clothes and the red rosette, an elegant figure with a dark beard already streaked with grey.
• Valentin's principal guest is not yet present, but other notable guests have arrived, including the English Ambassador, Lady Margaret Graham, and Commandant O'Brien of the French Foreign Legion.
• Commandant O'Brien is an Irish gentleman with an air at once dashing and melancholy, in uniform with sabre and spurs.
• Valentin is expecting a man of world-wide fame, whose friendship he has secured during some of his great detective tours and triumphs in the United States.
• Valentin stands at the open door of his study, looking out upon the garden, and regards the sharp moon with wistfulness unusual in such scientific natures as his.
• Valentin's guests are pillars of society, but he is not specially interested in any of them.
• Valentin performs his duties with precision, even though they are rootedly repulsive to him.
• Valentin's house has a large and elaborate garden, but there is no exit from the garden into the world outside, with a tall, smooth, unscalable wall with special spikes at the top.