My actions constitute my identity sufficiently. … It is all the better if people are never able to say with certainty, ‘There goes Arsène Lupin.’ The great thing is that they should say, without fear of being mistaken, ‘That action was performed by Arsène Lupin.’1
This won my purchase mostly by its physical qualities: I came across a charming pocket-sized edition while I was looking for a book to take on a plane. The stories themselves are charming as well, but not particularly remarkable by modern standards.
Interesting trivia that the introduction calls attention to: for a while, 19th-century French police departments used a very low-tech biometric system called bertillonnage2 (mentioned in passing in one of the stories).