The character of Arsène Lupin might also have been based by Leblanc on French anarchist Marius Jacob (1879–1954), whose trial made headlines in March 1905, but Leblanc had also read Octave Mirbeau's "Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique" (1901), which features a gentleman thief named Arthur Lebeau, and had seen Mirbeau's comedy "Scrupules" (1902), whose main character is a gentleman thief.