I'm running a little behind on this, due to travel.
813 was Maurice Leblanc's attempt to put Arsene Lupin to rest. It failed, and the next Lupin book, which is also the next fortnightly book, is The Crystal Stopper, which was serialized in Le Journal in 1912. Two of Lupin's associates are arrested and in danger of being executed; one of them is innocent, and Lupin puts his wits to plumbing the depths of the mystery in order to find the evidence to save him, which turns out to be much more complicated than it seems.
Pretty much every source that talks about this book also talks about how the book was inspired by the Panama Canal Scandals. The Panama Canal Company was a French company that, as its name suggests, was hired to construct a canal in Panama. The company found that, despite the project being for a shorter canal than the Suez Canal, the tropical climate was a massive impediment. Something like 22000 workers died trying to build the canal, largely due to malaria and yellow fever. The tropical rainy season also created severe engineering problems for which there was not always an obvious solution, and in fact, established clearly that the original design would need to be modified. In 1889, the company went bankrupt, and a court ordered it to be liquidated, a process that ended up being slow and complicated, and a financial disaster for a large number of people. In 1892, while this process was still going on, accusations were made that the company had been bribing politicians in an attempt to cover up the company's difficulties. Literally hundreds of legislators were accused, and a parliamentary inquiry discovered that over a hundred may have been involved, although the evidence in many of the cases was not sufficient for conviction. The scandal contributed to the downfall of the Clemenceau government, and, because some of the few people were actually convicted were Jewish, greatly intensified the risign surge of French antisemitism. It also convinced many that the Third Republic was too corrupt to be viable. As to the Panama Canal Company itself, a New Panama Canal Company was formed in order to find a buyer for the assets; the United States government bought them, and, based on what the Panama Canal Company had learned, was able actually to complete the Panama Canal. I don't know what relevance any of this will have to the story, but we will see.
