Arpin Lusene

Arpin Lusène, nicknamed Le Chevalier Noir (The Black Knight), is a French gentleman, and a notorious thief with, naturally, a cheesy French accent which other characters have hard time understanding at times, often leading to clever wordplay. Apparently, Lusène even writes in his accent, spelling English words phonetically as he would pronounce them. His home has been said to be a castle in Portofino on the Italian Riviera.

He is a sticky fingered thief. On some occasions he is even seen stealing people's clothes while the victims are wearing them. His life's goal is to steal Scrooge McDuck's money, or make it disappear to make people think he stole it. His motive for this is to be remembered as the greatest thief ever to exist, rather than to make a profit out of it, as he has plenty of money already.

Lusène strictly refuses to appear in any photographs, claiming he has never been photographed. He likes to use his extreme dexterity to avoid being photographed. He once removed the filament from the lightbulb of a camera's flash, without breaking the bulb glass.

Usually on his appearances, Lusène wears an armor of a knight, almost completely covered in Gyro Gearloose's invention, a universal solvent which has the ability of absorbing all kinds of matter, excluding diamonds. Only Lusène's hands, feet, and the handle of his sword are not coated with the universal solvent, and even this only so that he won't accidentally dissolve the floor he walks on or his own sword.

Lusène has appeared in several stories, the first one being The Black Knight in 1997. This story was mainly the introduction to the character as well as a sequel to the story The Universal Solvent. As the main plot, Arpin comes to Duckburg in order to rob the Money Bin. His first attempt fails, however he steals the universal solvent and uses it to make his special armor to make another, successful attack on the Bin. Scrooge, with the help of Donald, Huey, Dewey and Louie, manage to stop him. Lusène's next appearance was in the story Attaaaaaack! in which Scrooge stops his new plot to raid the Money Bin thanks to an invention of Gyro's. His third appearance was in Rosa's The Black Knight GLORPS Again which is a direct sequel to event's in The Black Knight and Arpine restores his suit in it. So far he has only made appearances on covers by other artists like Marco Rota.

Arpine is the only present day character that Don Rosa has created for the Duck Universe that has made more than one appearance.

His name comes from a spoonerism of Arsène Lupin, a fictional character from novels by Maurice Leblanc. The switcheroo spelling is ironic (or delicious, or funny) partly because Leblanc himself once changed the spelling of the name of a character (who was "visiting", in a way, from the works of another author) from "Sherlock Holmes" to "Herlock Sholmes", in response to legal objections from the author (Arthur Conan Doyle) who was the original creator of Sherlock Holmes. In the Swedish translation, his name is "Armand Lutin", a play on "Arséne Lupin".