Arthur Bernède died in French Brittany in 1871. He was a very prolific writer who wrote not only political, historical, adventure, and espionage novels, but also plays, opera scripts, and screenplays.
In 1919, seeing that cinema was making its way as a new narrative, he founded, together with the actor Louis Feuillade and the writer Gaston Leroux, author of "The Phantom of the Opera" - with which the present novel bears some relation -, the Sociedad Cinéromans, a brand new company for the production of both novels and movies. Bernède adapted twenty of his works to film. The most popular, "Judex", tells the story of a vigilante confronting the bankers in defense of a widow and an orphan. A member of Freemasonry, he struggled his entire life to achieve fair recognition of copyright.