What do you know about a car called Hirondelle used by The Saint in the original Saint books?

According to http://www.saint.org/Volvo.htm

"In the Saint books by Leslie Charteris, Simon Templar drove a Hirondel. The problem that the television producers had when they started to produce the 1960's Saint TV series was that the Hirondel was a fictional car. They decided to go with a contemporary car, and had two hot new sports cars to choose from: the Volvo P1800 or the Jaguar XK-E. Volvo was happy to supply a beautiful white P1800 for the show, leaving Jaguar to regret their decision not to provide a XK-E (something they rectified in the 1970's by giving The Return of The Saint show a white XJ-S). The mighty and mythical Hirondel was covered in the First Quarter 1972 issue of Automobile Quarterly (volume 10, number 1), with five different artists presenting their representations of Simon Templar's famous automobile. "

I might be somewhat late with this amendment but the matter demands correction.

Some twenty or thirty years before Mr. Charteris began writing the exploits of Simon Templar the French writer Maurice Leblanc was publishing the adventures of Arsene Lupin and his character also had at his disposal a "100HP HironDELLe" that clocked a fantastic 50mph average on a 120 miles trip (in "The Hollow Needle" 1909).

I am a sort of afficionado of old detective/supense stories and am quite familiar with both these authors and I assure you that could the personae and place-names be transposed and the stories shuffled and were you to draw any at random from the pack you could not tell who wrote what.

Regards, gigru

P. S. Arsene Lupen did not have such a charming logo as S. T. or any other such mark of recognition.