been sorry to see the Brigade of Surety, headed
by its chief, likewise approach the Holy Table,
keep the Jubilee, and follow the discipline of the
missionaries. Several attempts at converting
Vidocq completely failed. He had had too close
a view of false devotees in prison—the worst
class of prisoners—to wish to have any of them
in his brigade; and he made a point, besides, of
reserving the right of admitting and expelling
whomsoever he pleased.

On leaving the police, he was to have had
a pension for life, of twenty pounds a month. It
was paid for six months only, and then suddenly
stopped. At that period, everything was
arbitrary in the administration of the police. To
obtain an income, or rather, perhaps, to satisfy
his inexhaustible activity, he set up a paper, card,
and pasteboard manufactory, in which all the
workpeople were liberated criminals of either
sex. The police greatly encouraged the idea at
the outset, and made large promises of pecuniary
assistance. His first attempts, though beset
with difficulties, were fairly successful. He
demonstrated by experiment, still more forcibly
than by reasoning, that all liberated criminals
are not incorrigible, and that with a little
perseverance about a third of their number may be
reformed. But the police did not help him with
a sou; the paper-merchants wanted to have the
goods at half or quarter price, because they were
the produce of criminal hands; the neighbours
made an outcry against an establishment where
so many persons of ill-repute were at work
together. The speculation failed, with loss.

Other of his inventions were, a door that could
not be broken open, and paper that could not be
forged or imitated, for bank-notes and such-like
purposes. But police matters were Vidocq's
second nature; secret investigations, researches
after people and things, were what he craved
for as a necessity of existence. To gratify this,
he set up his famous Bureau de Renseignements,
or Information Office, which has since been
imitated in London; the prospectus of it appeared
in all the Parisian journals for June, 1833. Of
this, we have only space to say that while it
brought him in both credit and money, it
eventually brought him into trouble, lawsuits, and
difficulties' with the authorities, which emptied
his cash-box faster than it had been replenished.

To repair his losses, and still perhaps also to
exercise his untiring energy, Vidocq, truly believing
that his celebrity extended beyond the
limits of France, resolved to exhibit himself in
London. His first essay, during the season of
1845, succeeded so well, that he repeated it in
1846. For his theatre, he selected the Cosmorama
in Regent-street. The performance, which
was repeated several times in the course of the
same day, was this: He addressed his audience,
in French, in a short speech which was translated
by an interpreter. He gave, after his own
fashion a summary of his adventurous life. He
put on his galley-slave's dress and the irons with
which he had been laden, including the double
chain he had worn at Brest, as well as in the
different prisons of Douai, Lille, and Paris.

He related stratagems to which he had
recourse, to take the most formidable criminals;
and each time he put on the costume and made
up his face as he had been obliged to do under
the actual circumstances. Next, he displayed
a sort of museum which might have passed for
a wardrobe picked up at the Morgue—
Paparoine's hat, Lacenaire's pantaloons, Fieschi's
frock-coat, and so forth. Whatever might be the
authenticity of these relics, our countrymen were
never tired of admiring them. Finally, by way
of anti-climax, he exhibited a collection of
artificial tropical fruits, and of pictures professing
to be originals of the Italian and the Flemish
schools, a few of which he sold at high prices,
because they had been his property. Those
which remained on his hands barely fetched,
after his death, the value of the frames.

Vidocq was sought after, and his abilities
appreciated, by persons above the vulgar. M.
Charles Ledru, the eminent advocate, used not
unfrequently to invite him to a restaurant, to
meet a party of twenty, or five-and-twenty
guests, who listened breathlessly to his exciting
stories, and drank to the health of "the old
lion."

"My defective education," he used to say,
"left me unprovided with any check to curb so
imperious a nature as mine." (At the age of
fourteen, he killed a fencing-master in a duel.)
"If, instead of rushing, like a fiery horse, into the
abyss which I could not see opening wide before
me, I had taken the place for which. I was
destined by the intelligence and the energy with
which Providence had endowed me, I should
have become as great as Kleber, Murat, and the
rest of them. Both in head and in heart I was
as good as they were; and I should have risen,
as they rose. I lost the opportunity. I was
born to figure in the noble scenes of war. When
my eyes, at last, were open to reason, I beheld
no other prospect before me than the prison, the
dungeon, and the hulks. But if I have failed to
attain the glory of military heroes, I retain the
consolation of having always remained an honest
man amidst the miasms of perversity and the
atmosphere of crime. I have battled for the
defence of order, in the name of justice, as soldiers
battle for the defence of their country under the
flag of their regiment. I wore no epaulette,
but I incurred as great dangers as they did, and
like them I exposed my life every day."

During the troubled times of 1848, Vidocq
was in direct communication with M. de
Lamartine; and at the Fete of Fraternity, in the
Champ-de-Mars, he saved the Provisional
Government and the Constituant Assembly from
being burnt alive. Lamartine retained so lively
a remembrance of the service, that he is stated
to have been very near visiting Vidocq on his
death-bed.

Not only did Vidocq place himself at the disposal
of the Provisional Government, but long
after its fall he offered to propagate democratic
ideas. What is curious is, that at the same
time, by his own confession, he was vaunting
the services he had rendered in another cause.