1. The Case of the Crayfish
New Year’s Day, 1813, Rue des Grésillons
AT SOME POINT in the night, while the snow was falling thickly, the pile of rubbish had crossed the street, and was now positioned a few doors down from no. 13, Rue des Grésillons. This street, which was later swept away by the Gare Saint-Lazare, ran along the edge of the grim and grimy quartier known as Little Poland. It was the kind of area where a pile of rubbish might expect to pass unnoticed, even if it did occasionally put forth a gnarled head that swivelled and disappeared.
The Rue des Grésillons was the haunt of mysteriously industrious people who considered themselves lucky to be tenants, because no landlord or bailiff ever dared set foot there. It was Paris, but it had nothing that anyone would have recognized as Paris. Once, it had marked the point beyond which no building was allowed. On one side – the old perimeter of the city – were half-empty scrap-iron yards, smutty laundries, windowless brothels and nameless hostels. Most of its inhabitants came from distant parts of France, and some of its teetering tenements housed the entire adult male population of an Alpine valley. On the opposite side of the street – the side further from Paris – were the desolate slopes and gullies of the city’s northern waste dump.
In any other street, the pile of rubbish would have been dismantled in a trice by a licensed rag-picker, a municipal cleaner or by one of the unregistered scavengers who darted about like shadows, poking at piles of waste and filling a leather bag with objects of unidentifiable desire; but by the time they reached the Rue des Grésillons, the sweepings of Paris had attained a state of refinement that placed them almost beyond the digestive aspirations of a rat. Every cabbage-stalk and bone, every nail, splinter, scrap and thread, every bandage and poultice from the hospitals of Paris had been gathered or eaten, leaving only a gravelly coagulation of mud, soot, hair, faeces, and whatever else ten thousand brooms had mustered in the street before nine o’clock in the evening. There was just enough compostable matter in that residue of seven hundred thousand human lives to start the process of fermentation – which was fortunate, because the night was bitterly cold, and the occupant of the pile of rubbish was dressed only in the thin felt jacket of a messenger.
As he crouched in the steaming filth, the bogus messenger felt the warm glow of satisfaction that always seemed to presage a successful operation. The others had succumbed, hours before, to the lure of an all-night wine shop, but he knew that, however long it took, the wait would be worth his while. To the man known as ‘Sans-Gêne’ (‘Have-A-Go’) – the man who had tricked, chiselled, sawn and bludgeoned his way out of every prison in France – a night of cramp, frostbite and stench was nothing. As everyone knew, Eugène-François Vidocq was impervious to pain. He also possessed the curious faculty of lessening his height by four or five inches, and in this contracted form could walk about and jump. He could carry on a normal conversation with a metal file in his mouth. He had thought nothing of staining his face with walnut juice and clogging up his nostrils with coffee and gum arabic in order to imitate the skin colour and chronic nasal discharge of a criminal known as Tête-de-Melon. At last, his hard work and persistence were about to pay off. The case that had brought him that New Year’s Night to the Rue des Grésillons would, he was certain, be the last nail in the coffin of his enemies at police headquarters.
Twenty-two members of the gang had already fallen into his net – including the Pissard twins, and the fiendish criminal who, until he was tortured, was known only as ‘The Apothecary’. They had carried out their thefts with such elaborate cunning and such minute knowledge of the premises (including the apartment above the commissariat of the eighth district), that it was obvious they must have been employees of the victims. In bringing these men to justice, Vidocq had, almost single-handedly, destroyed the centuries-old reputation of Savoyard immigrants for honesty and reliability. No one would ever trust a chimney-sweep, floor-polisher or errand-boy again, which, in a city where people habitually left their key in the door and invited strangers into their home, could only be construed as an act of public philanthropy.
The one remaining member of the gang was the notorious ‘Crayfish’, whose whereabouts had remained as mysterious as his nickname. (Perhaps he owed it to his grasping claws or a bright-red complexion, or perhaps he had achieved proficiency in the potentially useful art of walking backwards.) Though the Crayfish had eluded capture, his girlfriend, a laundress, had been traced to the Rue des Grésillons, and it was reasonable to suppose that the Crayfish would attempt to deliver her New Year’s gift in person.
Dawn’s chill fingers were already stretching over the eastern suburbs when a shadow passed along the house-fronts. The door of no. 13 opened, and the figure scuttled in, looking up and down the street as it backed into the courtyard. A minute later, the frozen heap of filth was standing in the hallway, beneath the stairs, whistling in the manner of a Savoyard coachman. On hearing the signal, the Crayfish emerged on the landing two floors up, and the following conversation took place:
‘Is that you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll be down in a minute.’
‘It’s too cold to wait here. Meet me at the bar on the corner – and look sharp.’
It was not until he was holding up his trousers with one hand and, with the other, presenting his braces to a smelly man with a pistol in his hand, that the Crayfish realized what had happened. An hour or so later, his ankles tied with napkins to the legs of his chair, he was helping Vidocq to celebrate his capture in a private room at the Cadran Bleu restaurant, divulging all sorts of information about his criminal colleagues, in the mistaken belief that this would ensure his release.
THAT MORNING, Commissioner Henry arrived for work as usual, turning off the Quai des Orfèvres, and passing along a glass-covered arcade that led from the river to the courtyard of the Sainte-Chapelle. It was there, under the shadow of the medieval basilica, in a frequently fumigated office at no. 6 Petite Rue Sainte-Anne, that M. Henry conducted his never-ending war on crime.
As a man who had passed many a delightful Sunday fishing in the Seine, M. Henry knew the pleasure of outwitting a slippery creature. It was a pleasure that was denied to him as head of the Second Division of the Préfecture. Criminals, who were supposed to live by their wits, were desperately stupid. Their slang was a secret code that gave them away as surely as a bag marked ‘swag’. Recently, a thief called Mme Bailly, having learned that there was money to be made as an informer, had provided the police with details of all the burglaries she had committed herself, and was surprised when they came knocking at her door.
The Commissioner’s own modest powers had earned him a reputation for supernatural percipience. He was known to the criminal underworld of Paris as ‘the Bad Angel’, and it was said that no one ever left his office without accidentally confessing his crime or giving some vital clue that led to his conviction. Unfortunately, M. Henry was forced to work with a team of skivers and incompetents. His constables had been known to lie in wait in a burglar’s cupboard for seventy-two hours, only to be locked in by the burglar and almost starved to death. And so, when Vidocq had offered his services as a thief-catcher, and proposed the creation of a special Brigade de la Sûreté staffed by ex-convicts, Commissioner Henry – to the envious indignation of his regular officers – had promptly organized Vidocq’s ‘escape’ from La Force prison, and given him his own office, with a monthly salary of one hundred francs and the promise of a bonus for each arrest.
Vidocq returned the compliment by following M. Henry’s orders with almost sheepish devotion. There was something in Vidocq’s ability to grind a man’s face to an unidentifiable pulp that filled him with devoted tenderness towards anyone who earned his respect.
The Commissioner was briefing his officers when a powerful smell filled the room, followed by a visibly intoxicated Vidocq, holding his latest catch by the collar. Seeing the line of policemen, the Crayfish squirmed with loathing and spat out a stream of abuse. Vidocq bowed to his colleagues, and said,
‘Allow me and my illustrious companion to wish you a Happy New Year!’
The Commissioner looked at his man with pride. Then, turning to his officers, he said, frostily,
‘Now that’s what I call a New Year’s gift! Would that each of you, Messieurs, had come bearing a similar gift.’
The Crayfish was led away to the cells, and, from that day on, Vidocq’s position as Head of the Sûreté appeared to be unassailable.
2. The Case of the Yellow Curtains
New Year’s Day, 1814, Rue Poissonnière
THANKS TO Vidocq, Paris now had a centralized criminal bureau, instead of forty-eight competing commissaires who gave up the chase as soon as a felon turned a street corner and left the quartier. The ex-convict not only made police work more professional, he also conferred a rough sort of glamour on what had previously been seen as a rather squalid branch of government administration.
To M. Henry, Vidocq was simply the most effectual of all the two-faced opportunists who went back and forth between police headquarters and the underworld. To criminals, he was something weird and unnerving, a will-o’-the-wisp with fists of steel. His prestige and power were rooted in superstition: the edges of Paris were still half-dissolved in their rural hinterland, where werewolves and witches were as much a part of daily life as rabid dogs and concierges. Once, Vidocq was told by an unsuspecting policeman’s daughter that the great Vidocq could turn himself into ‘a truss of hay’.
‘A truss of hay! How?’
‘Yes, Monsieur. One day my father followed him, and just as he was going to put his hand on his collar, he grasped only a wisp of hay. That’s not all talk, the whole brigade saw the hay, which was burned.’
There was, however, nothing magical about Vidocq’s methods, and they deserve a purely rational investigation. It would be hard in any case to imagine a better guide to the devious streets of Paris than the human bloodhound who sniffed out their secrets with such ruthless delight.
OF ALL THE MYSTERIES that Vidocq solved – or rendered irrelevant by brute force – few were as revealing as the Case of the Yellow Curtains.
It was almost a year since the Crayfish had been netted, and M. Henry was hoping to present the Minister with another New Year’s gift. Unfortunately, the case that lay in front of him that Christmas Eve seemed too risky for Vidocq. A convict called Fossard, who specialized in making keys from wax impressions and in jumping out of upper-storey windows without hurting himself, had escaped from Bicêtre prison. (Bicêtre, two miles south of Paris, was a clearing-house for convicts: from there, they left in chains for the hulks of Brest, Rochefort and Toulon.) Apparently, Fossard was ‘armed to the teeth’, and had vowed to kill any policeman who tried to arrest him.
The problem was that Fossard had known Vidocq in prison and would certainly recognize his former cell-mate. M. Henry therefore entrusted the job to his regular officers, who, giving due consideration to the words ‘armed to the teeth’, busied themselves with paperwork and harmless enquiries which showed that Fossard was indeed still forging keys and jumping out of upper-storey windows. Faced with craven incompetence, the Commissioner reluctantly gave the job to Vidocq and presented him with the latest piece of intelligence. It took the form of a detailed but inconclusive report:
The said Fossard is now in Paris. He is lodged in a street that runs between the market and the boulevard, from the Rue Comtesse-d’Artois to the Rue Poissonnière, via the Rue Montorgueil and the Rue du Petit-Carreau. It is not known on which floor he resides, but his windows may be recognized by yellow silk curtains. In the same house, there is a little hunchback seamstress, who is a friend of Fossard’s concubine.
With this shred of information, Vidocq set off in search of the escaped convict.
The four streets in question formed a single, serpentine stretch of road that twisted and turned so often that it seemed to be heading nowhere in particular. In fact, it ran north from the central markets, bisecting the boulevard and the ‘Great Drain’ that girdled Paris. The main segment was the Rue Poissonnière – so called because this was the route by which fresh fish reached the capital from the ports of the Pas-de-Calais. In the festive season, the road was even busier than usual, and no one paid much attention to the elderly man with a three-cornered hat, a pigtail, and wrinkles painted on his face; nor did anyone stop to ask him why he was gazing up at windows and scribbling in a little book.
The task was daunting. Yellow was a popular colour for curtains – and many others had yellowed with age – and there were enough seamstresses in northern Paris to populate a small town. Assuming young men to be representative of the whole population, medical reports on army conscripts would suggest that there were something in the region of 6,135 hunchbacks in Paris. The streets of Paris had a total length of 425 kilometres, and the fish-route along which Fossard lurked behind yellow curtains was 900 metres long. Allowing for variations in population density in the different quartiers, this would give the streets in question a total hunchback population of thirteen.
A fictional sleuth might have interviewed the local haberdasher, interrogated the informant as a possible source of red herrings or examined the muddy street for the tell-tale prints of a female hunchback. But since this was real life, where the tediously simple and the impossibly confused left little room for tidy puzzles, Vidocq recorded over one hundred and fifty pairs of yellow curtains in his notebook, then trudged up and down the same number of staircases, knocking at doors. The result was a handy address list of ‘ravishing’ seamstresses, but no hunchback and no Fossard.
It transpired that the yellow curtains must have gone to the cleaners, and that Fossard no longer lived along the Rue Poissonnière. However, so dense and intertwined were the threads of mutual acquaintance, daily routines and knowledge of neighbours’ doings, and so tirelessly did Vidocq wear out his shoe-leather on the cobbles, that even if the report had falsely specified green curtains and a one-armed seamstress, he would still have found his man.
He eventually caught Fossard – just in time for the New Year – by asking hundreds of questions, spending a small taxpayers’ fortune in bribes, disguising himself as a coalman and, finally, by pouncing on Fossard ‘with the speed of a lion’. Fossard went back to Bicêtre, and from there to the hulks of Brest. No doubt, like most convicts, he managed to escape, but the coal-blackened face of the colossal Vidocq had put the fear of Satan in him, and the Sûreté Brigade was never troubled by Fossard again.
THE ULTIMATELY disappointing case of the yellow curtains is a good example of what might be termed the early Vidocq method of investigation. Ever since his boyhood in Arras, he had been paring down his modus operandi to a few infallible devices. His first theft had involved the use of a glue-coated feather, fed through the crack of the cash-box in his parents’ bakery – a crime as difficult to explain as it was tedious to commit. Since the feather extracted only the smallest of small change, he resorted to a false key, and when the key was confiscated by his father, he used a pair of pliers, wrecked the box, grabbed the cash and walked ‘very quickly’ to the next town.
These simple means were well suited to the urban villages that made up early-nineteenth-century Paris. But the city was growing by the day: in some quartiers, even a concierge or a police spy could barely keep abreast of the influx of strangers. In the sixteen years during which Vidocq ran the Sûreté Brigade (1811–27), the population of Paris increased by over one hundred thousand. The drainage system grew by ten kilometres, the hills of rubbish turned into mountains, and streets that had never wandered far from their medieval origins reached out into the countryside like the veins of a gigantic parasite. Soon, it would take something more than mere persistence to stretch the net of public safety over the whole crime-ridden metropolis.
3. The Case of the Six Thousand Missing Criminals
20 June 1827, 6 Petite Rue Sainte-Anne
ONLY A BUREAUCRAT with a heart of stone would have felt no pity for the fifty-two-year-old man who sat alone in his office that Wednesday in June, hunched over a large desk on which a single sheet of paper remained. That musky suite of rooms under the shadow of the Sainte-Chapelle had been his home for the last sixteen years, and the little platoon of twenty-eight men and women – scribes, spies and half-reformed convicts – had been the only family he had known since he left his parents’ bakery as a boy. He had grown to love the accommodating file cabinets, the capacious wardrobe that would have been the envy of a boulevard theatre and the little galley where, at any hour of the day or night, a convict’s mistress cooked the meals that kept them on the trail of criminals.
Commissioner Henry, who had been like a father to him, had retired to devote himself to fishing, and his departure had caused a flurry of administrative manoeuvrings. In his place, the Minister had appointed a neat and tidy young man with a heart of stone, who had begun to investigate Vidocq’s distant and not-so-distant past. Rather than await the outcome of the investigations, Vidocq had decided to tender his resignation. He signed the sheet of paper, and left the office for what seemed likely to be the last time. As he passed along the glass-covered arcade, lugging a trunk full of documents, he wondered how his successor as Head of the Sûreté – an ex-convict known as Coco Lacour – would manage to match his impressive record of arrests.
Vidocq had brought to justice enough criminals to sink a prison ship. His name was a household word, and he was somewhat inconveniently famous as a master of disguise from Cherbourg to Marseille. He had solved so many cases that to the tradesmen, cab drivers, clerks and, for that matter, criminals, who read about his exploits in the newspapers, nothing seemed quite as innocent as before. That feeble old woman might be a secret agent on a case, and that loaf of bread she was carrying might be an improvised valise containing a loaded pistol and a pair of handcuffs.
It is a tribute to Vidocq’s efficiency that when he left the Sûreté, most of the mysteries that remained unsolved concerned Vidocq himself. Why, for instance, were his hands covered with blood when his former mistress Francine was found with five stab-wounds inflicted by his knife – a knife, admittedly, that she later claimed in a signed statement to have borrowed for a suicide attempt? Why was an ex-convict, who was known to be a habitual gambler, put in charge of the Police des Jeux, which supervised casinos? And how did he manage to retire from the Sûreté in June 1827, with almost half a million francs, when his annual salary was only five thousand francs?
One case was so mysterious that it seems to have escaped attention altogether, and it is especially unfortunate that the lack of evidence makes it the shortest case of all.
The mystery is this: the number of people Vidocq arrested each year far exceeds the annual number of convictions for crimes against the person or against property in the entire Seine département. In one year, the Sûreté Brigade arrested seven hundred and seventy-two murderers, thieves, forgers, conmen, escaped convicts and miscellaneous miscreants. Even subtracting the forty-six unexplained arrests made ‘by special warrant’, and the two hundred and twenty-nine ‘vagabonds and thieves’ who were expelled from Paris, this leaves a very large number of criminals who do not appear in the official statistics. Even at a conservative estimate, in the sixteen years of Vidocq’s reign, the number of criminals arrested by the Sûreté, but unaccounted for in the official statistics, is approximately 6,350. At this rate, it would have taken fewer than fifteen Vidocqs to arrest every criminal in the country.
If Commissioner Henry had devoted his well-earned retirement to writing his memoirs instead of fishing in the Seine, he might have explained that Vidocq was more dangerous as a detective than he ever was as a crook, and that, by casting the eerie light of crime over the whole city, he created a demand for people like himself: legalized avengers who would give the taxpayers their money’s worth by cleaning up the streets. He might have granted Vidocq his proper place in history, and hailed him as the man who reinvented crime-fighting as a means of controlling the innocent population…But, as Vidocq may have reflected that June morning, as he set down his trunk on the Quai des Orfèvres to take a swig from his brandy-flask, a true genius is never recognized by his contemporaries.
4. The Case of the Mysterious Unpleasantness
17 October 1840, 13 Galerie Vivienne
SOME TIME AFTER Vidocq’s departure from the Sûreté, that characteristically Parisian breed known as badauds (‘gawkers’), who had nothing better to do than stand and stare, as though any object, whether living or lifeless, might become interesting if stared at long enough, began to notice Xs – sometimes accompanied by Os – marked in white chalk on the walls of certain houses. If a particularly patient badaud had lingered within sight of one of the single Xs, he might eventually have seen a man or a woman take a piece of white chalk and inscribe an O beside the X before disappearing down the street or behind the brick column of a public urinal; and, if he followed the mysterious defacer of public property, he might in due course have found himself in one of the plusher parts of Paris, under a glassy arcade thronged with people who, like himself, had nothing better to do than stand and stare.
The Galerie Vivienne had been built in 1823 as a speculative venture. It quickly became one of the busiest arcades on the Right Bank. On a summer evening, Parisians out for a stroll would leave the dazzling sun on the boulevard and plunge into its gleaming shadows to feast their eyes on chocolates and pralines and miniature armies of petits-fours, or to gaze at the frills and ornaments that were displayed like holy relics under the nymphs and goddesses of the rotunda. A man could smoke a cigarette there on a rainy day while examining the curves and unexpected vistas of the marble galleries and the pretty women who came to shop for lingerie and the latest fashions. Like an elegant marquise, the Galerie Vivienne had a sort of indestructible frivolity, and its fame as the centre of Paris fashions spread far beyond the city. The words ‘Galerie Vivienne’ appeared like a sacred motif on beautifully wrapped bandboxes that were delivered to ladies in provincial towns when their husbands were away. It was, in short, the sort of place a woman could safely visit on her own without arousing suspicion.
That Saturday afternoon, a young woman, who will have to remain nameless, entered the Galerie Vivienne and passed through the monumentally respectable entrance of no. 13. She climbed the magnificent, swirling staircase where windows set high in the marbled wall made it possible to look onto the stairs without being seen. She knocked at a door and was ushered into the comfortable office of the man who was described on the metal plaque, the headed notepaper and in countless advertisements as ‘Ex-chief of the special Sûreté police, which he directed for 20 years with undisputed success’.
The Bureau of Universal Intelligence at 13 Galerie Vivienne was the world’s first private detective agency, founded two decades before Allan Pinkerton, ‘the Vidocq of the West’, launched his National Detective Agency in Chicago. It offered a range of discreet services: ‘Prosecutions and debt-collection, intelligence of every sort, surveillance, and investigations in the interests of business and families.’ Other agencies had sprung up in imitation, but none of them had prospered, as the Bureau’s prospectus cheerfully explained:
All those who tried to imitate me have come to grief, and were bound to fail. ‘The Alarm-Bell’ was melted down in the prisons of Mézières. ‘The Lighthouse of Commerce’ was snuffed out in the cells of Bicêtre. ‘The Illuminator’ shed so much light on its own shady dealings that it went to jail for several months. Their successors will inevitably fail in their turn.
To some minds, there was a touch of menace in the Bureau’s advertising. It was almost as if a blackmailer had extended his operation to the entire commercial world of Paris…
Certain businessmen who subscribed to my Bureau for several years, and then saw fit to discontinue their subscription, found that, no sooner had they dispensed with my experience and advice, than they fell prey to rogues.
But since the Bureau performed such useful services, and since a more liberal government was preventing the police from interfering in family affairs, it enjoyed some powerful protection. It had a huge database of file-cards on every known criminal – and several thousand law-abiding citizens too – and a team of specialized sleuths: ‘the Cyclops’, ‘the Faun’, ‘the Man-about-Town’, and a very tall detective who could peer through first-floor windows without using a ladder. Even when the Bureau was raided, and more than two thousand old Sûreté files relating to the years 1811–27 were confiscated, its filing-system was feared by politicians as much as Vidocq’s fists were feared by criminals.
The Bureau’s ‘undisputed success’ had not come easily. The house rules, which were prominently displayed in the director’s office, gave some idea of how difficult it was to work with agents who had acquired their skills and manners in prison-cells and slums:
Employees must always be dressed in a clean and respectable fashion, and especially not have muddy shoes.
Employees must be equipped at all times with necessary items such as knives, rulers, pens, etc., and must always leave their desk tidy.
Drunkenness and gambling, those two shameful vices, will be severely repressed. Eating and drinking, smoking and chewing tobacco are forbidden in the offices, as is anything unconnected with the service.
Any employee who writes on the walls, notice-boards, windows, etc., will be punished with a fine three times the cost of the damage.
Documents and notes are to be turned face down in the office so that prying eyes cannot read them. Anyone who can prove that his comrade has divulged the details of a case to him will be rewarded with the day’s pay of the one who blabbed.
The final rule would have been of particular interest to a badaud. It pertained to ‘external operations’. When a house was under surveillance, the agent was to mark the nearest street corner with an X. ‘To this effect, white chalk will always be at his disposal.’ When he left the house to follow a subject or to ‘satisfy a need’, he was to mark the wall with an O. In this way, the director could monitor his agents’ activities and take punitive action where necessary.
It is fortunate, in a sense, that the Bureau was closed down in 1843 and its files dispersed. Some of the paperwork found its way to government offices and, from there, eventually, to second-hand bookshops and archival collections. One of the salvaged records appears to be the office copy of a letter that the young woman in the Galerie Vivienne had received that Saturday. (In 1840, there were six deliveries a day, so that a letter posted in Paris to an address in the city before 9 a.m. would arrive before noon.)
The letter was sufficiently disconcerting to bring the addressee to Vidocq’s office. It was written on the usual headed paper, with the Bureau’s motto beneath the address:
20 FRANCS A YEAR
Give protection from the wiles of the wiliest rogues.
Mademoiselle,
Having a matter to discuss that concerns you and that might cause you some unpleasantness and expense, please take the trouble to drop by my office on receipt of this letter.
Respectful regards,
It would be too much to hope that a case requiring such discretion should be transparent in all its details after so much time. The envelope has not survived, and the woman’s address is unknown. There is as much chance of identifying Vidocq’s client as there is of seeing Vidocq himself emerge from the offices of the historical preservation society that now occupies no. 13 Galerie Vivienne. However, the Bureau’s copy of the letter at least makes it possible to follow the progress of the case over the following week.
Several notes were scrawled across it. The first, in thick, clumsy characters suggesting a quill gripped by a fist, says: ‘She won’t pay more than 2 francs a month.’ Then, in another hand, ‘Wrote on 19 Feb. 1841 to pay’. Another note, in the first hand, says, ‘A note to find out the lady’s possition [sic].’ The final note says, ‘Made note on 23 February’.
No further information is available. The precise nature of the ‘unpleasantness’ to which the young woman was exposed must remain a mystery, and we shall never know whether or not her two francs a month were considered sufficient payment, nor in what manner the Bureau of Universal Intelligence intended to offer her protection from ‘the wiles of the wiliest rogues’…
5. The Case of the Bogus Revolution
6 June 1832, Île de la Cité, to 11 May 1857, Rue Saint-Pierre-Popincourt
ONLY A MAN who had hidden himself in piles of rubbish and watched the same door or alleyway for days on end would have known how many obscure dramas were wiped from the history of Paris by demolition and urban renewal. Street corners and crossroads were the synapses of a gigantic, convoluted brain, and when, in 1838, Prefect Rambuteau began to cut through the living tissue of ancient lanes to create the broad, hygienic street that bears his name, large parts of the city’s memory were lost without trace.
Since Vidocq was occasionally employed on special missions, even after the demise of his detective agency, he could certainly have written something more revealing than his ‘pocketbook for decent people’, Thieves: A Physiology of Thievish Behaviour and Language (1837). He might, for instance, have written a practical manual for army officers and would-be heads of state. He might have shown that anyone who wished to conquer France should first control the capital, and that, in order to control the capital, he should assemble at certain key points in the city the following items: two carts, some tables, chairs, bed-frames and doors, several mattresses, and some well-chosen rubbish untouched by rag-pickers. Since few streets were more than seven metres wide, a collection of such materials could quickly reach a first or a second floor. In this way, a whole battalion could be held at bay.
In a later chapter, he might have shown that in order to confirm the change of regime, and to damp down the fires that had forged the new administration, the head of state should provoke another revolution, and then repress it.
On 5 June 1832, one of the last victims of the cholera epidemic, the popular republican orator General Lamarque was being taken to his final resting-place by one of the largest funeral processions ever seen in Paris. Rumours had been spreading since the morning that the funeral would be the occasion of a royalist revolt. The liberal monarchy, which had been established by a three-day Revolution in July 1830, was threatened by discontented royalists on one side and disgruntled republicans on the other. Strangely, though, despite its fear of a further republican uprising or a royalist counter-revolution, the government did nothing to prevent the crowds from assembling, and when a colossal man appeared on a horse, waving a red flag and a Phrygian bonnet, no soldier or policeman intervened until panic had begun to spread.
Three hours later, half of Paris was choked with barricades, and a handful of intrepid men, dressed in the style of blood-red revolutionaries, were calling on citizens to resist the royalist revolt.
A cynic might have said that this chaotic revolt was a stroke of luck for the new regime. By dawn, many of the rioters had been killed or captured, and the rebellion was concentrated in the narrow streets around the church of Saint-Merri. It was there, as readers of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables know, that the final scenes of that bloody drama were acted out. Order was restored by government troops, who fired cannon at the bulwarks of mattresses, and smashed their way through partition walls to fire on the barricades from upper windows. Any general would have realized that a battle concentrated in such a small area would not eradicate the threat for good. Many of the troublemakers slipped through the cordon and escaped across the rooftops. But there was no doubt that, after the events of 5–6 June 1832, Paris was safer for the monarchy than before.
SURVEYING PARIS that morning from the Île de la Cité, a keen observer would have seen the clouds of gun-smoke and pulverized rubble rise over the impenetrable mass of roofs to the north. But he might also have heard sounds of fighting closer to hand. While the massacre was taking place across the river at Saint-Merri, barricades had appeared in the narrow lanes of the island, behind the Quai des Orfèvres. They were first noticed at about ten o’clock that morning, by which time, according to every history of the 1832 revolt, all resistance was confined to the Right Bank.
As they retreated from the massacre and fled across the river, several bands of rioters were alerted to the presence of barricades on the Île de la Cité by men who seemed to have a precise knowledge of the ebb and flow of the battle. Since the barricades occupied a position of clear strategic importance between the government buildings on the Right Bank and the army of starving workers and seditious students in the Latin Quarter, the insurrection was quickly reignited in the heart of the old city.
If any of the men and women who rushed to defend those barricades had paused to examine them, they might have noticed something odd about their architecture and composition. The barricades had firm foundations, as though the builders had manoeuvred the carts into position according to some unwritten principle of barricade construction. There was an unusual preponderance of desks and file cabinets forming neat courses with bridged joins and buttresses, and, running along the top, a row of cartwheels and chairs that served as coping-stones and battlements. If the battle had been long in coming, the insurgents might have realized that a barricade in a maze of alleyways could be attacked from several directions at once, or isolated from the neighbouring barricades by a handful of troops. They might have flushed out the occupants of the houses that looked down on the barricades, and picked off any snipers who squatted behind the chimneys and the mansards. Any such precautions would, of course, have been futile if some of the rebels defending the barricades had turned out to be soldiers or policemen in disguise.
In the absence of detailed records, it is hard to say exactly what happened that morning under the shadow of the Sainte-Chapelle. The most explicit document is a letter drafted by an unknown hand and signed by two hundred and fifty inhabitants of the neighbouring streets (Rue de la Licorne, Rue de la Calandre and Rue de la Juiverie). This testimonial, which was later produced by Vidocq in support of his application for a government pension, praised ‘the zeal and courage of M. Vidocq’, who, though no longer officially employed by the Sûreté, had somehow managed to capture the ‘malefactors’, and ‘cleaned up’ the quartier by ‘sweeping away the rabble’.
The notion that the barricades on the Île de la Cité had been constructed under Vidocq’s direction and manned by his agents provocateurs was expressed, long after the events, by some of the revolutionaries who were captured that day on the barricades, and then tortured and imprisoned. Some of the survivors later made attempts on Vidocq’s life, and their testimony has always been considered unreliable.
SO MANY MURKY TALES are attached to Vidocq’s name that he seems to hover over nineteenth-century Paris like a phantom. Governments that were increasingly sensitive to public opinion, and inclined to farm their policing out to criminals, were bound to find a man like Vidocq indispensable. There were probably few political pies in which he did not have a finger. In 1846, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (the future Napoleon III), who had been imprisoned after bungling a coup d’état, escaped from the fortress of Ham with the benefit of Vidocq’s advice. He fled to London, where Vidocq was sent to spy on him, and where Vidocq also took the opportunity to advise him on his next coup d’état. After the Revolution of 1848, and before Louis-Napoléon’s successful coup d’état of 1851, he served Lamartine as a secret agent. Lamartine himself paid tribute to the ex-convict, saying that he would have ‘mastered the situation with only Vidocq to help’.
The exact truth of these and other tales is almost impossible to separate from the mass of rumour and misinformation. In a city as large and as volatile as Paris, where ministries came and went like commuter trains, and whole quartiers disappeared from one year to the next, a historian is reduced to sifting through piles of suspect evidence like a rag-picker. Most of the documents have long since vanished, and many were probably destroyed. Within minutes of Vidocq’s death in 1857, a squad of policemen rushed to his house in the Marais and removed his files, leaving not a single clue by which to solve the penultimate mystery: when news of his death reached the newspapers, eleven women turned up at his home, each carrying a signed will that made her the sole heir to his fortune.
The old convict had remained slippery to the end. Some of the people who attended his quiet funeral at Saint-Denys-du-Saint-Sacrement in the Marais might have been forgiven for wondering whose body was in the coffin. The grave in Saint-Mandé cemetery, marked with the half-erased inscription, ‘Vidocq, 18--’, is now known to contain the body of a woman. It is most unlikely that Vidocq’s final resting-place will ever be known, and there will probably never be a monument or even a street name to commemorate the part he played in making Paris safe.