Page:Memoirs of Vidocq, Volume 1.djvu/236

 affair, and from whom confessions were expected. However, on the 22nd of February 1797, in a report to the Conseil des Anciens, on a proposal to grant a reward of five thousand francs to a madame Corbin, who had facilitated the discovery of a great quantity of the plundered property, Thiebault declared, in the most formal manner, that this event was not the result of any political measure, and had all been incurred by the defective vigilance of the police, and by the mismanagement which pervaded every department of the administration.

At the beginning, the Moniteur had heated the imaginations of the most wary, by speaking of forty armed robbers who had been surprised in the wardrobe. The truth is, that no one was surprised; and when they first discovered the loss of "the regent," the dauphin's coral, and a vast many other jewels valued at seventeen millions of francs, for four successive nights, Deschamps, Bernard Salles, and a Portuguese Jew, named Dacosta, had in their turns entered the apartments, without any other arms than the tools requisite to extract the jewels set in the plate, which they disdained to carry off; and thus they removed with the greatest precaution the magnificent rubies which formed the eyes of the ivory fishes.

Deschamps, to whom belongs the honour of the invention, first got into the gallery by climbing a window, by means of a lamp-post, which still stands at the angle of the Rue Royale, and the place of Louis XV. Bernard Salles and Dacosta, who kept watch, were at first his only comrades; but on the third night, BenôitBenoît [sic] Naid, Philipponeau, Paumettes, Fraumont, Gray, Monton, lieutenant of the National Guard, and Durand, called 'le Turc,' a jeweller in the Rue Saint Sauveur, were added to the gang, as well as many first-rate 'cracksmen,' who had been, in a friendly way, invited to come and participate in the spoil. The rendezvous was at a billiard-room in the Rue de Rohan; and, besides, they made so little mystery of the