Page:Memoirs of Vidocq, Volume 2.djvu/20

 but until I had a remittance from my mother I must live somehow. I thought I might manage to support myself for a time without labour. I proposed most determinately only to receive subsistence from the robbers; but man proposes and God disposes. The fugitives, discontented that I, under various pretexts, always avoided joining their daily plundering parties, at once denounced me, to get rid of a troublesome witness, who might become dangerous. They imagined that I should escape, as a matter of course, and relied, that once known by the police, and having no refuge but with their band, I should then unite myself to their party. In this circumstance, as in all others of a similar kind, in which I have been found, if they were so desirous of my companionship, it was because they had a high opinion of my penetration, my adroitness, and particularly of my strength,—a valuable quality in a profession in which profit is too often attained by peril.

Arrested at Adele Buffin's, in the passage Saint Come, I was taken to the prison of Roanne, where I learnt from my examination that I had been sold. In the rage which this discovery threw me into, I took a sudden step, which was in a measure my introduction to a career entirely new to me. I wrote to M. Dubois, commissary-general of the police, requesting a private interview, and the same evening I was conducted to his private closet. Having explained my situation to him, I offered to put him in the way of seizing the brothers Quinet, then pursued for having assassinated the wife of a mason of the Rue Belle-Cordaire. I proposed besides to point out the means of apprehending all the persons, lodging as well at the Jew's as at Caffin's, the joiner's, in the Rue Écorche-Bœuf. In return, I only asked for liberty to quit Lyons. M. Dubois had doubtless been before the dupe of such proposals, and I saw that he hesitated to trust me. "You doubt my word," said I to him: "should you still suspect me if I should escape on my way