Page:Memoirs of Vidocq, Volume 2.djvu/220

 to the service, when an unforeseen occurrence emancipated me from all dependence on the peace officers, who had, up to this time, so managed as to take upon themselves all the merits of my discoveries. This circumstance proved greatly in my favour, as it completely exposed the weakness and inefficiency of the inspectors, who complained, with much vehemence, that I gave them too much to do. To come to the fact, I shall begin the narration from its earliest commencement.

In 1810, robberies of a new kind and inconceivable boldness suddenly awakened the police to the knowledge of the existence of a troop of malefactors of a novel description.

Nearly all the robberies had been committed by ladders and forcible entries; apartments on the first and even second floor had been broken into by these extraordinary thieves, who, till then, had confined themselves to rich houses; and it was evident that these robbers must have had a knowledge of the localities, by the method of their burglaries.

All my efforts to discover these adroit thieves were without success, when a burglary which seemed almost impracticable was committed in the Rue Saint-Claude, near the Rue Bourbon-Villeneuve, in an apartment in the second floor above the 'entresol,' in a house in which the commissary of police for the district actually resided. The cord of the lantern which hung at his house-door had served for a ladder.

A nosebag (a small bag in which corn is put for horses to feed from when on the coach-stand) had been left on the spot, which gave rise to a surmise that the perpetrators might be hackney-coachmen, or at least that hackney-coaches had been employed in the enterprize.

M. Henry directed me to make my observations amongst the coachmen, and I discovered that the nosebag had belonged to a man named Husson, who drove the fiacre, No. 712. I reported this: Husson was