Page:Memoirs of Vidocq, Volume 2.djvu/271

 enlistment of our troops, and the desertion of foreign soldiers poured out upon our metropolis, a crowd of bad characters, adventurers, and needy persons of all nations, in spite of the presence of the national guard, much work was still to be performed by the brigade of safety and their chief. And we did much; and if I feel pleasure in paying to the national guard the well-earned tribute of their merits,—if from the experience I had during their existence, and since their disbanding, I declare that Paris without them cannot be in safety, it is because I have always found in them an intelligence, an anxiety to assist, a perfect desire to act in concert for the public good, which I have never observed in the gendarmes, who manifest their zeal, for the most part, by acts of brutality, after the actual danger has passed. I have left for the present police of safety an infinity of precedents, and the traditions of my enterprizes will not soon be forgotten: but whatever may be the abilities of my successor, as long as Paris shall be destitute of its civil guard, no measures will reduce to a state of inaction the generation of malefactors, which will spring up from the instant that a watch ceases to be kept, at all hours, and in all quarters. The chief of the police cannot be at all points at once, and each of his agents has not the hundred arms of Briareus. On looking over the columns of the daily journals, we are alarmed at the enormous quantity of violent burglaries nightly committed, and yet the journals do not detail nine-tenths of those that occur. It appears that a gang of galley-slaves has recently established itself on the banks of the Seine. The shopkeepers, even in the most frequented and most populous streets, cannot sleep in safety: the Parisian is afraid to leave his apartments for a short excursion into the country: we hear of nothing but breakings in, doors opened with false keys, apartments plundered, &c.; and yet we are in the season of the year most favourable for the