Page:Memoirs of Vidocq, Volume 3.djvu/138

 daunted me not, and, as I lacked neither zeal nor devotion, I thought it still possible not to destroy the good opinion which the authorities had conceived of me. I had now no chance of feigning with malefactors. The mask fallen, I was in their eyes a spy, and nothing but a spy. Yet I was a spy under better circumstances than the majority of my colleagues; and when I could not do otherwise than appear openly, yet my secret services of former periods profited me much, either by the connections I had formed, or by the vast number of facts and descriptions of all sorts that I had arranged and stored in my memory. I could then, like a certain king of Portugal, (but with more certainty than he,) judge of men by their looks, and point out to the police those dangerous persons who should be removed from society. The arbitrary power of the police at this period, and the faculty of administrative detentions, which formed its strong hold, left me a prodigious latitude for the exercise of my physiognomical knowledge, founded on positive experience. But, I thought that as it so greatly regarded the public welfare, I must not act with levity. Certainly, nothing would have been easier to me than to have filled the prisons; the thieves, and by this title all were denominated who had been committed for trial for any act contrary to honesty, were not ignorant that their fate was in the hands of the first as well as the last agent; and that to bring upon them a sentence of indefinite imprisonment at Bicêtre, only a statement was necessary whether true or false. Those particularly, who had been already in the hands of justice, were more exposed to the consequences of such denouncements, as no one took the trouble of minute inquiry: there were, besides, in the capital, a multitude of noted characters, of bad repute, whether merited or not, who were not treated with any greater consideration. This method of repression had serious consequences, since the innocent might be condemned as well as the guilty, the reformed confounded with the incorrigible. Certainly, when any feast or solemnity attracted a large