Page:Memoirs of Vidocq, Volume 3.djvu/21

 each Other by turns, mutually accusing each other, and certainly not unjustly; for they all robbed, and they were all privy to the deeds each performed: for how could they have lived without robbery, as the police allowed them nothing for subsistence?

In the beginning those robbers, who wished to have two strings to their bow, were very few in number; the reception given by the other prisoners to any one that had turned nose, (informer,) was a cause why the numbers did not increase. To suppose that they were actuated by any feeling of loyalty, would be to form a wrong estimate of these robbers: if the majority of them did not denounce others, it was from a fear of assassination. But it was with this dread as with the apprehension of every danger which must be faced, it gradually disappeared. At a later period the necessity of escaping the arbitrary power with which the police was armed, contributed to render the custom of informations more common amongst the robbers.

When, without any other form of process, and only because it was the gracious pleasure of the police, they put into the stone jug (prison) the individuals reputed incorrigible robbers, (a ridiculous denomination in a country in which nothing was ever tried to amend them,) many of these wretched beings, worn out by a detention which had no prospect of termination, devised a singular expedient for obtaining their liberty. These incorrigibles were also in their generation in some way suspected: reduced to a state which made them even envy the fate of the condemned, since they were at least freed at the expiration of their sentence; that they might be brought to trial they resolved to have themselves denounced for some petty robbery which they had oftentimes never committed; sometimes the crime for which they wished to be betrayed was allowed to them for a small payment by their comrade the denouncer, and happy even they who had crimes to sell! They emptied more than one can at the taproom to the health of the doer of their crime. It was