Page:Memoirs of Vidocq, Volume 3.djvu/36

 with booty, they left the apartment they had ransacked. This couple were condemned to ten years' confinement.

During the trial Corvet and his wife asserted that I had tempted them to the robbery. Certainly in the line I had pursued, there was nothing that could be construed into such a temptation; besides in a robbery I do not see how there can be any provocation possible. A man is honest or he is not: if he be honest, no consideration can be sufficiently powerful to determine him on committing a crime: if he be not, he only wants the opportunity, and is it not evident that it will offer itself sooner or later?

And if this opportunity makes a rogue, may not the robber become an assassin? Certainly he who labours to demoralize a frail being, and to inculcate pernicious principles, for the horrid pleasure of ultimately delivering him up afterwards to the executioner, must be the most infamous of scoundrels. But when a man is perverted, when he declares himself in a state of hostility with his equals, to draw him into a snare; to attract him by hopes of booty which yet he is prevented from gaining; to hold out to him the bait, which eventually takes him;—is not this rendering a real service to society? It is not the sheep which is placed in the wolf's trap which creates his depredatory instinct. He has the same inclination for robbing; he is predisposed to the action, and the action will be infallibly accomplished; for, at one time or other, the robber will go any lengths to perfect his crime. What is important is, when an attempt is made and the authors detected, the eye of the police is upon them, and the body of society thus guarded and benefitted. In fact I see no harm, but quite the reverse, in casting before the viper the piece of cloth on which he may exhaust his venom.

In a large city like Paris, gangrened hearts are never wanting, nor minds criminally perverted; but every robber who infests the metropolis has not the mark of crime upon his brow. Some are skilful enough to go on a long career of guilt before they are detected.