Page:Memoirs of Vidocq, Volume 3.djvu/37

 They are culpable, and should be brought to justice and convicted, that is to say, if taken with booty in hand. Well, when individuals of this kind have been pointed out to me, whether because their connections and habits rendered them suspected, or because they led a free life without any ostensible means of existence, to cut short their exploits I held out a snare for them; and, I confess it without shame, I did not make the least hesitation in doing so. Robbers are persons whose nature is to appropriate to themselves the property of another, just as the wolves are voracious animals whose nature is to attack the herds. We can scarcely confound the wolves with the lambs; but if it were possible that the one was concealed in the skin of the other, would a shepherd, when he saw the mark of their teeth, be to blame, if, to prevent future attempts, he tempted the voracity of all those whom he thought capable of biting? We may be certain that the one that bites is the one who has always been inclined to bite. If Corvet and his wife have robbed, it is that already, by fact or intent, they were robbers. On the other hand, I had never provoked them; I had only simply adhered to their proposition. It may be objected towards me, that by threatening them I could prevent them from committing the robbery which they had premeditated; but to threaten them was not to correct them: to-day they might have abstained, to-morrow they would have carried off a new booty: and certainly to have done so, they would not have called for my aid. What would have been the result? That the moral responsibility of the crime committed would have fallen on me with all its onus. And then if Corvet had any intention of implicating me in an affair of the kind, with any kind of promise from the préfet of police, after the event, did not my own personal safety prescribe the necessity of precaution, so as to undermine any trap which might be laid to ensnare me, and thus defeat those who invented and those who were the agents of it. This was the result I arrived at by denouncing Corvet to the