Page:Memoirs of Vidocq, Volume 3.djvu/38

 commissary of the quarter in which his operations were to be carried on, instead of denouncing him to the préfet. By following this plan, I was assured that if he had been set on they would disavow it, and justice would be done.

If I have insisted on the fact of provocation in this affair, it is because it was the general assertion and means of defence of the majority of those whom I was the cause of apprehending in the actual commission of robbery. We shall find, in the next chapter, that the idea of resorting to so pitiful an excuse was often suggested to them by my enemies. The recital of a plot of four agents of my brigade, Utinet, Chrestien, Decostard, and Coco-Lacour, will show how contemptible were the strongest imputations against me.

I will not here repeat what I have elsewhere said on the provocation of political measures. The discontent, legitimate or not, the superciliousness, the exasperation, nay, the fanaticism, do not constitute a state of perverseness; but they may produce a sort of momentary blindness, under the influence of which the most honourable man, the most virtuous citizen, will be easily misled. Captious reasonings, perfidious combinations, an intrigue to which he has no clue, may lead him to the abyss. Satan comes and carries him to the top of a mountain, whence he shows him the kingdoms of the world; he shows him the whole of a chimerical arsenal of armies, cannons, soldiers, and people ready to rise against oppression. He seduces him by impossibilities, and for impossibilities salutes him by the title of liberator; and the wretch, whose imagination gives birth to speculative ideas, thinks that he has at last found a point of strength and a lever to shake the world. Impelled by the most execrable of demons, he dares to utter his dreams: hell has its witnesses, its judges, and the delirium terminates at the scaffold's foot: such is, in a few words, the history of the patriots of 1816, excited by the infamous Schilkin. But let us return to the "brigade de sûreté."