Page:Memoirs of Vidocq, Volume 3.djvu/64

 "Parbleu!" replied another, "he sets them on, and makes a cat's-paw ".

"Oh, he is a malicious brute," added a third.

Then a fourth, placing a copestone upon the whole, cried out with a stentorian voice, "When there are no robbers, he makes them."

Now, see how I made robbers.

I do not think that amongst the readers of these Memoirs one will be found who, even by chance, has set foot at Guillotin's.

"Eh! what?" some one will exclaim, "Guillotin!"

"You are mistaken, we all know the celebrated doctor, who;" but the Guillotin of whom I am speaking is an unsophisticated adulterator of wines, whose establishment, well known to the most degraded classes of robbers, is situate opposite to the Cloaque Desnoyers, which the raff of the Barrière call the drawing-room of la Courtille. A workman may be honest to a certain extent and venture in, en passant, to papa Desnoyers'. If he be awake, and keep his eye on the company, although a row should commence, he may, by the aid of the gendarmes, escape with only a few blows, and pay no one's scot but his own. At Guillotin's he will not come off so well, particularly if his toggery be over spruce, and his pouch has chink in it.

Picture to yourself, reader, a square room of considerable magnitude, the walls of which, once white, have been blackened by every species of exhalation. Such is, in all its simple modesty, the aspect of a temple consecrated to the worship of Bacchus and Terpsichore. At first, by a very natural optical illusion, we are struck by the confined space before us, but the eye, after a time, piercing through the thick atmosphere of a thousand vapours which are most inodorous, the extent becomes visible by details which escape in the