Page:Memoirs of Vidocq, Volume 3.djvu/88

 the desire of vengeance animate me. Ill fated was the man who would have dared to assail me! but not one of these wretches made the least attempt, and I had only to endure the scowling look, to which I responded with that assurance which always disconcerts the enemy. The call terminated, a low murmur was the prelude to a fresh uproar: they vomited forth imprecations against me; "Let him come on then, he remains at the gate," the convicts bellowed forth, adding to my name the grossest epithets. Driven to extremity by this insolent defiance, I entered with one of my agents, and went into the midst of two hundred robbers, the majority of whom were arrested by me: "Come on, my friends! courage," cried they in the cells in which they were shut up, "look at the pig, kill him, and let us hear no more about him."

Now or never was the thethe [sic] time;—"Now, gentlemen," said I to the galley slaves, "kill him, you see that they advise you well; try." I do not know what revolution of opinion actuated them, but the more I was in their power, the more they became appeased. At the termination of the fettering, those men, who had sworn to exterminate me, were so much softened that many of them begged me to render them slight services. They had no reason to repent of having taxed my kindness, and the next day, at the hour of departure, after having thanked me, they bade me a cordial farewell. All was changed from black to white; the most mutinous of the previous evening had become supple, respectful at least in appearance, and almost overpoweringly so.

This was an experimental lesson of which I never lost the remembrance. It proved to me that, with persons of this stamp, we can only be potent when resolute: to keep them respectful, it is enough to have awed them once. From this period, I never allowed the chain to quit unless I attended the fettering of the convicts, and, with very few exceptions, I was never afterwards insulted. The convicts were accustomed to