Copyright This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2011 by The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc. 141 Wooster Street New York, NY 10012 www.overlookpress.com For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected] First published in Great Britain in 2004 by Ebury Press Copyright © 2004 James Morton All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. ISBN 978-1-59020-890-8 CONTENTS Copyright Introduction Part One Poacher 1 Vidocq Against His Parents 2 Vidocq Against His Wife in Particular 3 Vidocq Against Women in General 4 Vidocq Against the Gypsies 5 Vidocq Against the Feetwarmers 6 Vidocq and the Men from the Lyons Mail 7 Vidocq Against the Prison Ships 8 Vidocq Meets Francine Again 9 Vidocq Meets a Bad Angel 10 Vidocq as Supergrass Part Two Gamekeeper 11 Vidocq Against “ses amis d’antan” 12 Vidocq Triumphant 13 Vidocq at Bay 14 Vidocq at Saint-Mandé 15 Vidocq Restored 16 Vidocq and His Agency 17 Vidocq in Polite Society 18 Vidocq at the Theatre 19 Vidocq in London 20 Vidocq’s Criminal Friends 21 Vidocq’s Last Mission 22 Vidocq Against Death 23 “A la recherche du temps Vidocq” Bibliography Index INTRODUCTION It is sometimes said that, in a competition for mendacity, Baron Munchausen could lie for Germany, Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo, for England, Frank Harris for Ireland, Axel Munthe – the author of The Story of San Michele – for Sweden, Grey Owl (born Archibald Belaney and really from Hastings) for Canada, Aimée Semple McPherson for America and Casanova for Italy. To that select list could be added, if only a trifle unfairly, Vidocq for France. The former convict and police chief Eugène-François Vidocq, and his literary ghost, finished his memoirs in January 1828 when he was, as it were, between jobs. He had been sacked, or had resigned, as the Chief of Detectives in the Sûreté and was already actively lobbying for his return to power. He was also in the process of establishing a paper mill at Saint-Mandé near the Bois de Vincennes where he proposed to employ former convict labor. However, he broke his arm in five places in a fall the following month; it was feared that he would lose the arm but in time the fractures healed. Vidocq then rather let things slip as far as his memoirs were concerned and it was not until after he had been to Dijon to obtain a copy of a pardon granted him back in 1818 absolving him of a crime committed during the French Revolution, that he looked up the printer to see the page proofs. He was not pleased with what he found, complaining that the Prefect of Police, Guy Delavau, and his henchman Franchet, had taken advantage of his absence to change the text for the worse. So far as Vidocq – who describes himself as a sort of Faublas, the hero of one of the many semi-pornographic novels of the period1 – was concerned, the text had been completely altered and instead of: … the sallies, vivacity and energy of my character, another had been foisted in, totally deprived of all life, colouring or promptitude. With a few alternatives the facts were really the same; but all that was casual, involuntary and spontaneous in a turbulent career, was given as the long premeditation of evil intent. The necessity that impelled me was altogether passed over; I was made the scoundrel of the age or rather a Compère Mathieu, without one redeeming point of sensitivity, conscience, remorse or repentance.2 Vidocq may have been a great police officer, a talented swordsman, a prodigious womanizer, and a fine raconteur, but, certainly at that stage in his career – if ever – he was not a writer. He had set down his memoirs but, in an era when length was, if not all, then a great part of it, he had come up far too short. It put one in mind of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, in which Paul Pennyfeather gives an award to a boy for writing the longest essay, regardless of its merit. The publisher wanted four volumes to make it worth his while. The trouble was that the public were champing at the bit and there was no way, even had he the ability, that Vidocq could bring himself to rewrite the first volume. He did, however, correct the second one and, so he said, from the point at which he joined the Corsairs at Boulogne the story was all his own. Vidocq’s first ghostwriter was Emile Morice whom he sacked but, as so often happens, it was a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire. Louis-François L’Héritier de l’Ain, who was then employed, produced a further three volumes, padding things out with a version of his own, already published, novel. It is on those memoirs that Vidocq was judged for over a century. He was not helped in the least by L’Héritier’s vitriolic supplement to the final volume. Nevertheless the Mémoires were an immediate success and were constantly reprinted. One way of looking at Vidocq is to follow the approach to Casanova’s memoirs – to take them as invention unless and until it can be proved otherwise. Over the years, however, researchers into the life of the Venetian rake, notably J. Rives-Childs, have found that much of what he wrote was accurate. He had, it was true, muddled dates, and sometimes places and names had been changed or misremembered, but essentially large chunks could be proved. The same is true with Vidocq, particularly in the tales of his early years. It was all a large romance written to sell copies to a gullible public. Again, this is a trifle unfair. Not all the hyperbole was Vidocq’s. For example, in the English translation of 1828–9 an appendix had Vidocq imprisoned for debt as a result of his gambling and a fictitious son, Julius, who, after being in the galleys, was now employed in Vidocq’s Saint-Mandé paper mill; both stories simply added to spice up the text and neither of them true. For years no attempt was made to separate the Vidocq of fact from the Vidocq of fiction – the hero of the novel by Dick Donovan; of the play, VIDOCQ! The French Police Spy, staged in London in 1829, or the 1860 version of Vidocq’s life at the Brittania Theatre, or the one which played in Paris in the early 1900s. Things changed in the 1950s with the work of the historian Jean Savant who produced an annotated edition of Vidocq’s life and whose research was able to confirm Vidocq’s own account of many of the events in his life, particularly the later ones. Savant’s incalculably valuable work does, however, come down very heavily in favor of Vidocq at almost every conceivable opportunity. A rather more inquiring note was struck by both Eric Perrin in his 1995 biography and Bruno Roy-Henry in his 2001 book. No one writing about Vidocq could be other than indebted to them and their researches. They have shown that much of what he and his ghosts wrote can now be proved to be correct. Vidocq has been less fortunate with his English biographers, one of whom devotes only the final two pages of his book to the last thirty years of his life and manages, as has been pointed out, to make two glaring mistakes in those few hundred words.3 Philip Stead’s 1953 Vidocq: Picaroon of Crime is a book very much of its time when biographies included made-up conversations and contained neither annotations nor footnotes. It remains, nevertheless, a very readable account. In his 1977 account, The Vidocq Dossier (also unannotated), Samuel Edwards frankly admits that many of the books borrow from each other. I hope I have been able to add something to – as well as borrowing from – all these accounts and to place Vidocq more in the context of his times. Throughout his life Vidocq changed political direction, favoring whoever was in power at the time. He was a good man to have on your side but the worry was that he might just as easily turn up in the colors of the opposition. For those not familiar with the machinations of the French throne and Empires this is a good moment to summarize events. At the time of Vidocq’s birth in 1775 Louis XVI was on the throne, to which he had succeeded in 1754. He was executed in 1793 in the Terror which followed the beginning of the Revolution, by which time the Convention nationale was the ruling body. This was followed by the Directory, two chambers sharing legislative power, which existed from October 27, 1795, to November 9, 1799, when it was abolished by Napoleon who established the Consulate after his coup d’état of the same date. The Consulate was a triumvirate headed by Bonaparte who, on August 4, 1802, was made Consul for life with the power to nominate his successor. On May 18, 1804, he upgraded himself to Emperor. This lasted until his abdication on April 11, 1814, when the monarchy, in the form of Louis XVIII, was restored. On Napoleon’s escape from Elba and return to France – the Hundred Days – Louis XVIII fled Paris for Ghent, where he remained until the Emperor’s defeat at Waterloo on June 15, 1815, and his second abdication that July. For a brief period the Emperor’s son, Napoleon II, was recognized but he never reigned and died in exile. Louis XVIII died childless in 1824 and his brother Charles X succeeded to the throne. He was overthrown in the July Revolution of 1830 in favor of the duc d’Orléans, Louis- Philippe, who was placed on the throne by a combination of liberals and Republicans. His was an uneasy crown and he abdicated in 1848. In June and again in September that year Charles-Louis-Napoleon, the third son of Louis Napoleon, a younger brother of the Emperor, was elected to the Assemblée constituante. In December he was elected Prince-President of the Republic and, following a coup d’état on December 2, 1851, his powers were increased exponentially. On December 2, 1852, as Napoleon III, he was proclaimed Emperor. He was taken prisoner during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and died in exile at Chislehurst, in Kent, in 1873. Although I have generally avoided its use, the Revolutionary calendar also needs some explanation. It was divided into Vendémiaire, Brumaire, Frimaire, Nivôse, Pluviôse, Ventôse, Germinal, Floréal, Prairial, Messidor, Thermidor and Fructidor, names coined by Fabre d’Eglantine, a distinguished poet of the time. It commenced in November 1793 but was backdated to September 22, 1792, the day after the abolition of royalty and the date that the Convention seized power from the Legislative Assembly, as well as being the autumn equinox. Each month contained three weeks of ten days of which the last was a day of rest. The last five days of each year were holidays as was an extra day in each Françiade, or four years, which were public holidays. The Revolutionary calendar was abandoned in Nivôse 1805, or Year XIV, a year and a half after France ceased to be either a Republic or a Consulate. I hope that readers will accept that my translations from the French are free ones. It is sometimes suggested that the way of calculating the value of money in a currency should be made against the then living conditions. So for example in France when Vidocq was a young man a measure of flour in 1790 was 2 francs, and in 1795 in the immediate post-Revolution period the price had risen to 225 francs. Similarly the price of a hat that had cost 14 francs grew to 500 francs. Conversely 10,000 francs borrowed in 1790 could in 1796 be repaid for 35 francs.4 However as a very rough guide, to convert the franc in Vidocq’s time to today’s dollar it can be multiplied by 4.6. (The franc increased in value by a multiple of 23 between Vidocq’s day and modern times. In 2002 the French Franc was converted into the Euro, and in 2009 there would have been the equivalent of five francs to the US dollar.) One hundred francs in Vidocq’s time would be the equivalent of $460. A 14 franc hat would cost roughly $64 today.