“Before my time, strangers and country people looked on Paris as a den of infamy, where it was requisite to keep incessantly on the alert and where all comers, however guarded and careful, were sure to pay their footing. In his memoirs, he took quite a bit of credit for depressing the crime rates in Paris: Freed, he continued his life as an informant by 1811, he had convinced the authorities to allow him to head up a plainclothes unit, Brigade de la Sûreté, that eventually employed dozens of agents (many of them former criminals like Vidocq). While in prison, he decided to flip sides, feeding information to the Paris police. Following this early period as a criminal, fugitive, and deserter, Vidocq navigated his thirties with the realization that his criminal past was becoming more and more of a burden. However, his skill at disguise would serve him very well much later on, as a detective.)Īnd the incident with the nun disguise is only a footnote in a young life that also included privateering, a somewhat-profitable rampage around the battlefields of Europe, and liberal amounts of thievery. “Fortunately, the curate’s old female servant was at my side, and I got through very well by imitating her in every particular.” That discomfort is no surprise, considering his reputation as a womanizer. (“I was then compelled to go to church, and it was no trifling embarrassment for me to make the signs and genuflexions prescribed to a nun,” Vidocq would later write in his memoirs. This was someone who (if you believe his account) not only dressed as a nun to escape a prison hospital, but disappeared so deeply into the disguise that he fooled other nuns. There’s a little bit of irony in that statement whereas many fictional detectives are damned by critics as too unrealistic-their memories too sharp, their adventures too outlandish-Vidocq lived an actual life that puts many of his fictional brethren to shame. This is all a very roundabout way of saying that Vidocq, inadvertently, is one of the fathers of the modern detective novel. Indeed, crime-fiction writers of the 19th century found considerable inspiration in his life and work-and their writing, in turn, fueled the genre for more than two centuries. If Vidocq hadn’t existed, to mangle a quote from Voltaire, it would have been necessary to invent him. “There's no quiet place here on earth for our love, not in the village and not anywhere else, so I picture a grave, deep and narrow, in which we embrace as if clamped together, I bury my face against you, you yours against me, and no one will ever see us.Eugène-François Vidocq (1775-1857) was, at various times in his life, a thief, a puppeteer with a troupe of traveling performers, a soldier, a convict, a cop, a private detective, and, by the end, a bestselling author in his native France. “I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it.”. #Trying Quotes #May Quotes #Longing Quotes Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.”. “I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones.
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