ledge of the plans of the police; they will return to their old trade, and with additional prospect of success. All trials, when I have made them with my auxiliaries, have proved to me the truth of such an assertion. Not but that some of the members of my brigade (and it was entirely composed of individuals who had undergone sentences of punishment) were incapable of doing an action contrary to honesty; I could quote the names of many to whom I should not have hesitated to confide money to any amount without an acknowledgement for it—without even counting it; but those who were thus thoroughly reformed were in the distinguished minority: and this would not bear out an assertion, (with all respect for the profession) that there were amongst them fewer honest men in proportion, than are to be found in the other classes to which it is deemed honourable to belong. I have seen amongst notaries, money-brokers, and bankers, many faithless agents who have seemed to rejoice in the infamy with which they were covered. I have seen one of my subalterns, a freed galley-slave, blow out his brains, because he had lost at the gaming-table five hundred francs, of which he was only the depository. Can many similar suicides be pointed out in the annals of the Exchange? And yetbut it is not our business to apologise here for the brigade of safety, in a point of view totally foreign to its service. It was the inconvenience of large bodies of spies that I proposed to make evident; and inconvenience results from all that I have said, without mentioning its dangerous effect on the morals of the people, who become thereby familiarised with the idea, that every sentence undergone is a noviciate or introduction to a certain mode of existence, and that the police is only the invalid squadron of the galleys.
It is perhaps from the period of the formation of the Brigade de Sureté that the interest of these Memoirs really commences. It may be thought that I have expatiated somewhat too much at large on my
