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Les voleurs was a virtual how-to of crime. Vidocq showed how thieves broke into houses and offices using short swords of the finest steel, explained how pickpockets filed their fingers to increase their sensitivity of touch, and warned brothel patrons that many of the rooms had hidden peepholes so that when they were engaged in lovemaking, someone could enter the room and rifle their wallets. He described the nearly invisible dots that sharpers used to mark playing cards. He also cautioned people about beginning a correspondence with strangers who were in fact forgers hoping to get a sample of their handwriting.

Age eventually slowed even Vidocq. At age seventy-five, in 1847, he closed his detective agency, though he still took on cases for favorite clients. Seven years later, he suffered a paralytic stroke. He dictated his will and then died on May 11, 1854, just a month short of his eighty-second birthday. His epitaph could have been his speech to French lawmakers in which he idealized himself: “I have the consolation of having remained an honest man amid the darkness of perversion and the atmosphere of crime. I have fought for the defense of order, in the name of justice as soldiers fight for the defense of their country, beneath the flag of their regiment. I had no epaulettes, but I ran as many risks as they, and I exposed my life every day as they do.” 17 Before his body was even removed from his home, the Paris police arrived to confiscate his files and records.

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It can be argued that all detective fiction owes something to Vidocq. Certainly his outsize persona intrigued some of France’s greatest and most popular writers, among them Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, and Eugène Sue. Balzac used the character Vautrin, modeled after Vidocq, in several books of his massive sequence of novels, La comédie humaine. At one point, Vautrin explains crime and the world:

It is a strange mud pit.… If you get that dirt on you while you’re driving around in a carriage, you’re a very respectable fellow, but if it spatters all over you while you slog along on foot, then you’re a good-for-nothing rogue. Make the mistake of grabbing anything out of the mud, no matter how insignificant, and they’ll pillory you in the courts of law. But steal millions, and they’ll point you out as a hero, in the very best houses. That’s an ethical system you pay the cops and the judges thirty million a year to keep in good working order. It’s just great! 18 Vautrin also offers Balzac’s famous observation on wealth: “The secret of all great fortunes… is always some forgotten crime — forgotten, mind you, because it’s been properly handled.” 19

Victor Hugo, author of what has proved to be the most durable of nineteenth-century French novels, Les misérables, also knew Vidocq personally and is said to have modeled both of the main characters of his great book after Vidocq: Inspector Javert, the relentless policeman, and his quarry the ex-convict Jean Valjean represented the two sides of Vidocq’s nature and career.

The works of these authors were best sellers among a new class of reader that had developed along with the growth of literacy in nineteenth-century France. As the reading public grew, mass-circulation newspapers and journals sprang up to fulfill the demand for news, commentary, and popular literature. Newspapers printed sensational stories of crime and scandal, called faits divers; to improve their tales, authors of faits divers wrote in a style more usual for fiction than for journalism. Henry de Roure, a journalist of the Belle Époque, wrote that the reader sitting down to read a fait divers “licks his chops. Believes himself to experience one by one — and with what transports of joy! — the emotions of an unfortunate woman attacked at night and cut into pieces with successive blows of a sword; then, in trying to enter into the character of the assassin, he tastes the incomparable psychological pleasures which [the reader], as a practical man, has never experienced directly.” 20