François Vidocq—Opportunist, Cross-Dresser, Detective, and Spy
Eugène François Vidocq is known as a former criminal who became the head of the first known private detective agency. The French criminalist plays a leading role in Nancy Burkhalter’s novel, The Education of Delhomme.
Eugène-François Vidocq is not the kind of date I would have brought home to my mother. Sure, he was well placed in the government as the head of Prince Président Louis Philippe’s state security police force. Even so, my mother would have been aghast at his duplicitous character and willingness to sell out anyone, anytime, for money or self-aggrandizement. But as a character in my book? Pure gold.
As The Education of Delhomme took shape, I determined I needed a spy. So, I scoured Jay Robert Nash’s book, Spies, and finally lit on Vidocq, who lived from 1775 to 1857, a time period coincident with Chopin and Sand’s affair. Perfect. The more I read about this man, the more I appreciated his malleable morals, sizable ego, and skilled skullduggery. Most important was my need for a character to compromise the destitute piano tuner’s own principles into doing the king’s bidding. Zing! Vidocq was the man for the job.
And what a find he was. His chicanery began in childhood. He stole money from his parents’ bakery by putting glue on a feather to fish out a few light-weight coins through the hole in the locked cash box. Disappointed at the paltry take, he hired a blacksmith to make a key for the till and off he went to a local bar with his purloined earnings.
He joined the circus as a teen and went on to be arrested any number of times for forgery, desertion from the army, and on and on. That was the way he lived most of his life: snookering and conniving to cadge a meal or two. He often used his theatrical training to fashion disguises to get out of jams and was not above cross-dressing to evade the law. One time while in prison, he bamboozled a visiting nun into giving up her roomy habit so he could slip out the gate with the guards none the wiser.
The turnaround in his life came in 1809 (at 34) when he was arrested for the umpteenth time and put in prison for good. But creative bloke that he was, he sweet talked officials into letting him off the hook by offering to go back to prison as an informant to rat out fellow inmates. Later, in 1833, Vidocq established a private police agency and hired many of those same inmates as his own informants. Thus was begun the prototype of modern detective agencies. Is this not a character for the ages or what? Balzac, Dickens, Dumas, Hugo, Melville, Poe all modeled characters after him.
Nash points out that spies can have any number of motivations: patriotism, sex, drugs, and, of course, money. Knowing that the penurious piano tuner, Delhomme, desperately wanted to marry, Vidocq dangled sheaves of francs to lure him into spying on Frédéric Chopin. The classic dilemma: money vs. morals.
Vidocq served another purpose in my book as the perfect countervailing force to George Sand’s own robust personality. Both were formidable individuals and accomplished at their professions. But he had one Achilles’ heel—his ego. The perspicacious Sand sensed that he—like all men—were susceptible to flattery, just as La Fontaine’s crow was tricked by the fawning fox into giving up its cheese. She needed an introduction to his boss, the Prince Président, and fast. To that end, she invited him to lunch, where she leaned in to ooh and aah at his tales of derring-do. He lapped up her sexual innuendos and washed them down with lots of wine. How could he say no to her request? Nothing like using a bad guy’s own tricks against him, eh, Vidocq?
Our spymaster was an extraordinary man: duplicitous, amoral, yet brilliantly creative, and leavened with charm and wit. He would have met his match in my mother, though, because she’d have seen right through him. Just as George Sand did.
Nancy Burkhalter is an educator, writer, journalist, linguist, and piano tuner. She is the author of The Education of Delhomme: Chopin, Sand, and La France. Burkhalter holds a Master’s degree in journalism and English education as well as a Doctorate in linguistics from the University of New Mexico. She has taught composition for many years in the U.S., Germany, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, and Russia. Her overseas work led to an interest in comparative education, especially critical thinking. Both observations and research led to her book and blog, Critical Thinking Now.
Photo Credit: Austin Irving
