466 
7 HE STRAND MAGAZINE . 
vanity to exaggerate, often to a grotesque 
degree, the intelligence and multiple capacities 
of the quarry that he is hunting, of the 
criminal who is his real partner in this game 
of hide and seek. 
The true psychology of the detective has 
yet to be elucidated. You have little idea 
how modest they are when they talk amongst 
themselves. Modern scientific methods help 
them to unravel certain difficult problems 
which would have bewildered them some 
years' ago, but what the police all the world 
over has mainly to rely on is paid information. 
In the United States, to judge from the 
promises of rewards which reach us daily, the 
system of paying for information is practised 
openlv, Here in France it is carefully dis- 
guised. 
Now. the detective’s chief business is to 
provoke talk, and then to test its sincerity. 
It is in conversations, cleverly and carefully 
prompted, with a certain class of people 
that he is most likely to find the clue he 
is searching for. When he thinks that he is 
on the track of a conclusive revelation, what he 
next has to do is to test the. good faith and 
the accuracy of his informant. The people 
whose loquaciousness is most precious to him 
arc domestic; servants. Give me the detective 
who has a special talent for worming himself, 
without exciting suspicion, into the con- 
fidence of a caretaker, an under-valet, or a 
chambermaid, and I will make you a present 
of Sherlock Holmes. 
The detective rarely has anything like the 
knowledge popularly attributed to him of 
the antecedents of the criminal he is tracking 
clown. False names and disguises help to 
mystify him, and it is only when the arrest 
has been made and the prisoner lias passed 
through our Anthropometric Department 
that his true identity and the record of his 
previous condemnations are made clear. 
Now, 1 have in my department— the 
Service of Judicial Identity — at the. Paris 
Prefecture of Police more than half a million 
identification- cards, both of French citizens 
and of foreigners, which have been laboriously 
collected for twenty years past. And 1 can 
certify this: amongst them there are very few 
gentlemen by birth — so few indeed that I 
practically have the history of each one of 
them at my fingers’ ends. 
And among these ex-gen tie- 
men never have I come 
across one single professional 
burglar. 
The reason is simple. 
When a man of good birth 
covets his neighbour’s goods, 
bis first thoughts do not fly 
to the use of the “ jimmy A 
He takes up shady finance, 
which is likely to be more 
profitable than breaking 
into people’s houses, while 
the risk of punishment, in 
case of failure, is consider- 
ably less. To be a burglar 
you must be a “ handy- 
man,” with some technical 
ability. There is the thief 
who specializes in false keys. 
He is always more or less of 
a locksmith. The coiner 
must understand the gal- 
van o plastic casting of 
metals. The use of the 
oxyhydric blowpipe for 
fusing the steel plates of a 
strong-box, the manipula- 
tion of the dynamite cart- 
ridge, that “ Open Sesame ” to the most com- 
plicated of locks, cannot be learned in a day. 
Technical schools for burglars not having yet 
been established, it is in the metallurgical 
factory, as a former artisan, that the burglar 
has, as a rule, acquired his knowledge. 
WHERE THE FINGER-PRINTS ARE STORED. 
The Service of Judicial Identity at the Pans Prefecture of Police, where more than 
half a million identification-cards are kept. 
J’rvm « Photograph. 
