DOES “RAFFLES” EXIST ? 
47 * 
interpreter by profession, but his success 
in feminine circles was amazing. Incredible 
as it may seem, the police, after his arrest, 
acting with the consent of the judicial autho- 
rities, handed back to a young Canadian lady, 
who moved in the best society and was of 
irreproachable character, an amorous corre- 
spondence which she had carried on with 
Pranzim, every line of which displayed an 
infatuation, combined with an ignorance of the 
world, which simply took one’s breath away. 
As one of the rare exceptions to which 
every rule is subject, I will cite Prado, who, 
like Pranzini, was both a robber and a 
murderer, but was infinitely superior to him 
from the point of view of education. In 
fact, his intellectual attainments were nothing 
less than amazing. The accompanying photo- 
graph of him without collar or cravat, which 
I took an hour after his arrest — a most diffi- 
cult one — gives no idea of what his appearance 
must have been when free. The fierce 
eloquence of his defence before the Assize 
Court disturbed the equanimity even of the 
lawyers who were prosecuting him, and left 
an ineffaceable impression on the memory 
of those who heard it. In spite of all his 
efforts, and by very reason of the surprise 
occasioned by his transcendent talent, the 
verdict was against him. The proofs of his 
crime were overwhelming, and, the greater 
the gifts that Nature had endowed him with, 
the more guilty and the more dangerous to 
society did he seem to be. His real origin 
has always remained a mystery. It was 
widely believed that he was the natural son 
of the President of a South American 
Republic. However that may have been, 
it is undoubtedly among those who have 
been born and brought up on Fortune’s out- 
skirts, who as children have received a first- 
class education, followed, perhaps, on the 
brink of manhood by an unjustifiable abandon- 
ment on the part of their natural protectors, 
that the type might be found of the gentleman 
criminal so dear to our novelists, a type 
we have searched for in vain in our judicial 
archives. 
How did the “gentleman burglar” come 
to be invented ? To answer this question 
we must go back to the period of social 
upheaval which, at the end of the eighteenth 
and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, 
accompanied and followed the great French 
Revolution. During the terrible civil wars 
which then prevailed in France bands of 
ruffians traversed the country under the 
command of real noblemen, who, on the 
pretext of combating the Republic, com- 
Vol. xlvi.— 60. 
mitted the most atrocious crimes. Then, in 
the general confusion caused by the abdica- 
tion of Napoleon, a most singular impostor 
arose. An escaped convict, named Cognard, 
famous even to this day, having murdered 
one of Napoleon’s generals, Comte de Sainte- 
H Doe, and stolen his family papers , succeeded 
in impersonating his victim, installed himself 
in the murdered nobleman’s house, was 
accepted at the War Office and at Court, and 
even held reviews of troops. But another 
escaped convict, who had been his chain- 
companion at the hulks, recognized Cognard 
in the midst of his splendour, demanded hush- 
money, and, enraged at his refusal, denounced 
the sham general to the Ministry of Justice. 
Cognard was sent back to the chain, and 
shortly afterwards died. His adventures un- 
doubtedly inspired our greatest novelist with 
the immortal character of Vautrin, the 
enigmatical ex - convict, burglar, highway- 
man, and brilliant man of the world, known 
to his former “ pals” at the galleys as “Trompe- 
la-Mort.” who plays such a dramatic role in 
Balzac’s “ Human Comedy.” All the “gentle- 
men burglars ” who transmit such agree- 
able little sensations of imaginary fear 
through the nervous system of the modern 
novel -reader, comfortably installed in an 
arm - chair, are the natural descendants 
of Vautrin, and are modelled on the same 
purely illusionary type. For, whatever the 
fictitious Vautrin may have been in the 
imagination of Balzac, the real Cognard was 
not a gentleman. 
Even the Anarchists, who have loomed 
largely of late in the public eye, though they 
pretend to justify their crimes on the basis 
of social doctrine, are not drawn from the 
upper classes. There are no “gentlemen 
burglars ” amongst them. 
I give the portraits of two of them, 
both burglars and dynamiters (both ulti- 
mately guillotined), but each belonging to 
a different level of society. Emile Henry, 
who had been fairly well educated and might 
have passed as a “ Monsieur ” — that is to 
say, a respectable citizen of the middle class 
— preferred, out of pretentiousness, to wear a 
workman’s blouse ; while the sinister Ravachol, 
a former miner, who could barely write his 
name, believed that a frock - coat and a 
tall silk hat gave him an air of cultivated 
refinement. And yet, in spite of their 
efforts, neither succeeded in disguising his 
origin, as a comparison between the photo- 
graphs shows. A frock-coat does not make 
a gentleman burglar, any more than the 
cowl makes the monk. 
