A Detective in Danger

Brogniart, the Sub-Brigadier—From Police Archives

In 1868, the police de surete, or detective police of Paris, comprised one officer of the peace, the chief of the service, four office clerks, four chief inspectors, six brigadiers, six sub-brigadiers, one hundred and seventeen inspectors and seven auxiliaries—145 persons all told. One of the oldest and most efficient members of the force was the sous-brigadier, Hector Brogniart, a bachelor of fifty years of age, who had come up from the Mimizan in 1833 to seek his fortune, had served five years in a line regiment and then gone into the police as a sergeant de ville. In the police he had been ever since, in one capacity or another, and no man on the force was more fully and implicitly trusted by his superiors.

Brogniart had very comfortable lodgings in the fourth story of a large, old-fashioned, rambling hotel garni of the Rue Neuve St. Augustin—a quaint, many-floored, many-roomed house, with crooked stairways, dim corridors leading off no one knew where, waxed floors above and tiled floors below, a table d’hote of its own, and a comical little journeyman tailor for concierge, whose mother, an old, white-haired, bent woman, still wore the wooden shoes she had brought up with her from Dauphine in the flush of her youth—the quaintest old hotel, with its narrow back stairways leading down to a flag-paved court, on which looked some rusty iron-barred windows of ancient stables, now converted onto storage warehouses for slow-selling goods.

Brogniart had lived in the house for twenty years, and he knew everybody in it. Florentin, the concierge, Mme. Guignan and her snuffy spouse, the proprietor, the great jewel merchant, M. Anquetil, of the first floor, M. Povuelais, the artist and caricaturist, even little Mlle. Lillebon, the seamstress who sang so pleasantly by the window in her ten-by-six room… Read More