Doctor Who The Death of Art

Author:Simon Bucher-Jones
Format: mobi

He noticed, sheepishly, that Jarre had stopped and was looking at him sideways from a doorway. "That is it.'

Chris looked through the iron grating in the dark wood door. 'The Café Fantômas,' he breathed softly. The lurid magazines he had perused in the TARDIS library in his hurried research had sketched the smoke-etched lines of this building into his imagination.

Jarre nodded. 'The worst dive and parlour of vice on the quai St-Bernard. The house where Vidocq organized his cut-throats and made himself a thorn in the fleshy side of the Gendarmerie.'

'I thought Vidocq was a detective?'

'He was, the greatest detective. First, though, he was the greatest thief. He was a ruffian, a coiner, a card-sharper, a murderer by repute if not in fact. The Prefecture of Police at the time recruited him as an agent provocateur, and the eventual founder of the Sûreté Générale, in this very hell-hole. We aren't supposed to put this part in our moral homilies.'

Chris's face lit up. 'A Slippery Jim!'

'A what?'

'A man who was the slipperiest thief of his era, caught and set to catch those worse than thieves. It's an old story that I was told as a child. I never dreamt it had a basis in fact.'

'There's another part we aren't supposed to tell. In 1827

Vidocq was forced to resign from the Sûreté. He set up in business but his paper-mills were crippled by intrusive regulations, changes in employment law, visits from agencies within the Government. By 1833 he was reduced to scraping a living running a private enquiry service in Paris. The Government closed it down. No one knows why. It's not even in the files I've seen. He died alone, unloved, poor, without respect. That's the real tradition of the Sûreté. It doesn't give a shit.' He knocked hard on the dark wood door. 'Come on, I'll buy you a drink.'

On the fringes of the great hub, that core of stabilized space-time from which the great colonizing expeditions of the 136

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