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Updated: May 29, 2025
"The men belonging to the police are a mass of corruption which the Minister of that department divides into two parts: of the one, he makes spies or mouchards; of the other, satellites, exempts, that is, officers, whom he afterwards lets loose against pickpockets, swindlers, thieves, &c., much in the same manner as a huntsman sets hounds on wolves and foxes.
Here, the mouchards, or spies of the police, take their station; and, when at the expiration of a few days, they see not their man, they positively affirm that he is not in Paris." Such was the animated picture of the Pont Neuf, as drawn by Mercier in 1788, and such it really was before the revolution.
"The safety of Paris, during the night, is owing to the guard and two or three hundred mouchards, who trot about the streets, and recognize and follow suspected persons. It is chiefly by night that the police makes its captions."
"Madame," she said, coldly and calmly, "you will be kind enough to leave my house this very hour, in order to write your diary somewhere else. The French governor of Vienna will assign to you, perhaps, a place with his MOUCHARDS; go, therefore, to him, and never dare again to enter my house.
"There are also the court-spies, the town-spies, the bed-spies, the street-spies, the spies of impures, and the spies of wits: they are all called by the name of mouchards, the family name of the first spy employed by the court of France. "Men of fashion at this day follow the trade of mouchards; most of them style themselves Monsieur le Baron, Monsieur le Comte, Monsieur le Marquis.
And, to speak the truth, they have some more unamiable characteristics than these, which lead them to hereditary blood feuds. It is said, I know not with what accuracy, that most of the mouchards, or spies, and the agents provocateurs of the French police, are Corsican by birth. But certainly Corsica has produced more than these, since it was the birthplace of Paoli and of Napoleon.
Notwithstanding his appearance and manner were so much in his favour, he had no sooner affected his retreat than some subalterns of the police, not thief-takers, but mouchards or spies, some of whom are to be met with in every principal coffeehouse, cautioned the master of the house against suffering his presence in future, as he was a notorious adventurer.
And then we believed him, if artistically conservative, politically obnoxious to the powers that then were, though knowing that those so marked had to walk, and even to breathe, cautiously for fear of the mouchards of the tyrant; we knew all about mouchards and talked of them as we do to-day of aviators or suffragettes to remember which in an age so candidly unconscious of them is to feel how much history we have seen unrolled.
At one time with a diamond ring on his finger, at another with the most filthy wig on his head, he almost changes his countenance as he does his apparel; and more than one of these mouchards would teach the French Roscius the art of decomposing himself; he is all eyes, all ears, all legs; for he trots, I know not how, over the pavement of every quarter of the town.
"It is from these odious dregs," continues our author, "that public order arises. "When the mouchards of the police have acted contrary to their instructions, they are confined in the house of correction; but they are separated from the other prisoners, because they would be torn to pieces by those whom they have caused to be imprisoned, and who would recognize them.
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