released convict, who for five years
had eluded the most active search on the part of the police, under the
protection of seven or eight different names. This villain's disguises
were so perfect, that he had served two years of imprisonment under the
name of Delsouq, who was one of his own disciples, and a famous
thief, though he never, in any of his achievements, went beyond the
jurisdiction of the lower Courts. La Pouraille had committed no less
than three murders since his dismissal from the hulks. The certainty
that he would be executed, not less than the large fortune he was
supposed to have, made this man an object of terror and admiration to
his fellow-prisoners; for not a farthing of the stolen money had ever
been recovered. Even after the events of July 1830, some persons may
remember the terror caused in Paris by this daring crime, worthy
to compare in importance with the robbery of medals from the Public
Library; for the unhappy tendency of our age is to make a murder the
more interesting in proportion to the greater sum of money secured by
it.

La Pouraille, a small, lean, dry man, with a face like a ferret,
forty-five years old, and one of the celebrities of the prisons he had
successively lived in since the age of nineteen, knew Jacques Collin
well, how and why will be seen.

Two other convicts, brought with la Pouraille from La Force within
these twenty-four hours, had at once acknowledged and made the whole
prison-yard acknowledge the supremacy of this past-master sealed to the
scaffold. One of these convicts, a ticket-of-leave man, named Selerier,
alias l'Avuergnat, Pere Ralleau, and le Rouleur, who in the sphere
known to the hulks as the swell-mob was called Fil-de-Soie (or silken
thread)--a nickname he owed to the skill with which he slipped through
the various perils of the business--was an old ally of Jacques Collin's.

_Trompe-la-Mort_ so keenly suspected Fil-de-Soie of playing a double
part, of being at once in the secrets of the swell-mob and a spy laid by
the police, that he had supposed him to be the prime mover of his arrest
in the Maison Vauquer in 1819 (_Le Pere Goriot_). Selerier, whom we must
call Fil-de-Soie, as we shall also call Dannepont la Pouraille, already
guilty of evading surveillance, was concerned in certain well-known
robberies without bloodshed, which would certainly take him back to the
hulks for at least twenty years.

The other convict, named Riganson, and his kept wom