Petit’s mother had belonged to the lowest class of French criminals; his father was a person understood.
Bred in the gutters of that City by the Seine, where sit the seven devils of Christendom, with the collected devils of Heathendom to keep the watches when they go below—Jean Petit developed in crime.
Let it be said that the criminals of Paris are at once the most degraded and the cleverest in the world. London, New York, and Melbourne produce ruffians and rogues, but these be as little children to the sons of the sewers by the Seine.
The French criminal has all the cunning and the cruelty of the wild beast in addition to his own. In fact, he is more often than not a human tiger, preying not as tigers do upon the outside world, but upon his own kind.
He is steeped to the lips in the vices of his breed, a wild biped prowling the mazes of a great city; an obscene devil-worshipper who cracks indecent jokes at the very steps of the guillotine; a midnight murderer, who does not hesitate to redden his hands for a few sous.
Such was Jean Petit.
He had existed by thieving since he was little more than seven years of age. At twelve he was apprenticed to one of the worst house-breaking gangs in Paris; at seventeen he had taken his diploma, and at twenty-two he was a master of arts in the College of Crime.
For three years Petit reigned in his native city as an Emperor of Thieves. He was the most daring of the Black Confraternity, the hero of a thousand nefarious escapades; the pivot on which the world of ruffianism revolved. Again and again he eluded capture. His robberies were so cleverly organised and carried out that he appeared to be more than a match for the detectives, even to those astute officers who devote their lives to the study of Jean Petits and their methods.
But at last, as must happen, the perpetrator of a catalogue of crimes, in which arson and murder found a place, fell a victim to a slight personal miscalculation.
In escaping from a window by means of a rope ladder, he dropped into the arms of four gendarmes, and, despite a stubborn resistance, was overpowered.