All cabmen are not so honest, however; and now and again the fraudulent cabman gets caught. It was so in the case of a tortoiseshell fan, which was deposited under a wrong description and eventually, after the legal interval, handed over to the cabman who had found it. Soon afterwards a lady turned up to claim it, and as she described it exactly he was ordered to restore it to the lady, whose name was communicated to him. "But she has no right to it," protested the cabman. "She is a thief. I know the real owner. I have known her from the first. It is Mdlle. ----," and he named a popular actress, thus confessing his own misconduct. The actress was then summoned, and did in fact identify the fan as the one she had lost. But it was proved satisfactorily that the other lady also had lost a fan that was curiously similar.
The vicissitudes of treasure-trove might be greatly multiplied. The most curious chances happen, the strangest articles are brought to the police authorities. Everything found in the streets and highways, in omnibuses, theatres, cabs, railway stations, is forwarded to the Prefecture. In one case an immigrant who had made his fortune in Canada and carried it in his pocket, in the shape of fifty notes of ten thousand francs each (£20,000), dropped his purse as he climbed on to the outside of an omnibus. The conductor picked it up and restored it; he was rewarded with £500, and richly he deserved it for resisting so great a temptation. Beds, brooches, boots, sheets even, are brought into the Prefecture. A mummy was once among the _trouvailles_; there are umbrellas without end. Hogier Grisons, a French writer, from whom many of these incidents are taken, says that a friend of his declares that whenever he finds himself without an umbrella he goes straight to the Prefecture, describes some particular one, according to his fancy, with such and such a handle, a certain colour, and so on, when he always has the exact article handed over to him.
So much for the police in uniform. That in plain clothes, _en bourgeois_, as the French call it, is not so numerous, but it fulfils a higher, or at least a more confidential, mission. Its members are styled inspectors, not agents, and their functions fall under four principal heads. There is, first of all, the service of the _Sûreté_--in other words, of public safety--the detective department, employed entirely in the pursuit and capture of criminals, of which more anon; next comes the police, now amalgamated with the _Sûreté_, that watches over the morals of the capital in a fashion that would not be tolerated in this country, and possesses arbitrary powers under the existing laws of France; then there is the _brigade de garnis_, the police charged with the supervision of all lodging-houses, from the commonest "_sleep_-sellers' shop," as it is called, to the grandest hotels. Last of all there is the brigade for inquiries, whose business it is to act as the eyes and ears of the Prefecture--in plain English, as its spies.