Whether in person or in the guise of some fictional character, the figure of Vidocq appears regularly in the literature of the nineteenth century. (2) In the present article, I shall leave aside his autobiographical works in order to focus on the figure's literary posterity. In a previous article, I studied the Memoires and the Histoire de Vidocq and showed that Eugene-Francois Vidocq could be perfect identified as part of a long tradition of adventurers in the eighteenth century and that his autobiographical work, in both form and content, demonstrated a close link between the genre of the adventure story and that of the picaresque. Having already been copied and sold illegally in England and in Holland before its official release in France, the book ensured the author world renown. (1) In 1829, the 10,000 copies of the Histoire de Vidocq, a reworked version of the Memoires, sold out in the space of only a few days. The Memoires of the ex-convict who rose to the rank of chief of police became a best-seller. For some time all of Paris had been awaiting the publication of this book whose author was regularly the main topic of interest in newspapers on account of his exceptional detective skills. The publication of Eugene-Francois Vidocq's Memoires on 4 October 1828 was something of an event. Keywords: adventurer, Balzac, Collins, Jerrold, Raban By doing so I establish the various processes involved in the making of a legend and explore the different stages in the development of the adventurer as a social type in the nineteenth century. In the present article, I study the figure's literary posterity and examines how the ex-convict who rose to the rank of chief of police was treated by some French and English authors of the time, including Jerrold, Balzac and Collins.
Whether in person or in the guise of some fictional character, the figure of Europe-Francois Vidocq appears regularly in the literature of the nineteenth century.
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