But each of his thefts was almost a new sin, and would make a story by itself. It is due to him to say that his fantastic physical strength was generally employed in such bloodless though undignified scenes his real crimes were chiefly those of ingenious and wholesale robbery.

He was a Gascon of gigantic stature and bodily daring and the wildest tales were told of his outbursts of athletic humour how he turned the juge d’instruction upside down and stood him on his head, “to clear his mind” how he ran down the Rue de Rivoli with a policeman under each arm. Almost every morning the daily paper announced that he had escaped the consequences of one extraordinary crime by committing another. But in his best days (I mean, of course, his worst) Flambeau was a figure as statuesque and international as the Kaiser. It is many years now since this colossus of crime suddenly ceased keeping the world in a turmoil and when he ceased, as they said after the death of Roland, there was a great quiet upon the earth. Probably he would travel as some minor clerk or secretary connected with it but, of course, Valentin could not be certain nobody could be certain about Flambeau. The police of three countries had tracked the great criminal at last from Ghent to Brussels, from Brussels to the Hook of Holland and it was conjectured that he would take some advantage of the unfamiliarity and confusion of the Eucharistic Congress, then taking place in London. For this was Valentin himself, the head of the Paris police and the most famous investigator of the world and he was coming from Brussels to London to make the greatest arrest of the century.įlambeau was in England. There was nothing about him to indicate the fact that the grey jacket covered a loaded revolver, that the white waistcoat covered a police card, or that the straw hat covered one of the most powerful intellects in Europe. He was smoking a cigarette with the seriousness of an idler. His lean face was dark by contrast, and ended in a curt black beard that looked Spanish and suggested an Elizabethan ruff. His clothes included a slight, pale grey jacket, a white waistcoat, and a silver straw hat with a grey-blue ribbon. There was nothing notable about him, except a slight contrast between the holiday gaiety of his clothes and the official gravity of his face. Between the silver ribbon of morning and the green glittering ribbon of sea, the boat touched Harwich and let loose a swarm of folk like flies, among whom the man we must follow was by no means conspicuous-nor wished to be.

Father Brown by G.K. Chesterton