“Within minutes of Vidocq’s death in 1857, a squad of policemen rushed to his house in the Marais and removed his files, leaving not a single clue by which to solve the penultimate mystery: when news of his death reached the newspapers, eleven women turned up at his home, each carrying a signed will that made her the sole heir to his fortune.
The old convict had remained slippery to the end. Some of the people who attended his quiet funeral at Saint-Denys-du-Saint-Sacrement in the Marais might have been forgiven for wondering whose body was in the coffin. The gave in Saint-Mandé cemetery, marked with the half-erased inscription, ‘Vidocq, 18–‘, is now known to contain the body of a woman. (pg. 110-111)”