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protracted fight with a watchman. He had a death grip on the man’s throat and was holding him in a water-filled ditch when several other servants arrived, overpowered Vacher, and took him to the police. Arrested for vagrancy and aggravated assault, he was sentenced to a month in jail. It was a lenient sentence, given the antivagabond hysteria and the aggravated nature of the assault. Surprisingly, the jailers never made the connection between the man they were holding and the one who was being hunted just a few towns away. They certainly must have received the arrestwarrant. While police in the neighboring district pursued a vigorous manhunt, Vacher had found the perfect place to hide—in plain sight.
    Of all the luck—but it was something other than luck. Outside of the big cities, the French police were barely competent. 14 (The same was true for the rest of Europe and for the United States.) Big cities had municipal police departments, but the countryside was only loosely patrolled by a network of wardens and federal police. The wardens, or
gardes-champêtres
, were equal parts game wardens and policemen. Appointed by small-town mayors, these rural guards had been a feature of French country life for centuries and addressed the everyday problems of rural living such as vandalism, poaching, and bar fights. Many were old, poorly paid, and corrupt—useless in the face of serious crime. For major crimes, the local guard would find a gendarme, a local officer of the national police. (In Britain and the United States, the sheriff was the enforcer of higher authority.) Gendarmes were generally competent, but their barracks were thinly spread throughout the countryside, mostly along the main routes.
    Generally, whenever a serious crime was committed, the chance of successful prosecution was small. Only the three biggest French cities, Paris, Lyon, and Marseille, had full-time detective bureaus, a relatively new institution at the time. The rest of the country depended on a complicated legal structure that pivoted around a national network of investigating magistrates. University-educated and generally ambitious, these magistrates
(juges d’instruction)
served as both detective and grand jury. They could direct rural guards or gendarmes to bring in a suspect and to interview and detain him as long as necessary without charges. Usually, these suspects would be confined until they cracked or someone came forward with new evidence that either exculpated or condemned them. If the magistrate found enough evidence for a trial, he would write up a report, which he would then pass to the regional prosecutor, or procurer of the Republic
(procureur de la République)
, who would take the case to court. An investigating magistrate could send out interrogatories to his colleagues in other districts, asking them to pick up a suspect and question the person on his behalf. Such investigators were generally supposed to keep in touch with other districts on criminal goings-on. But due to overwork or sometimesprofessional jealously, they often did not. All too often an investigator did not think beyond his particular jurisdiction.
    Journalist Laurent-Martin, who eventually retraced Vacher’s footsteps, wrote that he was stupefied that someone “in our time, in the middle of France” could commit so many crimes “without ever being reported from one locality to another and without falling earlier into the hands of justice.” 15 He blamed the magistrates:
    Each is isolated. There is no correspondence between the authorities.… So if a crime is committed in a commune [a village or town], all the murderer has to do is pass into the neighboring territory for the wardens and gendarmes not to have the slightest recourse against him. By the time they can alert the authorities in the neighboring district, he’s long gone.
    That certainly described Vacher’s method of killing in one district and fleeing to another. Yet there were other reasons