Every detective follows a wrong clue now
and then, and every detective fails more often than he cares to admit.
No. All these things would not have shaken my position, but the
newspapers were so fortunate as to find something humorous in the
case, and for weeks Paris rang with laughter over my exploits and my
defeat. The fact that the chief French detective had placed the most
celebrated English detective into prison, and that each of them were
busily sleuth-hounding a bogus clue, deliberately flung across their
path by an amateur, roused all France to great hilarity. The
Government was furious. The Englishman was released and I was
dismissed. Since the year 1893 I have been a resident of London.
When a man is, as one might say, the guest of a country, it does not
become him to criticise that country. I have studied this strange
people with interest, and often with astonishment, and if I now set
down some of the differences between the English and the French, I
trust that no note of criticism of the former will appear, even when
my sympathies are entirely with the latter. These differences have
sunk deeply into my mind, because, during the first years of my stay
in London my lack of understanding them was often a cause of my own
failure when I thought I had success in hand.
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