Celebrated Crimes, Vol. V by Alexandre Dumas, Fiction, True Crime, Literary Collections

In this fifth volume of Celebrated Crimes, Dumas tells the tales of Antoine-Francois Derues and La Constantin. The first was a boy, left an orphan at three years old, brought up at first by a relation who turned him out for theft; afterwards by two sisters, his cousins, who were already beginning to take alarm at his abnormal perversity. This pale and fragile being, an incorrigible thief, a consummate hypocrite, and a cold-blooded assassin, was predestined to an immortality of crime, and was to find a place among the most execrable monsters for whom humanity has ever had to blush. La Constantin maintained a house where, in the night, great ladies crossed the threshold under assumed names and remained there for several days, during which La Constantin and Claude Perregaud, by an infamous use of their professional knowledge, restored their clients to an outward appearance of honor, and enabled them to maintain their reputation for virtue.(Vol. V of VIII)