Chapter 11: X

X A Mousetrap in the Seventeenth Century The invention of the mousetrap does not date from our days; as soon as societies, in forming, had invented any kind of police, that police invented mousetraps. As perhaps our readers are not familiar with the slang of the Rue de Jerusalem, and as it is fifteen years since we applied this word for the first time to this thing, allow us to explain to them what is a mousetrap. When in a house, of whatever kind it may be, an individual suspected …