Pierre-François Lacenaire (1803-1836) was a frustrated playwright and poet, a thief, a forger and a murderer. Known variously as the "poet assassin" and the "dandy of crime", he captured the public imagination, becoming almost a hero, having committed several highly publicised and apparently amoral crimes. He was executed by the guillotine in 1836, having acted as prosecutor at his own trial to ensure that his accomplices also received the death penalty along with him. He was also supposedly the source for the character Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.