condemn or legitimatize the act. A judge is not God; the duty is to

adapt facts to principles, to judge cases of infinitevariety while
measuring them by a fixed standard.

France employs about six thousand judges; no generation has six
thousand great men at her command, much less can she find them in the

legal profession. Popinot, in the midst of the civilization of Paris,
was just a very clever cadi, who, by the character of his mind, and by

dint of rubbing the letter of the law into the essence of facts, had
learned to see the error of spontaneous and violent decisions. By the

help of his judicial second-sight he could pierce the double casing of
lies in which advocates hide the heart of a trial. He was a judge, as

the great Desplein was a surgeon; he probed men's consciences as the
anatomist probed their bodies. His life and habits had led him to an

exact appreciation of their most secret thoughts by a thorough study
of facts.

He sifted a case as Cuvier sifted the earth's crust. Like that great
thinker, he proceeded from deduction to deduction before drawing his

conclusions, and reconstructed the past career of a conscience as
Cuvier reconstructed an Anoplotherium. When considering a brief he

would often wake in the night, startled by a gleam of truth suddenly
sparkling in his brain. Struck by the deep injustice, which is the end

of these contests, in which everything is against the honest man,
everything to the advantage of the rogue, he often summed up in favor

of equity against law in such cases as bore on questions of what may
be termed divination. Hence he was regarded by his colleagues as a man

not of a practical mind; his arguments on two lines of deduction made
their deliberations lengthy. When Popinot observed their dislike to

listening to him he gave his opinion briefly; it was said that he was
not a good judge in this class of cases; but as his gift of

discrimination was remarkable, his opinion lucid, and his penetration
profound, he was considered to have a special aptitude for the

laborious duties of an examining judge. So an examining judge he
remained during the greater part of his legal career.

Although his qualifications made him eminently fitted for its
difficult functions, and he had the reputation of being so learned in

criminal law that his duty was a pleasure to him, the kindness of his
heart constantly kept him in torture, and he was nipped as in a vise

between his conscience and his pity. The services of an examining
judge are better paid than those of a judge in civil actions, but they

do not therefore prove a temptation; they are too onerous. Popinot, a
man of modest and virtuouslearning, without ambition, an

indefatigable worker, never complained of his fate; he sacrificed his
tastes and his compassionate" target="_blank" title="a.有同情心的 vt.同情">compassionate soul to the public good, and allowed

himself to be transported to the noisome pools of criminal
examinations, where he showed himself alike severe and beneficent. His

clerk sometimes would give the accused some money to buy tobacco, or a
warm winter garment, as he led him back from the judge's office to the

Souriciere, the mouse-trap--the House of Detention where the accused
are kept under the orders of the Examining Judge. He knew how to be an

inflexible judge and a charitable man. And no one extracted a
confession so easily as he without having recourse to judicial

trickery. He had, too, all the acumen of an observer. This man,
apparently so foolishlygood-natured, simple, and absent-minded, could

guess all the cunning of a prison wag, unmask the astutest street
huzzy, and subdue a scoundrel. Unusual circumstances had sharpened his

perspicacity; but to relate these we must intrude on his domestic
history, for in him the judge was the social side of the man; another

man, greater and less known, existed within.
Twelve years before the beginning of this story, in 1816, during the

terrible scarcity which coincided disastrously with the stay in France
of the so-called Allies, Popinot was appointed President of the

Commission Extraordinary formed to distribute food to the poor of his
neighborhood, just when he had planned to move from the Rue du

Fouarre, which he as little liked to live in as his wife did. The
great lawyer, the clear-sighted criminal judge, whose superiority

seemed to his colleagues a form of aberration, had for five years been
watching legal results without seeing their causes. As he scrambled up

into the lofts, as he saw the poverty, as he studied the desperate
necessities which gradually bring the poor to criminal acts, as he

estimated their long struggles, compassion filled his soul. The judge
then became the Saint Vincent de Paul of these grown-up children,

these suffering toilers. The transformation was not immediately
complete. Beneficence has its temptations as vice has. Charity

consumes a saint's purse, as roulette consumes the possessions of a
gambler, quite gradually. Popinot went from misery to misery, from

charity to charity; then, by the time he had lifted all the rags which
cover public pauperism, like a bandage under which an inflamed wound

lies festering, at the end of a year he had become the Providence
incarnate of that quarter of the town. He was a member of the

Benevolent Committee and of the Charity Organization. Wherever any
gratuitous services were needed he was ready, and did everything

without fuss, like the man with the short cloak, who spends his life
in carrying soup round the markets and other places where there are

starving folks.
Popinot was fortunate in acting on a larger circle and in a higher

sphere; he had an eye on everything, he prevented crime, he gave work
to the unemployed, he found a refuge for the helpless, he distributed

aid with discernment wherever danger threatened, he made himself the
counselor of the widow, the protector of homeless children, the

sleeping partner of small traders. No one at the Courts, no one in
Paris, knew of this secret life of Popinot's. There are virtues so

splendid that they necessitateobscurity; men make haste to hide them
under a bushel. As to those whom the lawyer succored, they, hard at

work all day and tired at night, were little able to sing his praises;
theirs was the gracelessness of children, who can never pay because

they owe too much. There is such compulsorygratitude" target="_blank" title="n.忘恩负义">ingratitude; but what
heart that has sown good to reap gratitude can think itself great?

By the end of the second year of his apostolic work, Popinot had
turned the storeroom at the bottom of his house into a parlor, lighted

by the three iron-barred windows. The walls and ceiling of this
spacious room were whitewashed, and the furniture consisted of wooden

benches like those seen in schools, a clumsycupboard, a walnut-wood
writing-table, and an armchair. In the cupboard were his registers of

donations, his tickets for orders for bread, and his diary. He kept
his ledger like a tradesman, that he might not be ruined by kindness.

All the sorrows of the neighborhood were entered and numbered in a
book, where each had its little account, as merchants' customers have

theirs. When there was any question as to a man or a family needing
help, the lawyer could always command information from the police.

Lavienne, a man made for his master, was his aide-de-camp. He redeemed
or renewed pawn-tickets, and visited the districts most threatened

with famine, while his master was in court.
From four till seven in the morning in summer, from six till nine in

winter, this room was full of women, children, and paupers, while
Popinot gave audience. There was no need for a stove in winter; the

crowd was so dense that the air was warmed; only, Lavienne strewed
straw on the wet floor. By long use the benches were as polished as

varnished mahogany; at the height of a man's shoulders the wall had a
coat of dark, indescribable color, given to it by the rags and

tattered clothes of these poor creatures. The poor wretches loved
Popinot so well that when they assembled before his door was opened,

before daybreak on a winter's morning, the women warming themselves
with their foot-brasiers, the men swinging their arms for circulation,

never a sound had disturbed his sleep. Rag-pickers and other toilers
of the night knew the house, and often saw a light burning in the

lawyer's private room at unholy hours. Even thieves, as they passed
by, said, "That is his house," and respected it. The morning he gave

to the poor, the mid-day hours to criminals, the evening to law work.
Thus the gift of observation that characterized Popinot was

necessarily bifrons; he could guess the virtues of a pauper--good
feelings nipped, fine actions in embryo, unrecognized self-sacrifice,

just as he could read at the bottom of a man's conscience the faintest
outlines of a crime, the slenderest threads of wrongdoing, and infer

all the rest.
Popinot's inherited fortune was a thousand crowns a year. His wife,

sister to M. Bianchon SENIOR, a doctor at Sancerre, had brought him
about twice as much. She, dying five years since, had left her fortune

to her husband. As the salary of a supernumerary judge is not large,
and Popinot had been a fully salaried judge only for four years, we

may guess his reasons for parsimony in all that concerned his person
and mode of life, when we consider how small his means were and how

great his beneficence. Besides, is not such indifference to dress as
stamped Popinot an absent-minded man, a distinguishing mark of

scientific attainment, of art passionately pursued, of a perpetually
active mind? To complete this portrait, it will be enough to add that