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
criminalexaminations, 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
judicialtrickery. 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