The Commission in Lunacy | Page 8

physiognomist. This man
had a mouth to whose lips divine kindness lent its sweetness. They
were wholesome, full, red lips, finely wrinkled, sinuous, mobile, by
which nature had given expression to noble feelings; lips which spoke
to the heart and proclaimed the man's intelligence and lucidity, a gift of
second-sight, and a heavenly temper; and you would have judged him
wrongly from looking merely at his sloping forehead, his fireless eyes,
and his shambling gait. His life answered to his countenance; it was full
of secret labor, and hid the virtue of a saint. His superior knowledge of
law proved so strong a recommendation at a time when Napoleon was
reorganizing it in 1808 and 1811, that, by the advice of Cambaceres, he
was one of the first men named to sit on the Imperial High Court of
Justice at Paris. Popinot was no schemer. Whenever any demand was
made, any request preferred for an appointment, the Minister would
overlook Popinot, who never set foot in the house of the High
Chancellor or the Chief Justice. From the High Court he was sent down
to the Common Court, and pushed to the lowest rung of the ladder by
active struggling men. There he was appointed supernumerary judge.
There was a general outcry among the lawyers: "Popinot a
supernumerary!" Such injustice struck the legal world with dismay--the
attorneys, the registrars, everybody but Popinot himself, who made no
complaint. The first clamor over, everybody was satisfied that all was
for the best in the best of all possible worlds, which must certainly be
the legal world. Popinot remained supernumerary judge till the day
when the most famous Great Seal under the Restoration avenged the
oversights heaped on this modest and uncomplaining man by the Chief
Justices of the Empire. After being a supernumerary for twelve years,
M. Popinot would no doubt die a puisne judge of the Court of the
Seine.
To account for the obscure fortunes of one of the superior men of the
legal profession, it is necessary to enter here into some details which
will serve to reveal his life and character, and which will, at the same
time, display some of the wheels of the great machine known as Justice.

M. Popinot was classed by the three Presidents who successively
controlled the Court of the Seine under the category of possible judges,
the stuff of which judges are made. Thus classified, he did not achieve
the reputation for capacity which his previous labors had deserved. Just
as a painter is invariably included in a category as a landscape painter,
a portrait painter, a painter of history, of sea pieces, or of genre, by a
public consisting of artists, connoisseurs, and simpletons, who, out of
envy, or critical omnipotence, or prejudice, fence in his intellect,
assuming, one and all, that there are ganglions in every brain--a narrow
judgment which the world applies to writers, to statesmen, to
everybody who begins with some specialty before being hailed as
omniscient; so Popinot's fate was sealed, and he was hedged round to
do a particular kind of work. Magistrates, attorneys, pleaders, all who
pasture on the legal common, distinguish two elements in every
case--law and equity. Equity is the outcome of facts, law is the
application of principles to facts. A man may be right in equity but
wrong in law, without any blame to the judge. Between his conscience
and the facts there is a whole gulf of determining reasons unknown to
the judge, but which condemn or legitimatize the act. A judge is not
God; the duty is to adapt facts to principles, to judge cases of infinite
variety 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