The Commission in Lunacy | Page 9

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
virtuous learning, without ambition, an indefatigable worker, never
complained of his fate; he sacrificed his tastes and his 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 foolishly good-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