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 this secret life of Popinot's.There are virtues so splendid that they necessitate obscurity; 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 compulsory 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 clumsy cupboard, 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.
