im,
neither more nor less. Who authorised you to give a sanction to
documents, or to take it away? Who authorised you to interpret the
intentions of the dead?'

'But then, father Bouin, the old box?'

'Who authorised you to decide whether the will was thrown away on
purpose, or mislaid by accident? Has it never happened to you to do
such a thing, and to find at the bottom of a chest some valuable
paper that you had tossed there inadvertently?'

'But, father Bouin, the far-off date of the paper, and its
injustice?'

'Who authorised you to pronounce on the justice or injustice of the
document, and to regard the bequest as an unlawful gift, rather
than as a restitution or any other lawful act which you may choose
to imagine?'

'But, these poor kinsfolk here on the spot, and that mere
collateral, distant and wealthy?'

'Who authorised you to weigh in your balance what the dead man owed
to his distant relations, whom you don't know?'

'But, father Bouin, that pile of letters from the legatee, which
the departed never even took the trouble to open?'

'There is neither old box, nor date, nor letters, nor father Bouin,
nor if, nor but, in the case. No one has any right to infringe the
laws, to enter into the intention of the dead, or to dispose of
other people's property. If providence has resolved to chastise
either the heir or the legatee or the testator--we cannot tell
which--by the accidental preservation of the will, the will must
remain.'"[1]

[1] _Oeuv._, v. 289.

Diderot the younger declaims against all this with his usual vehemence,
while his brother, the abbe, defends the supremacy of the law on the
proper ground, that to evade or defy it in any given case is to open the
door to the sophistries of all the knaves in the universe. At this point
a journeyman of the neighbourhood comes in with a new case of
conscience. His wife has died after twenty years of sickness; in these
twenty years the cost of her illness has consumed all that he would
otherwise have saved for the end of his days. But, as it happens, the
marriage portion that she brought him has lain untouched. By law this
ought to go to her family. Equity, however, seems to justify him in
keeping what he might have spent if he had chosen. He consults the party
round the fire. One bids him keep the money; another f