angular. His thick knees, huge feet, and broad hands
formed a contrast with a priest-like face having a vague resemblance
to a calf's head, meek to unmeaningness, and but little brightened by
divergent bloodless eyes, divided by a straight flat nose, surmounted
by a flat forehead, flanked by enormous ears, flabby and graceless. His
thin, weak hair showed the baldness through various irregular partings.

One feature only commended this face to the 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