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 procee