d 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 P