of the law completely fill
the country attorney's mind; he has a bill of costs always before his
eyes, whereas his brother of Paris thinks of nothing but his fees. The
fee is a honorarium paid by a client over and above the bill of costs,
for the more or less skilful conduct of his case. One-half of the bill
of costs goes to the Treasury, whereas the entire fee belongs to the
attorney. Let us admit frankly that the fees received are seldom as
large as the fees demanded and deserved by a clever lawyer. Wherefore,
in Paris, attorneys, doctors, and barristers, like courtesans with
a chance-come lover, take very considerable precautions against the
gratitude of clients. The client before and after the lawsuit would
furnish a subject worthy of Meissonier; there would be brisk bidding
among attorneys for the possession of two such admirable bits of genre.

There is yet another difference between the Parisian and the country
attorney. An attorney in Paris very seldom appears in court, though he
is sometimes called upon to act as arbitrator (_refere_). Barristers,
at the present day, swarm in the provinces; but in 1822 the country
attorney very often united the functions of solicitor and counsel. As
a result of this double life, the attorney acquired the peculiar
intellectual defects of the barrister, and retained the heavy
responsibilities of the attorney. He grew talkative and fluent, and
lost his lucidity of judgment, the first necessity for the conduct of
affairs. If a man of more than ordinary ability tries to do the work of
two men, he is apt to find that the two men are mediocrities. The Paris
attorney never spends himself in forensic eloquence; and as he seldom
attempts to argue for and against, he has some hope of preserving his
mental rectitude. It is true that he brings the balista of the law
to work, and looks for the weapons in the armory of judicial
contradictions, but he keeps his own convictions as to the case, while
he does his best to gain the day. In a word, a man loses his head not so
much by thinking as by uttering thoughts. The spoken word convinces the
utterer; but a man can act against his own bad judgment without warping
it, and contrive to win in a bad cause without maintaining that it is
a good one, like the barrister. Perhaps for this very reason an old
attorney is the more likely of the two to make a good judge.

A country attorney, as we have seen, has plenty of excuses for his
mediocrity; he tak