THE COMMISSION IN LUNACY
By Honore De Balzac
Translated By Clara Bell
DEDICATION
Dedicated to Monsieur le Contre-Amiral Bazoche,
Governor of the Isle of Bourbon, by the grateful writer.
DE BALZAC.
THE COMMISSION IN LUNACY
In 1828, at about one o’clock one morning, two persons came out of
a large house in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, near the
Elysee-Bourbon. One was the famous doctor, Horace Bianchon; the other
was one of the most elegant men in Paris, the Baron de Rastignac; they
were friends of long standing. Each had sent away his carriage, and
no cab was to be seen in the street; but the night was fine, and the
pavement dry.
“We will walk as far as the boulevard,” said Eugene de Rastignac to
Bianchon. “You can get a hackney cab at the club; there is always one to
be found there till daybreak. Come with me as far as my house.”
“With pleasure.”
“Well, and what have you to say about it?”
“About that woman?” said the doctor coldly.
“There I recognize my Bianchon!” exclaimed Rastignac.
“Why, how?”
“Well, my dear fellow, you speak of the Marquise d’Espard as if she were
a case for your hospital.”
“Do you want to know what I think, Eugene? If you throw over Madame de
Nucingen for this Marquise, you will swap a one-eyed horse for a blind
one.”
“Madame de Nucingen is six-and-thirty, Bianchon.”
“And this woman is three-and-thirty,” said the doctor quickly.
“Her worst enemies only say six-and-twenty.”
“My dear boy, when you really want to know a woman’s age, look at her
temples and the tip of her nose. Whatever women may achieve with their
cosmetics, they can do nothing against those incorruptible witnesses to
their experiences. There each year of life has left its stigmata. When a
woman’s temples are flaccid, seamed, withered in a particular way; when
at the tip of her nose you see those minute specks, which look like the
imperceptible black smuts which are shed in London by the chimneys
in which coal is burnt.... Your servant, sir! That woman is more than
thirty. She may be handsome, witty, loving--whatever you please, but
she is past thirty, she is arriving at maturity. I do not blame men who
attach themselves to that kind of woman; only, a man of your superior
distinction must not mistake a winter pippin for a little summer apple,
smiling on the bough, and waiting for you to crunch it. Love never
goes to study the registers of birth and marriage; no one loves a woman
because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or clever; we love because we
love.”
“Well, for my part, I love for quite other reasons. She is Marquise
d’Espard; she was a Blamont-Chauvry; she is the fashion; she has soul;
her foot is as pretty as the Duchesse de Berri’s; she has perhaps a
hundred thousand francs a year--some day, perhaps, I may marry her! In
short, she will put me into a position which will enable me to pay my
debts.”
“I thought you were rich,” interrupted Bianchon.
“Bah! I have twenty thousand francs a year--just enough to keep up
my stables. I was thoroughly done, my dear fellow, in that Nucingen
business; I will tell you about that.--I have got my sisters married;
that is the clearest profit I can show since we last met; and I would
rather have them provided for than have five hundred thousand francs a
year. No, what would you have me do? I am ambitious. To what can
Madame de Nucingen lead? A year more and I shall be shelved, stuck in a
pigeon-hole like a married man. I have all the discomforts of marriage
and of single life, without the advantages of either; a false position
to which every man must come who remains tied too long to the same
apron-string.”
“So you think you will come upon a treasure here?” said Bianchon. “Your
Marquise, my dear fellow, does not hit my fancy at all.”
“Your liberal opinions blur your eyesight. If Madame d’Espard were a
Madame Rabourdin...”
“Listen to me. Noble or simple, she would still have no soul; she would
still be a perfect type of selfishness. Take my word for it, medical men
are accustomed to judge of people and things; the sharpest of us read
the soul while we study the body. In spite of that pretty boudoir where
we have spent this evening, in spite of the magnificence of the house,
it is quite possible that Madame la Marquise is in debt.”
“What makes you think so?”
“I do not assert it; I am supposing. She talked of her soul as Louis
XVIII. used to talk of his heart. I tell you this: That fragile, fair
woman, with her chestnut hair, who pities herself that she may be
pitied, enjoys an iron constitution, an appetite like a wolf’s, and
the strength and cowardice of a tiger. Gauze, and silk, and muslin were
never more cleverly twisted round a lie! Ecco.”
“Bianchon, you frighten me! You have learned a good many things, then,
since we lived in the Maison Vauquer?”
“Yes, since then, my boy, I have seen puppets, both dolls and manikins.
I know something of the ways of the fine ladies whose bodies we attend
to, saving that which is dearest to them, their child--if they love
it--or their pretty faces, which they always worship. A man spends
his nights by their pillow, wearing himself to death to spare them the
slightest loss of beauty in any part; he succeeds, he keeps their secret
like the dead; they send to ask for his bill, and think it horribly
exorbitant. Who saved them? Nature. Far from recommending him, they
speak ill of him, fearing lest he should become the physician of their
best friends.
“My dear fellow, those women of whom you say, ‘They are angels!’
I--I--have seen stripped of the little grimaces under which they hide
their soul, as well as of the frippery under which they disguise their
defects--without manners and without stays; they are not beautiful.
“We saw a great deal of mud, a great deal of dirt, under the waters of
the world when we were aground for a time on the shoals of the Maison
Vauquer.--What we saw there was nothing. Since I have gone into high
society, I have seen monsters dressed in satin, Michonneaus in white
gloves, Poirets bedizened with orders, fine gentlemen doing more
usurious business than old Gobseck! To the shame of mankind, when I have
wanted to shake hands with Virtue, I have found her shivering in a loft,
persecuted by calumny, half-starving on a income or a salary of fifteen
hundred francs a year, and regarded as crazy, or eccentric, or imbecile.
“In short, my dear boy, the Marquise is a woman of fashion, and I have
a particular horror of that kind of woman. Do you want to know why? A
woman who has a lofty soul, fine taste, gentle wit, a generously warm
heart, and who lives a simple life, has not a chance of being the
fashion. Ergo: A woman of fashion and a man in power are analogous; but
there is this difference: the qualities by which a man raises himself
above others ennoble him and are a glory to him; whereas the qualities
by which a woman gains power for a day are hideous vices; she belies her
nature to hide her character, and to live the militant life of the world
she must have iron strength under a frail appearance.
“I, as a physician, know that a sound stomach excludes a good heart.
Your woman of fashion feels nothing; her rage for pleasure has its
source in a longing to heat up her cold nature, a craving for excitement
and enjoyment, like an old man who stands night after night by
the footlights at the opera. As she has more brain than heart, she
sacrifices genuine passion and true friends to her triumph, as a general
sends his most devoted subalterns to the front in order to win a battle.
The woman of fashion ceases to be a woman; she is neither mother, nor
wife, nor lover. She is, medically speaking, sex in the brain. And your
Marquise, too, has all the characteristics of her monstrosity, the beak
of a bird of prey, the clear, cold eye, the gentle voice--she is as
polished as the steel of a machine, she touches everything except the
heart.”
“There is some truth in what you say, Bianchon.”
“Some truth?” replied Bianchon. “It is all true. Do you suppose that
I was not struck to the heart by the insulting politeness by which
she made me measure the imaginary distance which her noble birth sets
between us? That I did not feel the deepest pity for her cat-like
civilities when I remembered what her object was? A year hence she will
not write one word to do me the slightest service, and this evening she
pelted me with smiles, believing that I can influence my uncle Popinot,
on whom the success of her case----”
“Would you rather she should have played the fool with you, my dear
fellow?--I accept your diatribe against women of fashion; but you are
beside the mark. I should always prefer for a wife a Marquise d’Espard
to the most devout and devoted creature on earth. Marry an angel! you
would have to go and bury your happiness in the depths of the country!
The wife of a politician is a governing machine, a contrivance that
makes compliments and courtesies. She is the most important and most
faithful tool which an ambitious man can use; a friend, in short, who
may compromise herself without mischief, and whom he may belie without
harmful results. Fancy Mahomet in Paris in the nineteenth century! His
wife would be a Rohan, a Duchesse de Chevreuse of the Fronde, as keen
and as flattering as an Ambassadress, as wily as Figaro. Your loving
wives lead nowhere; a woman of the world leads to everything; she is the
diamond with which a man cuts every window when he has not the golden
key which unlocks every door. Leave humdrum virtues to the humdrum,
ambitious vices to the ambitious.
“Besides, my dear fellow, do you imagine that the love of a Duchesse
de Langeais, or de Maufrigneuse, or of a Lady Dudley does not bestow
immense pleasure? If only you knew how much value the cold, severe style
of such a woman gives to the smallest evidence of their affection! What
a delight it is to see a periwinkle piercing through the snow! A smile
from below a fan contradicts the reserve of an assumed attitude, and is
worth all the unbridled tenderness of your middle-class women with
their mortgaged devotion; for, in love, devotion is nearly akin to
speculation.
“And, then, a woman of fashion, a Blamont-Chauvry, has her virtues too!
Her virtues are fortune, power, effect, a certain contempt of all that
is beneath her----”
“Thank you!” said Bianchon.
“Old curmudgeon!” said Rastignac, laughing. “Come--do not be so common,
do like your friend Desplein; be a Baron, a Knight of Saint-Michael;
become a peer of France, and marry your daughters to dukes.”
“I! May the five hundred thousand devils----”
“Come, come! Can you be superior only in medicine? Really, you distress
me...”
“I hate that sort of people; I long for a revolution to deliver us from
them for ever.”
“And so, my dear Robespierre of the lancet, you will not go to-morrow to
your uncle Popinot?”
“Yes, I will,” said Bianchon; “for you I would go to hell to fetch
water...”
“My good friend, you really touch me. I have sworn that a commission
shall sit on the Marquis. Why, here is even a long-saved tear to thank
you.”
“But,” Bianchon went on, “I do not promise to succeed as you wish with
Jean-Jules Popinot. You do not know him. However, I will take him to see
your Marquise the day after to-morrow; she may get round him if she can.
I doubt it. If all the truffles, all the Duchesses, all the mistresses,
and all the charmers in Paris were there in the full bloom of their
beauty; if the King promised him the _Prairie_, and the Almighty gave
him the Order of Paradise with the revenues of Purgatory, not one of all
these powers would induce him to transfer a single straw from one saucer
of his scales into the other. He is a judge, as Death is Death.”
The two friends had reached the office of the Minister for Foreign
Affairs, at the corner of the Boulevard des Capucines.
“Here you are at home,” said Bianchon, laughing, as he pointed to the
ministerial residence. “And here is my carriage,” he added, calling a
hackney cab. “And these--express our fortune.”
“You will be happy at the bottom of the sea, while I am still struggling
with the tempests on the surface, till I sink and go to ask you for a
corner in your grotto, old fellow!”
“Till Saturday,” replied Bianchon.
“Agreed,” said Rastignac. “And you promise me Popinot?”
“I will do all my conscience will allow. Perhaps this appeal for a
commission covers some little dramorama, to use a word of our good bad
times.”
“Poor Bianchon! he will never be anything but a good fellow,” said
Rastignac to himself as the cab drove off.
“Rastignac has given me the most difficult negotiation in the world,”
said Bianchon to himself, remembering, as he rose next morning, the
delicate commission intrusted to him. “However, I have never asked
the smallest service from my uncle in Court, and have paid more than a
thousand visits gratis for him. And, after all, we are not apt to mince
matters between ourselves. He will say Yes or No, and there an end.”
After this little soliloquy the famous physician bent his steps, at
seven in the morning, towards the Rue du Fouarre, where dwelt Monsieur
Jean-Jules Popinot, judge of the Lower Court of the Department of
the Seine. The Rue du Fouarre--an old word meaning straw--was in the
thirteenth century the most important street in Paris. There stood the
Schools of the University, where the voices of Abelard and of Gerson
were heard in the world of learning. It is now one of the dirtiest
streets of the Twelfth Arrondissement, the poorest quarter of Paris,
that in which two-thirds of the population lack firing in winter, which
leaves most brats at the gate of the Foundling Hospital, which sends
most beggars to the poorhouse, most rag-pickers to the street corners,
most decrepit old folks to bask against the walls on which the sun
shines, most delinquents to the police courts.
Half-way down this street, which is always damp, and where the gutter
carries to the Seine the blackened waters from some dye-works, there is
an old house, restored no doubt under Francis I., and built of bricks
held together by a few courses of masonry. That it is substantial seems
proved by the shape of its front wall, not uncommonly seen in some
parts of Paris. It bellies, so to speak, in a manner caused by the
protuberance of its first floor, crushed under the weight of the second
and third, but upheld by the strong wall of the ground floor. At first
sight it would seem as though the piers between the windows, though
strengthened by the stone mullions, must give way, but the observer
presently perceives that, as in the tower at Bologna, the old bricks and
old time-eaten stones of this house persistently preserve their centre
of gravity.
At every season of the year the solid piers of the ground floor have the
yellow tone and the imperceptible sweating surface that moisture gives
to stone. The passer-by feels chilled as he walks close to this wall,
where worn corner-stones ineffectually shelter him from the wheels of
vehicles. As is always the case in houses built before carriages were
in use, the vault of the doorway forms a very low archway not unlike
the barbican of a prison. To the right of this entrance there are three
windows, protected outside by iron gratings of so close a pattern, that
the curious cannot possibly see the use made of the dark, damp rooms
within, and the panes too are dirty and dusty; to the left are two
similar windows, one of which is sometimes open, exposing to view the
porter, his wife, and his children; swarming, working, cooking, eating,
and screaming, in a floored and wainscoted room where everything is
dropping to pieces, and into which you descend two steps--a depth which
seems to suggest the gradual elevation of the soil of Paris.
If on a rainy day some foot-passenger takes refuge under the long vault,
with projecting lime-washed beams, which leads from the door to
the staircase, he will hardly fail to pause and look at the picture
presented by the interior of this house. To the left is a square
garden-plot, allowing of not more than four long steps in each
direction, a garden of black soil, with trellises bereft of vines, and
where, in default of vegetation under the shade of two trees, papers
collect, old rags, potsherds, bits of mortar fallen from the roof; a
barren ground, where time has shed on the walls, and on the trunks and
branches of the trees, a powdery deposit like cold soot. The two parts
of the house, set at a right angle, derive light from this garden-court
shut in by two adjoining houses built on wooden piers, decrepit and
ready to fall, where on each floor some grotesque evidence is to be seen
of the craft pursued by some lodger within. Here long poles are hung
with immense skeins of dyed worsted put out to dry; there, on ropes,
dance clean-washed shirts; higher up, on a shelf, volumes display their
freshly marbled edges; women sing, husbands whistle, children shout; the
carpenter saws his planks, a copper-turner makes the metal screech;
all kinds of industries combine to produce a noise which the number of
instruments renders distracting.
The general system of decoration in this passage, which is neither
courtyard, garden, nor vaulted way, though a little of all, consists of
wooden pillars resting on square stone blocks, and forming arches. Two
archways open on to the little garden; two others, facing the front
gateway, lead to a wooden staircase, with an iron balustrade that was
once a miracle of smith’s work, so whimsical are the shapes given to the
metal; the worn steps creak under every tread. The entrance to each flat
has an architrave dark with dirt, grease, and dust, and outer doors,
covered with Utrecht velvet set with brass nails, once gilt, in a
diamond pattern. These relics of splendor show that in the time of Louis
XIV. the house was the residence of some councillor to the Parlement,
some rich priests, or some treasurer of the ecclesiastical revenue. But
these vestiges of former luxury bring a smile to the lips by the artless
contrast of past and present.
M. Jean-Jules Popinot lived on the first floor of this house, where the
gloom, natural to all first floors in Paris houses, was increased by the
narrowness of the street. This old tenement was known to all the twelfth
arrondissement, on which Providence had bestowed this lawyer, as it
gives a beneficent plant to cure or alleviate every malady. Here is a
sketch of a man whom the brilliant Marquise d’Espard hoped to fascinate.
M. Popinot, as is seemly for a magistrate, was always dressed in
black--a style which contributed to make him ridiculous in the eyes of
those who were in the habit of judging everything from a superficial
examination. Men who are jealous of maintaining the dignity required
by this color ought to devote themselves to constant and minute care of
their person; but our dear M. Popinot was incapable of forcing himself
to the puritanical cleanliness which black demands. His trousers, always
threadbare, looked like camlet--the stuff of which attorneys’ gowns
are made; and his habitual stoop set them, in time, in such innumerable
creases, that in places they were traced with lines, whitish, rusty, or
shiny, betraying either sordid avarice, or the most unheeding poverty.
His coarse worsted stockings were twisted anyhow in his ill-shaped
shoes. His linen had the tawny tinge acquired by long sojourn in a
wardrobe, showing that the late lamented Madame Popinot had had a mania
for much linen; in the Flemish fashion, perhaps, she had given herself
the trouble of a great wash no more than twice a year. The old man’s
coat and waistcoat were in harmony with his trousers, shoes, stockings,
and linen. He always had the luck of his carelessness; for, the first
day he put on a new coat, he unfailingly matched it with the rest of his
costume by staining it with incredible promptitude. The good man waited
till his housekeeper told him that his hat was too shabby before buying
a new one. His necktie was always crumpled and starchless, and he never
set his dog-eared shirt collar straight after his judge’s bands had
disordered it. He took no care of his gray hair, and shaved but twice
a week. He never wore gloves, and generally kept his hands stuffed into
his empty trousers’ pockets; the soiled pocket-holes, almost always
torn, added a final touch to the slovenliness of his person.
Any one who knows the Palais de Justice at Paris, where every variety
of black attire may be studied, can easily imagine the appearance of M.
Popinot. The habit of sitting for days at a time modifies the structure
of the body, just as the fatigue of hearing interminable pleadings tells
on the expression of a magistrate’s face. Shut up as he is in courts
ridiculously small, devoid of architectural dignity, and where the air
is quickly vitiated, a Paris judge inevitably acquires a countenance
puckered and seamed by reflection, and depressed by weariness; his
complexion turns pallid, acquiring an earthy or greenish hue according
to his individual temperament. In short, within a given time the most
blooming young man is turned into an “inasmuch” machine--an instrument
which applies the Code to individual cases with the indifference of
clockwork.
Hence, nature, having bestowed on M. Popinot a not too pleasing
exterior, his life as a lawyer had not improved it. His frame was
graceless and 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 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 proceeded from deduction to deduction before drawing his
conclusions, and reconstructed the past career of a conscience as Cuvier
reconstructed an Anoplotherium. When considering a brief he would often
wake in the night, startled by a gleam of truth suddenly sparkling
in his brain. Struck by the deep injustice, which is the end of these
contests, in which everything is against the honest man, everything
to the advantage of the rogue, he often summed up in favor of equity
against law in such cases as bore on questions of what may be termed
divination. Hence he was regarded by his colleagues as a man not of
a practical mind; his arguments on two lines of deduction made their
deliberations lengthy. When Popinot observed their dislike to listening
to him he gave his opinion briefly; it was said that he was not a good
judge in this class of cases; but as his gift of discrimination was
remarkable, his opinion lucid, and his penetration profound, he was
considered to have a special aptitude for the laborious duties of an
examining judge. So an examining judge he remained during the greater
part of his legal career.
Although his qualifications made him eminently fitted for its difficult
functions, and he had the reputation of being so learned in criminal
law that his duty was a pleasure to him, the kindness of his heart
constantly kept him in torture, and he was nipped as in a vise between
his conscience and his pity. The services of an examining judge are
better paid than those of a judge in civil actions, but they do not
therefore prove a temptation; they are too onerous. Popinot, a man of
modest and virtuous learning, without ambition, an indefatigable
worker, never complained of his fate; he sacrificed his tastes and
his compassionate soul to the public good, and allowed himself to be
transported to the noisome pools of criminal examinations, where he
showed himself alike severe and beneficent. His clerk sometimes would
give the accused some money to buy tobacco, or a warm winter garment,
as he led him back from the judge’s office to the Souriciere, the
mouse-trap--the House of Detention where the accused are kept under the
orders of the Examining Judge. He knew how to be an inflexible judge
and a charitable man. And no one extracted a confession so easily as
he without having recourse to judicial trickery. He had, too, all the
acumen of an observer. This man, apparently so foolishly good-natured,
simple, and absent-minded, could 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 Popinot’s. There are virtues so splendid that they
necessitate obscurity; men make haste to hide them under a bushel. As to
those whom the lawyer succored, they, hard at work all day and tired
at night, were little able to sing his praises; theirs was the
gracelessness of children, who can never pay because they owe too much.
There is such compulsory ingratitude; but what heart that has sown good
to reap gratitude can think itself great?
By the end of the second year of his apostolic work, Popinot had turned
the storeroom at the bottom of his house into a parlor, lighted by the
three iron-barred windows. The walls and ceiling of this spacious room
were whitewashed, and the furniture consisted of wooden benches like
those seen in schools, a clumsy cupboard, a walnut-wood writing-table,
and an armchair. In the cupboard were his registers of donations, his
tickets for orders for bread, and his diary. He kept his ledger like a
tradesman, that he might not be ruined by kindness. All the sorrows of
the neighborhood were entered and numbered in a book, where each had its
little account, as merchants’ customers have theirs. When there was any
question as to a man or a family needing help, the lawyer could always
command information from the police.
Lavienne, a man made for his master, was his aide-de-camp. He redeemed
or renewed pawn-tickets, and visited the districts most threatened with
famine, while his master was in court.
From four till seven in the morning in summer, from six till nine
in winter, this room was full of women, children, and paupers, while
Popinot gave audience. There was no need for a stove in winter; the
crowd was so dense that the air was warmed; only, Lavienne strewed straw
on the wet floor. By long use the benches were as polished as varnished
mahogany; at the height of a man’s shoulders the wall had a coat of
dark, indescribable color, given to it by the rags and tattered clothes
of these poor creatures. The poor wretches loved Popinot so well that
when they assembled before his door was opened, before daybreak on a
winter’s morning, the women warming themselves with their foot-brasiers,
the men swinging their arms for circulation, never a sound had disturbed
his sleep. Rag-pickers and other toilers of the night knew the house,
and often saw a light burning in the lawyer’s private room at unholy
hours. Even thieves, as they passed by, said, “That is his house,” and
respected it. The morning he gave to the poor, the mid-day hours to
criminals, the evening to law work.
Thus the gift of observation that characterized Popinot was necessarily
bifrons; he could guess the virtues of a pauper--good feelings nipped,
fine actions in embryo, unrecognized self-sacrifice, just as he could
read at the bottom of a man’s conscience the faintest outlines of a
crime, the slenderest threads of wrongdoing, and infer all the rest.
Popinot’s inherited fortune was a thousand crowns a year. His wife,
sister to M. Bianchon _Senior_, a doctor at Sancerre, had brought him
about twice as much. She, dying five years since, had left her fortune
to her husband. As the salary of a supernumerary judge is not large,
and Popinot had been a fully salaried judge only for four years, we may
guess his reasons for parsimony in all that concerned his person and
mode of life, when we consider how small his means were and how great
his beneficence. Besides, is not such indifference to dress as stamped
Popinot an absent-minded man, a distinguishing mark of scientific
attainment, of art passionately pursued, of a perpetually active mind?
To complete this portrait, it will be enough to add that Popinot was one
of the few judges of the Court of the Seine on whom the ribbon of the
Legion of Honor had not been conferred.
Such was the man who had been instructed by the President of the
Second Chamber of the Court--to which Popinot had belonged since his
reinstatement among the judges in civil law--to examine the Marquis
d’Espard at the request of his wife, who sued for a Commission in
Lunacy.
The Rue du Fouarre, where so many unhappy wretches swarmed in the early
morning, would be deserted by nine o’clock, and as gloomy and squalid as
ever. Bianchon put his horse to a trot in order to find his uncle in the
midst of his business. It was not without a smile that he thought of the
curious contrast the judge’s appearance would make in Madame d’Espard’s
room; but he promised himself that he would persuade him to dress in a
way that should not be too ridiculous.
“If only my uncle happens to have a new coat!” said Bianchon to himself,
as he turned into the Rue du Fouarre, where a pale light shone from
the parlor windows. “I shall do well, I believe, to talk that over with
Lavienne.”
At the sound of wheels half a score of startled paupers came out from
under the gateway, and took off their hats on recognizing Bianchon; for
the doctor, who treated gratuitously the sick recommended to him by the
lawyer, was not less well known than he to the poor creatures assembled
there.
Bianchon found his uncle in the middle of the parlor, where the benches
were occupied by patients presenting such grotesque singularities of
costume as would have made the least artistic passer-by turn round
to gaze at them. A draughtsman--a Rembrandt, if there were one in our
day--might have conceived of one of his finest compositions from seeing
these children of misery, in artless attitudes, and all silent.
Here was the rugged countenance of an old man with a white beard and
an apostolic head--a Saint Peter ready to hand; his chest, partly
uncovered, showed salient muscles, the evidence of an iron constitution
which had served him as a fulcrum to resist a whole poem of sorrows.
There a young woman was suckling her youngest-born to keep it from
crying, while another of about five stood between her knees. Her white
bosom, gleaming amid rags, the baby with its transparent flesh-tints,
and the brother, whose attitude promised a street arab in the future,
touched the fancy with pathos by its almost graceful contrast with the
long row of faces crimson with cold, in the midst of which sat this
family group. Further away, an old woman, pale and rigid, had the
repulsive look of rebellious pauperism, eager to avenge all its past
woes in one day of violence.
There, again, was the young workman, weakly and indolent, whose brightly
intelligent eye revealed fine faculties crushed by necessity struggled
with in vain, saying nothing of his sufferings, and nearly dead for lack
of an opportunity to squeeze between the bars of the vast stews where
the wretched swim round and round and devour each other.
The majority were women; their husbands, gone to their work, left it
to them, no doubt, to plead the cause of the family with the ingenuity
which characterizes the woman of the people, who is almost always queen
in her hovel. You would have seen a torn bandana on every head, on every
form a skirt deep in mud, ragged kerchiefs, worn and dirty jackets, but
eyes that burnt like live coals. It was a horrible assemblage, raising
at first sight a feeling of disgust, but giving a certain sense of
terror the instant you perceived that the resignation of these souls,
all engaged in the struggle for every necessary of life, was purely
fortuitous, a speculation on benevolence. The two tallow candles which
lighted the parlor flickered in a sort of fog caused by the fetid
atmosphere of the ill-ventilated room.
The magistrate himself was not the least picturesque figure in the midst
of this assembly. He had on his head a rusty cotton night-cap; as he had
no cravat, his neck was visible, red with cold and wrinkled, in contrast
with the threadbare collar of his old dressing-gown. His worn face had
the half-stupid look that comes of absorbed attention. His lips, like
those of all men who work, were puckered up like a bag with the strings
drawn tight. His knitted brows seemed to bear the burden of all the
sorrows confided to him: he felt, analyzed, and judged them all. As
watchful as a Jew money-lender, he never raised his eyes from his books
and registers but to look into the very heart of the persons he was
examining, with the flashing glance by which a miser expresses his
alarm.
Lavienne, standing behind his master, ready to carry out his orders,
served no doubt as a sort of police, and welcomed newcomers by
encouraging them to get over their shyness. When the doctor appeared
there was a stir on the benches. Lavienne turned his head, and was
strangely surprised to see Bianchon.
“Ah! It is you, old boy!” exclaimed Popinot, stretching himself. “What
brings you so early?”
“I was afraid lest you should make an official visit about which I wish
to speak to you before I could see you.”
“Well,” said the lawyer, addressing a stout little woman who was still
standing close to him, “if you do not tell me what it is you want, I
cannot guess it, child.”
“Make haste,” said Lavienne. “Do not waste other people’s time.”
“Monsieur,” said the woman at last, turning red, and speaking so low as
only to be heard by Popinot and Lavienne, “I have a green-grocery truck,
and I have my last baby to nurse, and I owe for his keep. Well, I had
hidden my little bit of money----”
“Yes; and your man took it?” said Popinot, guessing the sequel.
“Yes, sir.”
“What is your name?”
“La Pomponne.”
“And your husband’s?”
“Toupinet.”
“Rue du Petit-Banquier?” said Popinot, turning over his register. “He
is in prison,” he added, reading a note at the margin of the section in
which this family was described.
“For debt, my kind monsieur.”
Popinot shook his head.
“But I have nothing to buy any stock for my truck; the landlord came
yesterday and made me pay up; otherwise I should have been turned out.”
Lavienne bent over his master, and whispered in his ear.
“Well, how much do you want to buy fruit in the market?”
“Why, my good monsieur, to carry on my business, I should want--Yes, I
should certainly want ten francs.”
Popinot signed to Lavienne, who took ten francs out of a large bag, and
handed them to the woman, while the lawyer made a note of the loan in
his ledger. As he saw the thrill of delight that made the poor hawker
tremble, Bianchon understood the apprehensions that must have agitated
her on her way to the lawyer’s house.
“You next,” said Lavienne to the old man with the white beard.
Bianchon drew the servant aside, and asked him how long this audience
would last.
“Monsieur has had two hundred persons this morning, and there are eight
to be turned off,” said Lavienne. “You will have time to pay your early
visit, sir.”
“Here, my boy,” said the lawyer, turning round and taking Horace by the
arm; “here are two addresses near this--one in the Rue de Seine, and the
other in the Rue de l’Arbalete. Go there at once. Rue de Seine, a young
girl has just asphyxiated herself; and Rue de l’Arbalete, you will find
a man to remove to your hospital. I will wait breakfast for you.”
Bianchon returned an hour later. The Rue du Fouarre was deserted; day
was beginning to dawn there; his uncle had gone up to his rooms; the
last poor wretch whose misery the judge had relieved was departing, and
Lavienne’s money bag was empty.
“Well, how are they going on?” asked the old lawyer, as the doctor came
in.
“The man is dead,” replied Bianchon; “the girl will get over it.”
Since the eye and hand of a woman had been lacking, the flat in which
Popinot lived had assumed an aspect in harmony with its master’s. The
indifference of a man who is absorbed in one dominant idea had set its
stamp of eccentricity on everything. Everywhere lay unconquerable
dust, every object was adapted to a wrong purpose with a pertinacity
suggestive of a bachelor’s home. There were papers in the flower vases,
empty ink-bottles on the tables, plates that had been forgotten, matches
used as tapers for a minute when something had to be found, drawers or
boxes half-turned out and left unfinished; in short, all the confusion
and vacancies resulting from plans for order never carried out. The
lawyer’s private room, especially disordered by this incessant rummage,
bore witness to his unresting pace, the hurry of a man overwhelmed with
business, hunted by contradictory necessities. The bookcase looked as
if it had been sacked; there were books scattered over everything,
some piled up open, one on another, others on the floor face downwards;
registers of proceedings laid on the floor in rows, lengthwise, in front
of the shelves; and that floor had not been polished for two years.
The tables and shelves were covered with ex votos, the offerings of
the grateful poor. On a pair of blue glass jars which ornamented the
chimney-shelf there were two glass balls, of which the core was made up
of many-colored fragments, giving them the appearance of some singular
natural product. Against the wall hung frames of artificial flowers, and
decorations in which Popinot’s initials were surrounded by hearts and
everlasting flowers. Here were boxes of elaborate and useless cabinet
work; there letter-weights carved in the style of work done by
convicts in penal servitude. These masterpieces of patience, enigmas of
gratitude, and withered bouquets gave the lawyer’s room the appearance
of a toyshop. The good man used these works of art as hiding-places
which he filled with bills, worn-out pens, and scraps of paper. All
these pathetic witnesses to his divine charity were thick with dust,
dingy, and faded.
Some birds, beautifully stuffed, but eaten by moth, perched in this
wilderness of trumpery, presided over by an Angora cat, Madame Popinot’s
pet, restored to her no doubt with all the graces of life by some
impecunious naturalist, who thus repaid a gift of charity with a
perennial treasure. Some local artist whose heart had misguided his
brush had painted portraits of M. and Madame Popinot. Even in the
bedroom there were embroidered pin-cushions, landscapes in cross-stitch,
and crosses in folded paper, so elaborately cockled as to show the
senseless labor they had cost.
The window-curtains were black with smoke, and the hangings absolutely
colorless. Between the fireplace and the large square table at which the
magistrate worked, the cook had set two cups of coffee on a small table,
and two armchairs, in mahogany and horsehair, awaited the uncle and
nephew. As daylight, darkened by the windows, could not penetrate to
this corner, the cook had left two dips burning, whose unsnuffed wicks
showed a sort of mushroom growth, giving the red light which promises
length of life to the candle from slowness of combustion--a discovery
due to some miser.
“My dear uncle, you ought to wrap yourself more warmly when you go down
to that parlor.”
“I cannot bear to keep them waiting, poor souls!--Well, and what do you
want of me?”
“I have come to ask you to dine to-morrow with the Marquise d’Espard.”
“A relation of ours?” asked Popinot, with such genuine absence of mind
that Bianchon laughed.
“No, uncle; the Marquise d’Espard is a high and puissant lady, who has
laid before the Courts a petition desiring that a Commission in Lunacy
should sit on her husband, and you are appointed----”
“And you want me to dine with her! Are you mad?” said the lawyer, taking
up the code of proceedings. “Here, only read this article, prohibiting
any magistrate’s eating or drinking in the house of either of two
parties whom he is called upon to decide between. Let her come and see
me, your Marquise, if she has anything to say to me. I was, in fact,
to go to examine her husband to-morrow, after working the case up
to-night.”
He rose, took up a packet of papers that lay under a weight where he
could see it, and after reading the title, he said:
“Here is the affidavit. Since you take an interest in this high and
puissant lady, let us see what she wants.”
Popinot wrapped his dressing-gown across his body, from which it was
constantly slipping and leaving his chest bare; he sopped his bread in
the half-cold coffee, and opened the petition, which he read, allowing
himself to throw in a parenthesis now and then, and some discussions, in
which his nephew took part:--
“‘To Monsieur the President of the Civil Tribunal of the Lower Court of
the Department of the Seine, sitting at the Palais de Justice.
“‘Madame Jeanne Clementine Athenais de Blamont-Chauvry, wife of
M. Charles Maurice Marie Andoche, Comte de Negrepelisse, Marquis
d’Espard’--a very good family--‘landowner, the said Mme. d’Espard living
in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, No. 104, and the said M. d’Espard
in the Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve, No. 22,’--to be sure, the
President told me he lived in this part of the town--‘having for her
solicitor Maitre Desroches’--Desroches! a pettifogging jobber, a man
looked down upon by his brother lawyers, and who does his clients no
good--”
“Poor fellow!” said Bianchon, “unluckily he has no money, and he rushes
round like the devil in holy water--That is all.”