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