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