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.