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