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