“Such a comparison, my dear, is at best but a jest, and jesting is out of place now.  In this case the dead man clutches the living.  All our hopes are buried in Lucien’s coffin.”

“Indeed?” said Madame Camusot, with deep irony.

“Yes, my career is closed.  I shall be no more than an examining judge all my life.  Before this fatal termination Monsieur de Granville was annoyed at the turn the preliminaries had taken; his speech to our President makes me quite certain that so long as Monsieur de Granville is public prosecutor I shall get no promotion.”

Promotion!  The terrible thought, which in these days makes a judge a mere functionary.

Formerly a magistrate was made at once what he was to remain.  The three or four presidents’ caps satisfied the ambitions of lawyers in each Parlement.  An appointment as councillor was enough for a de Brosses or a Mole, at Dijon as much as in Paris.  This office, in itself a fortune, required a fortune brought to it to keep it up.

In Paris, outside the Parlement, men of the long robe could hope only for three supreme appointments:  those of Controller-General, Keeper of the Seals, or Chancellor.  Below the Parlement, in the lower grades, the president of a lower Court thought himself quite of sufficient importance to be content to fill his chair to the end of his days.

Compare the position of a councillor in the High Court of Justice in Paris, in 1829, who has nothing but his salary, with that of a councillor to the Parlement in 1729.  How great is the difference!  In these days, when money is the universal social guarantee, magistrates are not required to have—­as they used to have—­fine private fortunes:  hence we see deputies and peers of France heaping office on office, at once magistrates and legislators, borrowing dignity from other positions than those which ought to give them all their importance.

In short, a magistrate tries to distinguish himself for promotion as men do in the army, or in a Government office.

This prevailing thought, even if it does not affect his independence, is so well known and so natural, and its effects are so evident, that the law inevitably loses some of its majesty in the eyes of the public.  And, in fact, the salaries paid by the State makes priests and magistrates mere employes.  Steps to be gained foster ambition, ambition engenders subservience to power, and modern equality places the judge and the person to be judged in the same category at the bar of society.  And so the two pillars of social order, Religion and Justice, are lowered in this nineteenth century, which asserts itself as progressive in all things.

“And why should you never be promoted?” said Amelie Camusot.

She looked half-jestingly at her husband, feeling the necessity of reviving the energies of the man who embodied her ambitions, and on whom she could play as on an instrument.