of the bundles,
and the avalanche of falling documents crushed two head clerks, fourteen
second clerks, and sixty copying clerks, who were at work upon the
ground floor arranging a change in the fashion of the cavalry gaiters.
The walls of the huge edifice had to be propped. Passers-by saw
with amazement enormous beams and monstrous stanchions which reared
themselves obliquely against the noble front of the building, now
tottering and disjointed, and blocked up the streets, stopped the
carriages, and presented to the motor-omnibuses an obstacle against
which they dashed with their loads of passengers.

The judges who had condemned Pyrot were not, properly speaking, judges
but soldiers. The judges who had condemned Colomban were real judges,
but of inferior rank, wearing seedy black clothes like church vergers,
unlucky wretches of judges, miserable judgelings. Above them were the
superior judges who wore ermine robes over their black gowns. These,
renowned for their knowledge and doctrine, formed a court whose terrible
name expressed power. It was called the Court of Appeal (Cassation) so
as to make it clear that it was the hammer suspended over the judgments
and decrees of all other jurisdictions.

One of these superior red Judges of the Supreme Court, called
Chaussepied, led a modest and tranquil life in a suburb of Alca. His
soul was pure, his heart honest, his spirit just. When he had finished
studying his documents he used to play the violin and cultivate
hyacinths. Every Sunday he dined with his neighbours the Mesdemoiselles
Helbivore. His old age was cheerful and robust and his friends often
praised the amenity of his character.

For some months, however, he had been irritable and touchy, and when he
opened a newspaper his broad and ruddy face would become covered with
dolorous wrinkles and darkened with an angry purple. Pyrot was the cause
of it. Justice Chaussepied could not understand how an officer could
have committed so black a crime as to hand over eighty thousand trusses
of military hay to a neighbouring and hostile Power. And he could still
less conceive how a scoundrel should have found official defenders in
Penguinia. The thought that there existed in his country a Pyrot,
a Colonel Hastaing, a Colomban, a Kerdanic, a Phoenix, spoilt his
hyacinths, his violin, his heaven, and his earth, all nature, and even
his dinner with the Mesdemoiselles Helbivore!

In the mean time the Pyrot case, having been pr