persons who take society in its serious aspects, the
paraphernalia of justice has a grand and solemn character difficult
perhaps to define. Institutions depend altogether on the feelings with
which men view them and the degree of grandeur which men's thoughts
attach to them. When there is no longer, we will not say religion,
but belief among the people, whenever early education has loosened all
conservative bonds by accustoming youth to the practice of pitiless
analysis, a nation will be found in process of dissolution; for it will
then be held together only by the base solder of material interests, and
by the formulas of a creed created by intelligent egotism.

Bred in religious ideas, Birotteau held justice to be what it ought to
be in the eyes of men,--a representation of society itself, an august
utterance of the will of all, apart from the particular form by which it
is expressed. The older, feebler, grayer the magistrate, the more solemn
seemed the exercise of his function,--a function which demands profound
study of men and things, which subdues the heart and hardens it against
the influence of eager interests. It is a rare thing nowadays to find
men who mount the stairway of the old Palais de Justice in the grasp of
keen emotions. Cesar Birotteau was one of those men.

Few persons have noticed the majestic solemnity of that stairway,
admirably placed as it is to produce a solemn effect. It rises, beyond
the outer peristyle which adorns the courtyard of the Palais, from the
centre of a gallery leading, at one end, to the vast hall of the Pas
Perdus, and at the other to the Sainte-Chapelle,--two architectural
monuments which make all buildings in their neighborhood seem paltry.
The church of Saint-Louis is among the most imposing edifices in Paris,
and the approach to it through this long gallery is at once sombre and
romantic. The great hall of the Pas Perdus, on the contrary, presents at
the other end of the gallery a broad space of light; it is impossible to
forget that the history of France is linked to those walls. The stairway
should therefore be imposing in character; and, in point of act, it is
neither dwarfed nor crushed by the architectural splendors on either
side of it. Possibly the mind is sobered by a glimpse, caught through
the rich gratings, of the Place du Palais-de-Justice, where so many
sentences have been executed. The staircase opens above into an enormous
space, or antechamber, leading to th