"Monsieur," said my good master, "when we have called beauty beautiful, truth true, and justice just, we shall have said nothing at all. Your Ulpian, who spoke with precision, asserted that justice is the firm and perpetual desire to attribute to each what belongs to him, and that laws are just when they sanction this desire. The misfortune is, that men have nothing of their own, and thus the equity of law does but guarantee to them the fruit of their inherited, or recent, rapine. They resemble those childish agreements wherein after having won some marbles, the winners say to those who wish to win them back again, 'That is not fair play.' The sagacity of judges limits itself to differentiating between usurpations which are not fair play and those which were agreed upon in starting, and this distinction is equally childish and thin. Above all, it is arbitrary. The strapping young woman who at this very moment is hanging at the end of a hempen rope, had stolen, you say, a lace head-dress from Councillor Josse's wife. But on what do you found your belief that this head-dress belonged to Councillor Josse's wife? You will tell me that she bought it with her own money, or found it in her wedding-chest, or received it from some lover—all good ways of acquiring lace. But however she may have acquired it I merely see that she had the enjoyment of it, as one of those gifts of fortune one finds, or loses perchance, and over which one has no natural right. Nevertheless, I own that the lappets belonged to her conformably to the rules of this game of possession, which human society can play as children play at hop-scotch. She valued her lappets, and in fact she had no less right to them than any other. Well and good. It was justice to return them to her, but without putting such a high price on them that for two wretched lappets of point d'Alençon a human creature should be destroyed."
"Monsieur," said the little official, "you keep in view but one side of the justice of the matter. It was not enough to do right by Councillor Josse's wife by giving her back her lappets. It was necessary also to do right by the servant in hanging her by the neck. For justice is to render to each what is due to him. In which lies its majesty."
"In that case," said my good master, "justice is wickeder even than I thought. This belief that she owes punishment to the guilty is ferocious in the extreme. It is gothic barbarity."
"Monsieur," said the little official, "you misunderstand justice. Justice strikes without anger, and it has no hatred for this girl it sends to the gallows."
"A good thing, too," said my good master. "But I should prefer that judges confess that they punish the guilty from pure necessity, and only to make impressive examples. In that case they would merely hold by what was actually necessary. But if they think, in punishing, to give the guilty his due, one sees to what this delicate discrimination will lead them, and their probity itself will make them inexorable; for one knows not how to refuse people what is due to them. This maxim horrifies me, Monsieur. It was laid down with the greatest severity by an able philosopher of the name of Menardus, who pretends that to fail to punish an ill-doer is to do him wrong, and wickedly to deprive him of the right to expiate his fault. He held that the Athenian magistrates had done excellently well by Socrates the sage, and that they worked for the purification of his soul when they made him drink the hemlock. But those are odious thoughts. I ask that criminal justice should tend less to the sublime. The notion of pure revenge attached more commonly to the punishment of malefactors, although base and bad in itself, is less terrible in its consequences than the overweening virtue of ingenuous philosophers. I knew in former days, in Séez, a jovial and good sort of fellow, who took his children on his knee every evening and told them tales. He led an exemplary life, went to the sacraments, and prided himself on his scrupulous honesty in the corn business he had carried on for more than sixty years. Now he happened to be robbed by his servant of some doubloons, ducats, rose-nobles, and some fine gold coins, which he, curious of such things, kept in a case at the back of a drawer. As soon as he discovered this loss he carried complaint to the police, whereupon the maidservant was questioned, tried, condemned, and executed. The good man, who knew his rights, exacted that the skin of the thief should be given to him, of which he made a pair of pantaloons; and he would often smack his thigh and cry, 'The hussy! the hussy!' The girl had taken his gold pieces, he had taken her skin; anyway he had his unphilosophical revenge in all the simplicity of his rustic savagery. He had no notion of fulfilling a lofty duty when he slapped his hand light-heartedly on his garment of human skin. Better is it to acknowledge that if one hangs a thief it is for prudence' sake, and with the object of frightening the others by his example, and not at all on the philosophical plea for the sake of giving each man his due. For in true philosophy nothing belongs to anyone if we except life itself. To pretend that we owe expiation to criminals is to fall into mysticism of a ferocious description, worse than naked violence and open anger. As to the punishment of thieves, it is a right which has its origin in force, not in philosophy. Philosophy teaches us, on the contrary, that all we possess is acquired by violence or by cunning. And you see also that judges approve of our being deprived of our possessions if the ravisher be powerful enough. Thus it is permitted to the king to take our silver-plate to make war, as was seen under Louis the Great, when the requisition was so exacting that they even took away the fringe of the bed-hangings, to use the gold woven with the silk. This prince put his hand on the goods of individuals and on the treasures of the Church, and twenty years ago, performing my devotions in Notre-Dame-de-Liesse in Picardy, I heard the complaints of an old verger, who deplored that the late king had taken away and melted down all the treasures of the church, and ravished even the jewelled breast of gold, placed there some time before in great pomp by the Princess Palatine, after she had been miraculously cured of cancer. Justice seconded the prince in his requisition, and punished severely those who hid away any article from the king's commissaries. Evidently she did not think that these things belonged so peculiarly to their possessors that nothing could separate them."
"Monsieur," said the little official, "the commissaries acted in the name of the king, who, possessing everything in the kingdom, can dispose of it to his liking, either for war, or for naval armaments, or in any other way."
"That is true," said my good master, "and that is one of the rules of the game. The judges go about it as in the game of 'goose,' following one another and looking at what is written in the rules. The sovereign's rights, upheld by the Swiss Guard, and by all sorts of soldiers, are written there. And this poor girl, who has been hanged, had no Swiss Guard to inscribe in the rules of the game that she had the right to wear Madame Josse's lace. That is just how it is."
"Monsieur," said the little official, "I hope you do not liken Louis the Great, who took his subjects' plate to pay his soldiers, to this creature who stole a head-dress to deck herself."
"Monsieur," said my good master, "it is less innocent to make war than to go to Ramponneau's in a lace head-dress. But justice gives to every one what is his, according to the rules of this game played by man, which is the wickedest, the most absurd, and the least amusing of all games. And 'tis our misfortune that every man is obliged to take a hand in it."
"It is necessary," said the little official.