LAWYER.—By no means, but our forefathers, you must know, had a prodigious passion for tilting and fox hunting; they ran all, as if they were mad, to the Holy Land with their doxies. You will grant me that men in such a hurry of business of consequence could not be supposed to have time on their hands to frame a complete body of universal jurisprudence.
CLIENT.—Aye, aye, I understand you. For want of laws of your own you are forced to beg of Charondas and Justinian to be so good as tell you how you should proceed when an inheritance is to be divided.
LAWYER.—There you are mistaken, we have more laws than all Europe besides; almost every city has a body of laws of its own.
CLIENT.—Your most obedient. Here’s another miracle.
LAWYER.—Ah! had your wards been born at Guignes-la-Putain instead of being natives of Melun near Corbeil!
CLIENT.—Very well; what had happened then, for God’s sake?
LAWYER.—You should have gained your cause as sure as two and two make four, that’s all, for at this same Guignes-la-Putain there is a custom which is wholly in your favor; but were you to go but two leagues beyond this, you would then be in a very different situation.
CLIENT.—But pray are not Guignes and Melun both in France? And can anything be more absurd or horrible than to tell me that what’s right in one village is wrong in another? By what fatal barbarity does it happen that people born in the same country do yet live under different laws?
LAWYER.—The reason is, that formerly the inhabitants of Guignes and those of Melun were not inhabitants of the same country: these two fine cities formed in the golden days of yore two distinct empires, and the august sovereign of Guignes, though a vassal to the king of France, gave laws to his own subjects. Those laws depended on the good will and pleasure of his major domo, who, it seems, could not read, so that they have been handed down by a most venerable tradition from father to son, so that the whole race of the barons de Guignes becoming extinct, to the irrecoverable loss of all mankind, the conceits of their first lackeys still exist and are held for the fundamental law of the land. The case is exactly the same in every six leagues in the whole kingdom, so that you change laws every time you change horses, so you may judge what a taking we poor advocates are in when we are to plead, for instance, for an inhabitant of Poictou against an inhabitant of Auvergne.
CLIENT.—But these same men of Poictou, Auvergne, with your Guignes gentry, are they not all dressed in the same manner? Is it a harder matter to use the same laws than it is to wear the same clothes? And since it is evident the tailors and cobblers understand one another from one end of the kingdom to the other, why cannot the judges learn of them, and follow so excellent an example?