FOR AND AGAINST

The bar association loses, with Mr. Demange, a great man and a man, a great man of the highest talent, the noblest and the broadest, a man of the highest and clearest conscience.
His eloquence was superb and his character was worth his eloquence. It is a magnificent figure of France who disappears...
He is not, for example, a "very Parisian" figure... No! Mr. Edgar Demange was never a very Parisian man. He did not attend premieres... He did not speak at big funerals. He dined very little in town and, a detail that is perhaps not one, he did not have a car. What am I saying! In his quiet and secluded apartment on the Quai de la Tournelle, he did not even have an elevator.
Mr. Demange was too old a Parisian to be very Parisian... Glory, boasting, vanity, honors, power, influence, all that did not touch him. He had devoted his life to a single task, a single passion: the bar. Nothing could have distracted him from this task, to tear him away from this passion, which he also considered a duty... And this is perhaps what is the greatest and rarest in the career of this master of speech: he had and wanted to have only one profession...
A lawyer, he never got involved in politics. It is hardly believable. His splendid audience successes never turned his head... He pleaded for Pranzini - the most sensational affair of the time, and perhaps even of an era, and he did not take advantage of it to launch himself, then, into politics...
He defended Captain Dreyfus and yet remained above and outside all the storms of the time. He was not seen at any meeting. And defending Captain Dreyfus, he defended, the same year, a fierce "anti-Dreyfusard", the master journalist Paul de Cassagnac. He was not of any clan, of any group. He had opinions, but he kept them to himself and did not feel obliged to communicate them to the whole country....
He accepted only one celebrity: that of his profession. His parliament was the Palais de Justice, his Académie française was the Palais. His only pride, his only ambition, his only satisfaction, was his "only" task, defense...
We can salute this great man, this honest man, this simple, discreet, modest and poor man...

Maurice PRAX.