The Zlotogrod District lay in the remote eastern part of the monarchy, a region in which there had previously been a worthless Inspector. A long time ago – the older ones could still remember it – there had been real weights and measures! Now there were only scales. Only scales. Cloth was measured with the arm, and as all the world knows, a man’s arm, from his closed fist to his elbow, measures an ell, no more and no less. Moreover, all the world knew that a silver candlestick weighed a pound and twenty grams, and a brass candlestick about two pounds. Indeed, in those parts, there were many folk who really had no use for weights and measures. They weighed in the hand and measured with the eye. It was not a propitious district for a public Inspector of Weights and Measures.

As has been said, there had been another Inspector in the Zlotogrod District before the arrival of the artilleryman Anselm Eibenschütz. An Inspector of a kind! Old and infirm and addicted to alcohol, he had never checked the weights and measures in the little town of Zlotogrod itself, still less in the villages and market-places that belonged to the district. That is why, when the time came for him to be buried, he had an extraordinarily fine funeral. All the merchants followed his coffin: those who weighed with false weights, that is with the silver and brass candlesticks, those who measured with the arm, from closed fist to elbow, and many others who bitterly bewailed, without self-interest and merely as it were on principle, that an Inspector of Weights had passed away who could hardly have possessed any kind of weight himself. For the people of this district regarded all those who made inflexible reference to law, statute, justice and the State as born enemies. To keep the prescribed weights and measures in their shops was as much as they could reconcile with their conscience. What, then, were they to make of the arrival of a new and conscientious Inspector? The suspicion with which Anselm Eibenschütz was welcomed in Zlotogrod matched the grief with which the old Inspector had been borne to the grave.

For it was evident at the first glance that he was neither old, nor infirm, nor given to drink, but, on the contrary, imposing, forceful and honest: above all, too honest.

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