Les Miserables (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (10 page)

The installation being completed, the town was curious to see its bishop at work.

THE BISHOP’S PALACE at D—was contiguous to the hospital: the palace was a spacious and beautiful edifice, built of stone near the beginning of the last century by Monseigneur Henri Pujet, a doctor of theology of the Faculty of Paris, abbé of Simore, who was bishop of D—in 1712. The palace was in truth a lordly dwelling: there was an air of grandeur about everything, the apartments of the bishop, the parlors, the chambers, the court of honour, which was very wide, with arched walks after the antique Florentine style; and a garden planted with magnificent trees.

The hospital was a low, narrow, one-story building with a small garden.

Three days after the bishop’s advent he visited the hospital; when the visit was ended, he invited the director to oblige him by coming to the palace.

“Monsieur,” he said to the director of the hospital, “how many patients have you?”

“Twenty-six, monseigneur.”

“That is as I counted them,” said the bishop.

“The beds,” continued the director, “are very crowded.”

“I noticed it.”

“The wards are only small rooms, and are not easily ventilated.”

“It seems so to me.”

“And then, when the sun does shine, the garden is very small for the convalescents.”

“That was what I was thinking.”

“Of epidemics we have had typhus fever this year; two years ago we had military fever, sometimes one hundred patients, and we did not know what to do.”

“That occurred to me.”

“What can we do, monseigneur?” said the director; “we must be resigned.”

This conversation took place in the dining gallery on the ground floor.

The bishop was silent a few moments: then he turned suddenly towards the director.

“Monsieur,” he said, “how many beds do you think this hall alone would contain?”

“The dining hall of monseigneur!” exclaimed the director, stupefied.

The bishop ran his eyes over the hall, seemingly taking measure and making calculations.

“It will hold at least twenty beds,” said he to himself; then raising his voice, he said:

“Listen, Monsieur Director, to what I have to say. There is evidently a mistake here. There are twenty-six of you in five or six small rooms: there are only three of us here, and space for sixty. There is a mistake, I tell you. You have my house and I have yours. Give me back my house; the palace is your home now.”

Next day the twenty-six poor invalids were installed in the bishop’s palace, and the bishop was in the hospital.

M. Myriel had no property, his family having been impoverished by the revolution. His sister had a life income of five hundred francs which in the vicarage sufficed for her personal needs. M. Myriel received from the government as bishop a salary of fifteen thousand francs.

 

 

Mademoiselle Baptistine accepted this arrangement with entire submission; for that saintly woman, M. Myriel was at once her brother and her bishop, her companion by ties of blood and her superior by ecclesiastical authority. She loved and venerated him unaffectedly; when he spoke, she obeyed; when he acted, she gave him her co-operation. Madame Magloire, however, their servant, grumbled a little. The bishop, as will be seen, had reserved but a thousand francs for himself; this, added to the income of Mademoiselle Baptistine, gave them a yearly independence of fifteen hundred francs, upon which the three old people subsisted.

Thanks, however, to the rigid economy of Madame Magloire, and the excellent management of Mademoiselle Baptistine, whenever a curate came to D—, the bishop found means to extend to him his hospitality.

About three months after the installation, the bishop said one day, “With all this money I have to scrimp a good deal.” “I think so too,” said Madame Magloire: “Monseigneur has not even asked for the sum due him by the department for his carriage expenses in town, and in his circuits in the diocese. It was formerly the custom with all bishops.”

“Yes!” said the bishop; “you are right, Madame Magloire.”

He made his application.

Some time afterwards the conseil-général took his claim into consideration and voted him an annual stipend of three thousand francs under this head: “Allowance to the bishop for carriage expenses, and travelling expenses for pastoral visits.”

The bourgeoisie of the town complained vociferously and a senator of the empire, formerly a member of the Council of Five Hundred, formerly in favor of the Eighteenth Brumaire and now provided with a rich senatorial seat near D—, wrote to M. Bigot de Préameneu, Minister of Public Worship, a fault-finding confidential epistle,
¹
from which we make the following extract:—

“Carriage expenses! What can he want it for in a town of fewer than 4000 inhabitants? Expenses of pastoral visits! And what good do they do, in the first place; and then, how is it possible to travel by post in this mountain region? There are no roads; he can go only on horseback. Even the bridge over the Durance at Château-Arnoux is scarcely passable for oxcarts. These priests are always so; greedy and miserly. This one played the good apostle at the outset: now he acts like the rest; he must have a carriage and post-chaise. He must have luxury like the former bishops. Bah! this whole priesthood! Monsieur le Comte, things will never be better till the emperor delivers us from these macaroni priests. Down with the pope! (Relations with Rome were becoming tense.) As for me, I am for Cæsar alone,” etc., etc., etc.

This application, on the other hand, pleased Madame Magloire exceedingly. “Good,” said she to Mademoiselle Baptistine; “Monseigneur began with others, but he has found at last that he must end by taking care of himself. He has arranged all his charities, and so now here are three thousand francs for us.”

 

 

Such was the budget of M. Myriel.

In regard to the official perquisites, payments for marriage licenses, dispensations, private baptisms, and preaching, consecrations of churches or chapels, marriages, etc., the bishop collected them from the wealthy with all the more determination because he dispensed them to the poor.

In a short time donations of money began to come in; those who had and those who had not, knocked at the bishop’s door; some came to receive alms and others to bestow them, and in less than a year he had become the treasurer of all the benevolent, and the dispenser to all the needy. Large sums passed through his hands; but nothing could make him change his simple way of life, nor indulge in any luxuries.

On the contrary, as there is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher, everything was given away, so to speak, before it was received, like water on thirsty soil; it was well that money came to him, for he never kept any; and besides he robbed himself. It being the custom that all bishops should put their baptismal names at the head of their orders and pastoral letters, the poor people of the district had chosen by a sort of affectionate instinct, from among the names of the bishop, that which was expressive to them, and they always called him Monseigneur Bienvenu. We shall follow their example and shall call him thus; besides, this pleased him. “I like this name,” said he; “Bienvenu counterbalances Monseigneur.”

We do not claim that the portrait which we present here is plausible; we say only that it resembles him.

THE BISHOP, after converting his carriage into alms, none the less regularly made his round of visits, and in the diocese of D—this was a wearisome task. There was very little plain, a good deal of mountain; and hardly any roads, as a matter of course; thirty-two curacies, forty-one vicarages, and two hundred and eighty-five sub-curacies. To visit all these is a great labour, but the bishop went through with it. He travelled on foot in his own neighbourhood, in a cart when he was in the plains, and in a
cacolet,
a basket strapped on the back of a mule, when in the mountains. The two women usually accompanied him, but when the journey was too difficult for them he went alone.

One day he arrived at Senez, formerly the seat of a bishopric, mounted on an ass. His purse was very empty at the time, and would not permit any better conveyance. The mayor of the city came to receive him at the gate of the episcopal residence, and saw him dismount from his ass with astonishment and mortification. Several of the citizens stood near by, laughing. “Monsieur Mayor,” said the bishop, “and Messieurs citizens, I see what astonishes you; you think that it shows a good deal of pride for a poor priest to use the same conveyance which was used by Jesus Christ. I have done it from necessity, I assure you, and not from vanity.”

In his visits he was indulgent and gentle, and preached less than he talked. He never used far-fetched reasons or examples. To the inhabitants of one region he would cite the example of a neighbouring region. In the cantons
^c
where the necessitous were treated with severity he would say, “Look at the people of Briançon. They have given to the poor, and to widows and orphans, the right to mow their meadows three days before any one else. When their houses are in ruins they rebuild them without cost. And so it is a country blessed of God. For a whole century they have not had a single murderer.”

In villages where the people were greedy for gain at harvest time he would say, “Look at Embrun. If a father of a family, at harvest time, has his sons in the army, and his daughters at service in the city, and he is sick, the priest recommends him in his sermons, and on Sunday, after mass, the whole population of the village, men, women, and children, go into the poor man’s field and harvest his crop, and put the straw and the grain into his granary.” To families divided by questions of property and inheritance, he would say, ”See the mountaineers of Devolny, a country so wild that the nightingale is not heard there once in fifty years. Well now, when the father dies, in a family, the boys go away to seek their fortunes, and leave the property to the girls, so that they may get husbands.” In those cantons where people liked to sue each other, and where the farmers were ruining themselves paying for notarized documents, he would say, ”Look at those good peasants of the valley of Queyras. There are three thousand souls there. Why, it is like a little republic! Neither judge nor constable is known there. The mayor does everything. He taxes each one according to his judgment, resolves their disputes without charge, distributes their patrimony without fees, gives judgment without expense; and he is obeyed, because he is a just man among simple-hearted men.” In the villages which he found without a schoolmaster, he would again refer to the valley of Queyras. ”Do you know how they do?” he would say. ”As a little district of twelve or fifteen houses cannot always support a teacher, they have schoolmasters that are paid by the whole valley, who go around from village to village, passing a week in this place, and ten days in that, and give instruction. These masters attend the fairs, where I have seen them. They are known by quills which they wear in their hatband. Those who teach only how to read have one quill; those who teach reading and arithmetic have two; and those who teach reading, arithmetic, and Latin, have three; the latter are esteemed great scholars. But what a shame to be ignorant! Do like the people of Queyras.”

In such fashion would he talk, gravely and paternally, in default of examples he would invent parables, going straight to his object, with few phrases and many images, which was the very eloquence of Jesus Christ, convincing and persuasive.

His CONVERSATION was affable and pleasant. He adapted himself to the capacity of the two old women who lived with him, but when he laughed, it was the laugh of a schoolboy.

Madame Magloire usually called him
Your Greatness.
One day he rose from his armchair, and went to his library for a book. It was upon one of the upper shelves, and as the bishop was rather short, he could not reach it. “Madame Magloire,” said he, “bring me a chair. My greatness does not extend to this shelf.”

When soliciting aid for any charity, he was not silenced by a refusal; he was at no loss for words that would set the hearers thinking. One day, he was receiving alms for the poor in a parlour in the city, where the Marquis of Champtercier, who was old, rich, and miserly, was present. The marquis managed to be, at the same time, an ultra-royalist and an ultra-Voltairean, a species of which he was not the only representative.
^d
The bishop coming to him in turn, touched his arm and said, “Monsieur le Marquis, you must give me something.” The marquis turned and answered drily, “Monseigneur, I have my own poor.” “Give them to me,” said the bishop.

One day he preached this sermon in the cathedral:—

“My very dear brethren, my good friends, there are in France thirteen hundred and twenty thousand peasants’ cottages that have but three openings; eighteen hundred and seventeen thousand that have two, the door and one window; and finally, three hundred and forty-six thousand cabins, with only one opening—the door. And this is in consequence of what is called the excise upon doors and windows. In these poor families, among the aged women and the little children, dwelling in these huts, how abundant is fever and disease? Alas! God gives light to men; the law sells it. I do not blame the law, but I bless God. In Isère, in Var, and in the Upper and the Lower Alps, the peasants have not even wheelbarrows, they carry the manure on their backs; they have no candles, but burn pine knots, and bits of rope soaked in pitch. And the same is the case all through the upper part of Dauphiné. They make bread once in six months, and bake it by burning dried cow patties. In the winter it becomes so hard that they cut it up with an axe, and soak it for twenty-four hours, before they can eat it. My brethren, be compassionate; behold how much suffering there is around you.”