بخش 1 کتاب 1

As long as social damnation exists, through laws and customs, artificially creating hell at the heart of civilization and muddying a destiny that is divine with human calamity; as long as the three problems of the century—man’s debasement through the proletariat, woman’s demoralization through hunger, the wasting of the child through darkness—are not resolved; as long as social suffocation is possible in certain areas; in other words, and to take an even broader view, as long as ignorance and misery exist in this world, books like the one you are about to read are, perhaps, not entirely useless.

—HAUTEVILLE HOUSE,1 January 1, 1862

PART ONE

FANTINE

BOOK ONE

A JUST MAN

MONSIEUR MYRIEL

IN 1815, MONSIEUR CHARLES-FRANÇOIS-BIENVENU MYRIEL was bishop of Digne. He was an elderly man of about seventy-five and he had occupied the seat of Digne since 1806.

There is something we might mention that has no bearing whatsoever on the tale we have to tell—not even on the background. Yet it may well serve some purpose, if only in the interests of precision, to jot down here the rumours and gossip that had circulated about him the moment he first popped up in the diocese. True or false, what is said about people often has as much bearing on their lives and especially on their destinies as what they do. Monsieur Myriel was the son of a councillor of the Aix parliament, a member of the noblesse de robe. They reckoned his father had put him down to inherit his position and so had married him off very early in the piece when he was only eighteen or twenty, as they used to do quite a lot in parliamentary families. Charles Myriel, married or no, had, they said, set tongues wagging. He was a good-looking young man, if on the short side, elegant, charming, and witty; he had given the best years of his life thus far to worldly pursuits and love affairs. Then the Revolution came along, events spiralled, parliamentary families were wiped out, chased away, hunted, scattered. Monsieur Charles Myriel emigrated to Italy soon after the Revolution broke out. His wife died there of the chest infection she’d had for ages. They had no children. What happened next in the destiny of Monsieur Myriel? The collapse of the old society in France, the fall of his own family, the tragic scenes of ‘93,3 which were, perhaps, even more frightening for émigrés4 watching them from afar with the magnifying power of dread—did these things cause notions of renunciation and solitude to germinate in his mind? Was he, in the middle of the distractions and amorous diversions that filled his life, suddenly hit by one of those mysterious and terrible jolts that sometimes come and strike at the heart, bowling over the man public calamities couldn’t shake, threatening as these did only his existence and his fortune? No one could say; all that was known was that, when he came back from Italy, he was a priest.

In 1804,5 Monsieur Myriel was the curé of Brignolles. He was already old and lived like a real recluse in profound seclusion.

Around the time of the coronation, a small parish matter—who can remember what now?—took him to Paris. Among other powerful persons, he called on Cardinal Fesch, Napoléon’s uncle, to petition him on his parishioners’ behalf. One day when the emperor was visiting his uncle, the worthy curé, who was waiting in the anteroom, found himself in His Majesty’s path. Napoléon, seeing the old boy give him the once-over with a certain curiosity, wheeled round and said brusquely: “Who is this little man staring at me?” “Your Majesty,” said Monsieur Myriel, “you see a little man, and I see a great man. Both of us may benefit.”

That very night, the emperor asked the cardinal what the curé’s name was and some time after that Monsieur Myriel was stunned to learn that he’d been named bishop of Digne.

But, when all’s said and done, what was true in the tales told about the first phase of Monsieur Myriel’s life? No one could tell. Few families had known the Myriel family before the Revolution.

Monsieur Myriel had to endure the fate of every newcomer in a small town, where there are always plenty of mouths blathering and not many brains working. He had to endure it even though he was the bishop, and because he was the bishop. But, after all, the talk in which his name cropped up was perhaps nothing more than talk; hot air, babble, words, less than words, pap, as the colourful language of the Midi8 puts it.

Whatever the case, after nine years as the resident bishop of Digne, all the usual gossip that initially consumes small towns and small people had died and sunk without a trace. No one would have dared bring it up, no one would have dared remember what it was.

Monsieur Myriel arrived in Digne accompanied by an old spinster, Mademoiselle Baptistine, who was his sister and ten years his junior.

They had only one servant, a woman the same age as Mademoiselle Baptistine, called Madame Magloire. Having been the servant of Monsieur le curé, she now went by the double title of personal maid to Mademoiselle and housekeeper to Monseigneur.9 Mademoiselle Baptistine was a tall, pale, thin, sweet person, the personification of that ideal expressed by the word respectable; for it seems a woman must be a mother to be esteemed. She had never been pretty, but her entire life, which had been merely a succession of holy works, had ended up laying a sort of whiteness and brightness over her; as she aged, she had gained what you could describe as the beauty of goodness. What had been skinniness in her youth had become transparency with maturity; and this diaphanous quality revealed the angel within. She was more of a spirit than a virgin. She seemed a mere shadow with scarcely enough of a body to have a gender; just a bit of matter bearing a light, with great big eyes always lowered to the ground, an excuse for a spirit to remain on earth.

Madame Magloire was a little old lady, white skinned, plump, round, busy, always wheezing, first because of always bustling about and second because of her asthma.

When he first arrived, Monsieur Myriel was set up in his episcopal palace with all the honours required by imperial decree, which ranked bishops immediately after field marshals. The mayor and the president of the local council were the first to visit him, and on his side, he made his first visits to the general and the chief of police.

Once he had moved in, the town waited to see their bishop on the job.

MONSIEUR MYRIEL BECOMES MONSEIGNEUR BIENVENU

THE EPISCOPAL PALACE of Digne was next door to the hospital. The episcopal palace was a vast and handsome town house built in stone at the beginning of the previous century by Monseigneur Henri Puget, doctor of theology of the faculty of Paris and abbé of Simore, who had been bishop of Digne in 1712. The palace was truly a mansion fit for a lord. Everything about it was on the grand scale, the bishop’s apartments, the drawing rooms, the bedrooms, the main courtyard, which was huge, with covered arcades in the old Florentine style, and the gardens planted with magnificent trees. It was in the dining room, which was a long and superb gallery on the ground floor opening onto the grounds, that Monseigneur Henri Puget had, on July 29, 1714, ceremoniously fed the ecclesiastical dignitaries, Charles Brûlart de Genlis, archbishop prince of Embrun, Antoine de Mesgrigny, Capuchin bishop of Grasse, Philippe de Vendôme, grand prior of France, abbé of Saint-Honoré de Lérins, François de Berton de Crillon, bishop baron of Vence, César de Sabran de Forcalquier, lord bishop and lord of Glandève, and Jean Soanen, priest of the oratory, preacher in ordinary to the king, lord bishop of Senez. The portraits of these seven reverend fathers embellished the dining room and the memorable date of July 29, 1714, was engraved there in gold lettering on a white marble panel.

The hospital was a low, narrow, single-story house with a small garden.

Three days after his arrival, the bishop visited the hospital. When his visit was over, he politely begged the director to accompany him back to his place.

“Monsieur le directeur, how many sick people do you have in your hospital at the moment?”

“Twenty-six, Monseigneur.”

“That’s what I counted,” said the bishop.

“The beds are all jammed together,” the director went on.

“That’s what I noticed.”

“The living areas are just bedrooms, and they’re difficult to air.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Then again, when there’s a ray of sun, the garden’s too small for the convalescents.”

“That’s what I said to myself.”

“As for epidemics, we’ve had typhus this year, and two years ago we had miliary fever—up to a hundred were down with it at any one time. We don’t know what to do.” “The thought did strike me.”

“What can we do, Monseigneur?” said the director. “You have to resign yourself to it.”

This conversation took place in the dining-room gallery on the ground floor. The bishop fell silent for a moment, then suddenly turned to the hospital director.

“Monsieur,” he said, “how many beds do you think you could get in this room alone?”

“Monseigneur’s dining room?” cried the astonished director.

The bishop sized up the room, giving the impression he was taking measurements and making calculations by eye alone.

“It could easily hold twenty beds!” he mumbled, as though talking to himself. Then he spoke more loudly. “Look, my dear director, I’ll tell you what. There has obviously been a mistake. There are twenty-six of you in five or six small rooms. There are three of us here and we’ve got enough room for sixty. There’s been a mistake, I’m telling you. You’ve got my place and I’ve got yours. Give me back my house. This is your rightful home, here.” The next day, the twenty-six poor were moved into the bishop’s palace and the bishop was at the hospital.

Monsieur Myriel had no property, his family having lost everything in the Revolution. His sister got an annuity of five hundred francs, which was enough for her personal expenses, living at the presbytery. Monsieur Myriel received a salary of fifteen thousand francs from the government as bishop. The very day he moved into the hospital, Monsieur Myriel decided once and for all to put this sum to use as follows. We transcribe here the note written in his hand.

HOUSEHOLD EXPENDITURE

For the small seminary 1500 livres

Mission congregation 100 livres

For the Lazarists of Montdidier 100 livres

Seminary of foreign missions in Paris 200 livres

Congregation of the Saint-Esprit 150 livres

Religious institutions in the Holy Land 100 livres

Societies of maternal charity 300 livres

For the one at Arles 50 livres

For the betterment of prisons 400 livres

For the relief and release of prisoners 500 livres

For the release of fathers of families imprisoned for debt 1000 livres

Salary supplement for poor schoolteachers in the diocese 2000 livres

Upper Alps public granary 100 livres

Ladies’ Association of Digne, Manosque, and Sisteron, for the free education of poor girls 1500 livres

For the poor 6000 livres

My personal expenses 1000 livres

TOTAL 15000 livres

The whole time Monsieur Myriel held the see of Digne, he made almost no change in this arrangement—what he called, as we shall see, “taking care of his household expenses.” Mademoiselle Baptistine accepted the arrangement with absolute submission. For this devout spinster, Myriel was both her brother and her bishop, the friend she grew up with and her superior according to ecclesiastical authority. Quite simply, she loved him and revered him. When he spoke, she listened, and when he took action, she was right behind him. Only the servant, Madame Magloire, grumbled a bit. As you will have noticed, the bishop kept only a thousand livres for himself which, added to Mademoiselle Baptistine’s pension, meant fifteen hundred francs a year. The two old women and the old man all lived on those fifteen hundred francs.

And when some village curé came to Digne, the bishop still managed to find a way of entertaining him, thanks to the assiduous scrimping and saving of Madame Magloire and Mademoiselle Baptistine’s clever management.

One day, when the bishop had been in Digne for about three months, he said, “With all that, things are pretty tight!”

“They certainly are!” cried Madame Magloire. “Monseigneur hasn’t even claimed the money the département owes him for the upkeep of his carriage in town and his rounds in the diocese. In the old days, that was standard for bishops.” “You’re right, Madame Magloire!” the bishop agreed. And he put in his claim.

A short while later, after considering this application, the department council voted him an annual stipend of three thousand francs, under the heading, Bishop’s Allowance for Carriage Upkeep, Postal Costs, and Travel Expenses Incurred in Pastoral Rounds.

The local bourgeoisie was up in arms over this and an imperial senator, who had been a member of the Council of Five Hundred promoting the Eighteenth Brumaire and was now provided with a magnificent senatorial seat near Digne township, wrote a cranky little private letter to the minister of public worship, Monsieur Bigot de Préameneu. We produce here a genuine extract of a few lines: “Carriage upkeep? Whatever for, in a town with less than four thousand people? Travel expenses incurred in pastoral rounds? To start with, what’s the good of them anyway? And then, how the hell does he do the rounds by post chaise in such mountainous terrain? There are no roads. One has to proceed on horseback. Even the bridge over the Durance at Château-Arnoux7 can barely take a bullock-drawn cart. All these priests are the same. Greedy and tight. This one played the good apostle when he first turned up. Now he acts like all the rest. He must have a carriage and a post chaise. He must have luxury, the same as the old bishops. Oh, these bloody clergy! Monsieur le comte, things will only come good when the emperor has delivered us from these pious swine. Down with the pope! [Things were not good with Rome at that point.]8 As for me, I’m for Caesar alone.” And so on and so forth.

Madame Magloire, on the other hand, was delighted.

“Hooray!” she said to Mademoiselle Baptistine. “Monseigneur put the others first but he’s wound up having to think of himself, finally. He’s fixed up all his charities. Here’s three thousand livres for us. At last!” The same night, the bishop wrote a note, which he handed to his sister. It went like this:

CARRIAGE UPKEEP AND TRAVEL EXPENSES

Beef broth for the sick in the hospital 1500 livres

For the society of maternal charity of Aix 250 livres

For the society of maternal charity pf Draguignan 250 livres

For abandoned children 500 livres

For orpahns 500 livres

TOTAL 3000 livres

And that was Monsieur Myriel’s budget.

As for the cost of episcopal services, redemptions, dispensations, baptisms, sermons, consecrations of churches and chapels, marriages and so on, the bishop took from the rich all the more greedily for giving it all to the poor.

It wasn’t long before offerings of money poured in. The haves and the have-nots all knocked on Monsieur Myriel’s door, some coming in search of the alms that the others had just left. In less than a year, the bishop became treasurer of all works of charity and cashier to all those in distress. Large sums passed through his hands, but nothing could make him change his style of life in the slightest or get him to embellish his spartan existence by the faintest touch of the superfluous.

Far from it. As there is always more misery at the bottom of the ladder than there is fraternity at the top, everything was given away, so to speak, before it was received, like water on thirsty soil. A lot of good it did him to be given money, he never had any. And so, he robbed himself.

The custom being for bishops to put their full baptismal names at the head of their mandates and pastoral letters, the poor people of the area had chosen, out of a sort of affectionate instinct, the one among all the bishop’s various names that made the most sense to them, and so they called him Monseigneur Bienvenu—Welcome. We’ll do likewise whenever the occasion arises. Besides, the nickname tickled him.

“I like that name,” he said. “Bienvenu pulls Monseigneur into line.”

We are not saying that the portrait of the man we offer here is accurate; we will restrict ourselves to the claim that it is a passing likeness.

A GOOD BISHOP FOR A HARD BISHOPRIC

THOUGH HE MAY have converted his carriage into alms, that didn’t stop the bishop from doing his rounds. Digne was a particularly exhausting diocese to tour. There was precious little flat land and a great deal of mountain. And there were almost no roads, as we said earlier. Thirty-two parishes, forty-one vicarages, and two hundred and eighty branch parishes. To visit all of that is no mean feat. But the bishop somehow managed. He did it on foot locally, in a cart on the plains, and in a chair on a pack mule in the mountains. The two old women went with him. When the going was too tough for them, he went on his own.

One day he rode into Senez, a town that was once an episcopal city,1 mounted on a donkey. He had been bled dry at the time and couldn’t afford any other mode of transport. The mayor of Senez, who had come to greet him at the gate of the bishop’s palace, watched him get down from his donkey, completely scandalized. A few good burghers stood around snickering.

“Monsieur le maire,” said the bishop, “and you dear gentlemen, I see I’ve shocked you. You think it’s terribly arrogant of a poor priest to ride the same beast that Jesus Christ rode. I only did so out of necessity, let me assure you, and not out of vanity.” On his rounds, he was giving and gentle and he didn’t preach so much as chat. He never represented a virtue as though it were beyond an ordinary person’s reach. He never drummed up far-fetched arguments or examples. To the inhabitants of one area, he cited the example of the inhabitants of a neighbouring area. In cantons where those in need were dealt with harshly, he would say, “Look at the good folk of Briançon. They have given their poor and widows and orphans the right to mow their meadows three days before everyone else.2 When their houses are tumbling down, they rebuild them for free. And so it is a place blessed by God. For a whole hundred years, they have not had a single murderer.” At harvest time in villages where people were greedy for gain he would say, “Look at the good folk of Embrun. If a man with a family finds himself at harvest time with his sons in the army and his daughters working as domestics in town, and he’s sick and can’t work, the curé offers up prayers for him and on Sunday, after mass, all the people in the village, men, women, and children, go into the poor man’s field and harvest his crop for him and they take the straw and grain and put it in his granary.” To families torn by money worries and inheritance wrangles he would say, “Look at the Devolny mountains, a place so wild you’ll only hear the nightingale there once every fifty years. Well, when the father in a family dies, the boys go off to seek their fortunes and leave the girls the property, so they have a better chance of finding a husband.” In cantons where people had a taste for litigation and where farmers went broke over engraved stationery,3 he would say, “Look at the fine peasants of the valley of Queyras. There are three thousand souls there. Lord! It’s like a small republic. Judges and bailiffs are unheard-of. The mayor does everything. He divvies up taxes, assessing each person fairly, mediates quarrels for free, distributes personal assets without charging any fees, hands down sentences without cost. And he is obeyed because he is a just man among simple men.” In villages that he found to be without a schoolteacher, he also cited the case of Queyras. “Do you know what they do?” he would ask. “Since a tiny place of some twelve to fifteen households can’t always feed a teacher, they’ve got teachers who are paid by the whole valley, who whip around the villages, spending a week here, ten days there, teaching. These teachers do the fairs—I’ve seen them. You can recognize them by the quills they wear in their hatband. The ones who only teach how to read wear one feather, those who teach reading and sums have two feathers, and those who teach reading, sums, and Latin have three feathers. Those last I mentioned are real scholars. What a shameful thing it is to be ignorant! You should do what the folk of Queyras do.” That’s how he talked, in a fatherly fashion, gravely. If he lacked examples, he made up parables that went straight to the point, with few pretty phrases and lots of images—and with the same eloquence as Jesus Christ himself, sincere and persuasive.

HE PUTS HIS MONEY WHERE HIS MOUTH IS

IN CONVERSATION, HE was affable and cheery. He spoke at the same level as the two old ladies that spent their lives by his side; when he laughed, it was the laugh of a schoolboy.

Madame Magloire liked to call him Your Highness. One day, he got up out of his armchair and went to find a book. The book happened to be on one of the top shelves and, as the bishop was fairly short, he couldn’t reach it. “Madame Magloire,” he said, “bring me a chair, will you. My Highness doesn’t extend to this shelf.” One of his distant relatives, Madame la comtesse de Lô, rarely let an opportunity slip to enumerate in his presence what she called “the hopes” of her three sons. She had several very elderly relatives at death’s door of whom her sons were the natural heirs. The youngest of the three was to collect from a great-aunt a tidy sum of a hundred thousand livres in bonds; the middle son was to step into his uncle’s title as duc; and the eldest was to succeed to a peerage held by his grandfather.1 The bishop would listen in silence to this innocent and forgivable maternal showing off. Once, though, he seemed more dreamy than usual as Madame de Lô was going over all these successions and “hopes” in lavish detail. She stopped midsentence somewhat impatiently.

“Heavens, cousin! A penny for your thoughts!”

“I was thinking,” said the bishop, “about something strange that is, I think, in Saint Augustine.2 ‘Put your hope in Him who has no successor.’”

Another time he received the death notice of a gentleman of the district, which laid out, in one long page, not only the honours of the deceased but all the feudal ranks and titles of nobility of every one of his relations.

“What a broad back has Death!” he cried. “You can cheerily pile up any number of titles on it. And how cunningly people manage to feed their vanity via the tomb!” He occasionally went in for gentle raillery but there was almost always a serious message involved. One year, during Lent, a young vicar came to Digne and preached eloquently enough in the cathedral. The subject of his sermon was charity. He called upon the rich to give to the poor and thereby avoid hell, which he painted in the most alarming colours imaginable, and to get to heaven, which he made out to be desirable and extremely pleasant. In the audience there was a well-heeled retired merchant, a bit of a cheapskate, named Monsieur Géborand, who had made half a million manufacturing serge and other kinds of coarse woolen cloth, known as cadis and gasquets. Monsieur Géborand had never in his life given alms to those less fortunate than himself. But from the date of this sermon, everyone noticed that he gave a sou every Sunday to the old beggar women who hung around the door of the cathedral. There were six of them who had to share that sou. One day, the bishop saw him performing his act of charity and said to his sister with a smile, “I see Monsieur Géborand’s busy buying a sou’s worth of paradise.” When it came to charity, he did not allow himself to be put off, even by a knock-back; in such a case, he would find words that gave pause for thought. Once he was collecting money for the poor in a salon in town. The marquis de Champtercier happened to be there—a rich old skinflint who had found a way to be an ultra-royalist and an ultra-Voltairean at once,3 though at the time he was not alone in such a feat. The bishop came to him and put a hand on his arm. “Monsieur le marquis, you must give me something.” The marquis turned to him and said sharply, “Monseigneur, I have my own poor.” “Give them to me,” came the bishop’s reply.

One day he gave the following sermon in the cathedral:

“Dearly beloved brethren, my good friends, there are in France thirteen hundred and twenty thousand peasant’s homes that have only three openings; eighteen hundred and seventeen homes that have only two openings, the door and one window; and, lastly, three hundred and forty-six thousand cabins that have only one opening, the door. This, thanks to something called the tax on doors and windows.4 You put poor families, old women, young children, in such abodes, and just watch the fevers and diseases! Alas! God gives men air, the law sells it to them. I do not blame the law, I praise God. In the Isère, in the Var, in the two alpine regions, the Upper Alps and the Lower Alps, the peasants don’t even have wheelbarrows; the men carry cow dung on their backs. They don’t have candles; they burn twigs and rope soaked in pine resin. It’s the same throughout the highlands of the Dauphiné. They make bread to last six months, they bake it with dried cow dung. In winter they break the bread with the aid of an axe and soak it in water for twenty-four hours before they are able to eat it. My brothers, have pity! Look at all the suffering around you.” A native of Provence, he had easily picked up all the different dialects of the south. He could say, “Eh bé! moussou, sès sage?” (All right mate, you behavin’?), as they said in the Lower Languedoc, and “Onté, anaris passa?” (‘Morning, what gives?), as they said in the Lower Alps, and “Puerte un bouen moutou embe un bouen froumage grase” (A good sheep gives a good fat cheese), as they said in the Upper Dauphiné. People appreciated this and it was no small factor in giving him access to everyone’s innermost thoughts. He made himself at home everywhere, whether in a humble cottage or in the mountains. He had a knack for expressing great things in the most common idioms. Speaking all tongues, he entered all hearts and minds.

Besides, he was the same to everybody, the high and mighty and the humble alike.

He was never quick to condemn and he always took into account the surrounding circumstances. He would say, “Let’s see how this sin came to pass.”

Being, as he laughingly described himself, an ex-sinner, he had nothing of the purist about him and boldly professed, without the mad frowning of the ferociously virtuous, a doctrine that may be summed up as follows: “Man is made of flesh and that flesh is both a burden and a temptation to him. He drags it around with him and he yields to it.

“He should keep a close eye on it, put the lid on it, repress it, and only give in to it at the last extremity. There may still be some sin in giving in to it even then; but such a sin is venial. It is a slip, but a slip onto one’s knees, which may well end in prayer.

“To be a saint is the exception; to be a just person is the rule. Err, stumble, commit sin, but be one of the just.

“Sin as little as possible—that is the law of mankind. Not to sin at all is the dream of the angel. All earthly things are subject to sin. Sin is like gravity.”

Whenever he saw people indignant over something, rushing to get on their high horse, he would say, with a smile, “Tut! Tut! This would seem to be a serious crime that everyone commits! The hypocrites are so shocked they can’t point their fingers and duck for cover fast enough.” He went easy on women and the poor, feeling that the weight of human society fell on them. He would say, “The sins of women and children, domestic servants and the weak, the poor and the ignorant, are the sins of the husbands and fathers, the masters, the strong and the rich and the educated.” He would also say, “Those who are ignorant should be taught all you can teach them; society is to blame for not providing free public education; and society will answer for the obscurity it produces. If the soul is left in darkness, sin will be committed. The guilty party is not he who has sinned but he who created the darkness in the first place.” As you can see, he had a strange, idiosyncratic way of looking at things. I suspect he got it from the Gospel.

In someone’s drawing room one day he heard a tale about a criminal case that was about to go to court. Some miserable wretch, for love of a woman and the child he’d had with her, found himself at the end of his rope and had gone in for a bit of counterfeiting. Counterfeiting was still punishable by death in those days. The woman had been arrested trying to pass the first false coin the man had made. She was held in custody, but they had no proof against the man. She was the only one who could point the finger at her lover and sink him by telling all. She denied his guilt. They put the pressure on, but still she denied his guilt. At that point the public prosecutor5 had a bright idea. He told her that her lover had been unfaithful and he managed to cobble together fragments of letters and so persuade the poor woman that she had a rival and that the man was betraying her behind her back. She was immediately overcome by a fit of jealousy and swiftly denounced her lover, admitted everything, offered proof. The man was lost. He was shortly to be tried in Aix along with his accomplice. When the tale was told, everyone there was in raptures over the cunning of the prosecuting magistrate. By bringing jealousy into play, he had provoked the woman’s rage and the truth had shot out of her; he had brought about justice by sparking revenge. The bishop listened to all this in silence. When they were finished marvelling, he had a question.

“Where are the man and woman to be tried?”

“In the circuit court.”

“And where is the public prosecutor to be tried?”

A tragic event occurred in Digne. A man had been condemned to death for murder. It was some poor unfortunate who was not quite literate, but not completely illiterate; he had been a tumbler working the fairs as well as a public letter-writer. The trial was the talk of the town. The day before the date set for the condemned man’s execution, the prison chaplain got sick. A priest was needed to attend the prisoner in his last moments, so they went for the local curé. Apparently this curé refused, saying, “That’s not my problem. Not my job. Besides, I don’t want anything to do with that circus monkey. I’m sick, too. And anyway, it’s not my place.” When the bishop was told of this response he said, “The reverend father is right. It’s not his place, it’s mine.”

And with that, he sped off to the jail, rushed to the cell of the “circus monkey,” called him by his name, took his hand and talked to him. He spent all day and all night with him, forgetting about food and sleep and praying to God for the soul of the condemned man, as well as praying to the condemned man for his own soul. He spoke to him of the highest truths, which are the simplest ones. He was a father, brother, friend; and only acted as a bishop to bless him. He taught him everything he could, reassuring him and consoling him as he did so. This man had been about to die in despair. Death for him had been an abyss. Standing, trembling, on the ghastly brink, he had shrunk back in horror. He was not ignorant enough to be completely unmoved. His sentence had come as a terrible shock and had somehow, here and there, broken through the wall that inures us to the mystery of things and that we call life. He couldn’t take his eyes off the fatal chinks in the wall and what lay on the other side and he could see only darkness. The bishop made him see a light.

The next day, when they went to get the poor man, the bishop was there. He went with him and showed himself to the crowd decked out in his purple cape and with his episcopal cross around his neck, at the side of this poor wretch whose hands were tied with rope.

He climbed into the cart with him, he mounted the scaffold with him. The doomed man, so gloomy and horror-stricken the day before, was radiant. He felt his soul reconciled and he trusted himself to God. The bishop embraced him and, just as the blade was about to fall, he said to him, “Whomsoever man puts to death, God restores to life; whomsoever his brothers chase away, finds the Father. Pray, believe, enter into life! God the Father is there!” When he got down again from the scaffold, there was a look in his eye that made the crowd stand back. They would have been hard-pressed to say which was the most impressive, his pallor or his serenity. When he got back to his humble abode, which he fondly called his palace, he said to his sister, “I’ve just been officiating pontifically.” As the most sublime things are often also the most misunderstood, there were those in town who said, commenting on the bishop’s conduct, “Talk about laying it on thick!” But that was parlour talk. Ordinary people do not view saintly acts with malice and they melted with admiration.

As for the bishop, seeing the guillotine up close had been a shock, one from which he was a long time recovering.

The scaffold, when it is standing there, tall and straight, can, indeed, make you think you’re seeing things. You may think you are indifferent to the death penalty,6 can’t say whether you are in favour of it or not—as long as you haven’t clapped eyes on a guillotine. When you come across one, the shock is brutal and forces you to take a stand, for or against. Some, like Maistre, admire it; others, like Beccaria,7 abhor it. The guillotine is the ultimate embodiment of the Law; its name is Retribution. It is not neutral and doesn’t allow you to remain neutral, either. Whoever sees it quakes in their boots with the most mysterious of terrors. Every social issue hooks its question mark around this chopper. The scaffold is not a framework, the scaffold is not a machine, the scaffold is not some inert mechanism made of wood, iron, and rope. It is more like some sort of living being that has taken who knows what sombre initiative of its own. You’d think that the framework could see, that the machine could hear, that the mechanism could understand, that this wood, this iron, this rope, had a will of its own. In the frightened reverie into which your soul is thrown by its presence, the scaffold appears terrifying and somehow actively involved in what it does. The scaffold is the executioner’s accomplice. It devours, it eats flesh, it drinks blood. The scaffold is a kind of monster manufactured by judge and carpenter together, a spectre that seems to have a kind of ghastly life of its own arising out of all the death it has dealt.

And so the impression was horrible and cut deep. The day after the execution and for many days following, the bishop seemed devastated. The almost brutal serenity of the fatal moment had vanished; but the phantom of social justice haunted him and would not leave him alone. He, who usually came home beaming with satisfaction after performing his duties, now seemed to blame himself. At times, he talked to himself, muttering gloomy monologues under his breath. This is one that his sister overheard one night and wrote down: “I had no idea it was so monstrous. It is wrong to be so absorbed in divine law that you take no notice of human law. Death belongs only to God. By what right do men tamper with a thing so unknowable?” With time, his impressions faded and probably were erased altogether. But it was remarked how the bishop from that point on avoided going near the square where executions took place.

Monsieur Myriel could be called to the bedside of the sick and dying at any time of the day or night. He was well aware that this was his greatest duty and his greatest work. Widowed or orphaned families didn’t have to ask, he came of his own accord. He knew exactly how to sit and keep quiet for hours at a stretch by the side of a man who had lost the woman he loved, the mother who had lost her child. Just as he knew when to keep quiet, he also knew when to say something. Such a wonderful comforter! He did not seek to efface pain in forgetfulness, he sought to elevate it and to dignify it with hope. He would say, “Be careful how you turn to the dead. Don’t think of the rotting. Hold your gaze and you will see the living light of your dearly loved departed up above in heaven.” He knew how healthy believing is. He sought to counsel and to calm the desperate by pointing to those who were resigned, and to transform the grief that gazes on the freshly dug grave by showing it the grief that gazes up at a star.

HOW MONSEIGNEUR BIENVENU MADE HIS CASSOCKS LAST TOO LONG

MONSIEUR MYRIEL’S INNER LIFE was brimming with the same thoughts as his public life. If you could have seen it close up, the self-imposed poverty in which the bishop of Digne lived would have been a grave and moving spectacle.

Like all old men and like most thinkers, he slept little. But his short sleep was deep. In the morning, he reflected for an hour, then said mass, either in the cathedral or in his oratory. Once he’d said mass, he breakfasted on a bit of rye bread dunked in milk from his cows. Then he got down to work.

A bishop has a lot on his plate. Every day he must receive the secretary of the diocese, who is usually a canon, and almost every day his grand-vicars.1 He has congregations to oversee, privileges to bestow, a whole ecclesiastical book trade to look into, with the publication of missals and diocesan catechisms, books of hours and so on, pastoral letters to write, sermons to endorse, priests and mayors to make peace between, stacks of clerical and administrative correspondence, with the government on the one hand and with the Holy See on the other. In short, a thousand matters to tackle.

The free time left to him by these thousand matters and by his church services and his breviary was given first to the needy, the sick, and the downtrodden; the time left to him by the downtrodden, the sick, and the needy was given to toil. Sometimes he took a shovel to the garden, sometimes he did a bit of reading and writing. He had one word only for these two different kinds of work: he called both gardening. “The mind is a garden,” he would say.

At midday, he would stop to eat and the midday meal was virtually the same as his breakfast.

At around two in the afternoon, when the weather was fine, he would go for a walk in the countryside or around town, often poking into the poorest hovels. He could be seen ambling about, alone, his head in the clouds, his eye to the ground, leaning on his long cane, snug as a bug in his warm quilted purple overcoat, purple stockings,2 and great clodhopper shoes, his head capped by his flat tricorn hat with three golden “spinach-seed” tassels dangling off the corners.

Wherever he appeared, there was a party. You would have said that he brought warmth and light wherever he went. Children and old folk rushed to their front doors to see the bishop as they would run to look at the sun. He blessed and was blessed in return. Anyone who needed anything was shown to his door.

Here and there, he would stop and talk to the boys and girls and have a laugh with their mothers. He visited the poor whenever he had money, and when he had none, he visited the rich.

As he made his cassocks last a very long time,3 but didn’t want anyone to know this, he never went to town without his padded purple overcoat. This was a bit uncomfortable for him in summertime.

At eight-thirty at night, he dined with his sister, Madame Magloire in position behind them waiting on the table. Nothing could be more frugal than their evening meal. Though, if the bishop had one of his priests to dinner, Madame Magloire took advantage of the occasion to serve Monseigneur some wonderful fish from the lake or some fine game from the mountains. Any curé was a good excuse for a good meal. The bishop went along with it. But apart from this, his usual diet consisted of little more than boiled vegetables and soup made with olive oil. And so, the saying went in town, “When the bishop isn’t feeding a priest, he’s feeding a Trappist.”4 After dinner, he would chat for half an hour with Mademoiselle Baptistine and Madame Magloire before returning to his room and writing a bit more, sometimes on loose sheets of paper, sometimes in the margins of one of his folios. He was well read and rather erudite. He has left us five or six somewhat curious manuscripts, among others a dissertation on this passage in Genesis:5 “And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” He contrasts this with three other texts: the Arabic version, which goes, “the winds of God blew”; Flavius Josephus,6 who says, “a wind from on high descended upon the earth”; and finally the Chaldean paraphrase of Rabbi Onkelos, which goes, “a wind from God blew upon the face of the waters.” In another dissertation, he examines the theological works of Hugo, bishop of Ptolemaïs7 and great-great-uncle of the Hugo writing this book, and he demonstrates that sundry little tracts published in the last century under the pseudonym of Barleycourt should be attributed to this bishop.

Sometimes, while he was in the middle of reading, and no matter what book he happened to have in his hands, he would fall into the most profound meditation and emerge only to scribble a few lines over the pages of this same volume. These lines often had no bearing on the book containing them. We have before us a note written by him in the margin of a quarto volume entitled, Correspondance du lord Germain avec les généraux Clinton, Cornwallis et les amiraux de la station de l’Amérique. À Versailles, chez Poinçot, libraire, et à Paris, chez Pissot, libraire, quai des Augustins.

Here is the note:

Oh, Thou who art!

Ecclesiastes names you the Almighty; the Maccabees name you the Creator; the Epistle to the Ephesians names you Liberty; Baruch names you Immensity; the Psalms name you Wisdom and Truth; John names you Light; the Book of Kings names you Lord; Exodus calls you Providence; Leviticus, Holiness; Esdras, Justice; Creation names you God, mankind names you Father; but Solomon names you Mercy and of all your names, that is the most beautiful.8 At around nine o’clock at night, the two women retired and went upstairs to their rooms on the first floor, leaving him on his own on the ground floor until morning.

Here we really need to give you a more precise idea of the bishop of Digne’s abode.

HOW HE PROTECTED HIS HOUSE

THE HOUSE HE lived in, as we’ve said, consisted of a downstairs and an upstairs: three rooms at street level, three bedrooms on the upper floor, and an attic above. At the back of the house, a quarter-acre garden. The two women occupied the upper storey. The bishop lived below. The first room, which opened onto the street, served him as a dining room, the second, as a bedroom, and the third as an oratory. There was no way out of this oratory except through the bedroom, and no way out of the bedroom except through the dining room. In the oratory, at the back, there was an alcove, closed off by a screen, with a bed for the odd guest. The bishop offered this bed to country curés brought to Digne on business or to attend to the needs of their parish.

The hospital pharmacy, a small building tacked onto the house and extending into the garden, had been turned into a kitchen and cellar.

There was also a stable in the garden, which had once been the hospital kitchen and where the bishop now kept a couple of cows. Whatever the quantity of milk they produced, he invariably sent half of it every morning to the sick in the hospital. “I’m just paying my dues,” he would say.

His bedroom was fairly big and fairly hard to heat up in winter. As wood is very dear in Digne, he’d had the bright idea of dividing the cow stable with a partition made of wooden boards and that way creating a sealed compartment for himself. And that was where he spent his evenings when it got really cold. He called it his winter salon.

Like the dining room, the winter salon was very nearly bare, the only furniture being a square pine table and four straw-seated chairs. The dining room had the additional enhancement of an old sideboard mottled pink with distemper. The bishop had made the altar that decorated his oratory out of a similar sideboard, and suitably decked it out with white doilies and imitation lace.

His wealthy female penitents and the devout women of Digne had chipped in to provide a fine new altar for the monseigneur’s oratory; he had taken the money every time and given it to the poor. “The finest altar,” he said, “is the soul of some poor wretch who finds comfort and gives thanks to God.” There were two wicker prie-dieu chairs in the oratory, and an armchair also made of wicker in the bedroom. When he happened to have seven or eight visitors at the same time, the prefect of police, or the general, or officers of the regiment stationed in the garrison, or some students from the little seminary, someone had to go and get the chairs from the winter salon in the stables, the prie-dieux in the oratory, and the armchair in the bedroom; that way, he managed to collect up to eleven seats for his visitors. At each new visit, a room was laid bare.

Sometimes there were twelve, and the bishop would cover up the embarrassment of the situation by remaining standing in front of the fireplace if it was winter, or proposing a turn in the garden if it was summer.

There was an extra chair in the enclosed alcove, but half the straw seating was missing and it only had three legs to stand on, so that it could only be used propped up against a wall. Mademoiselle Baptistine also had a huge bergère1 in her room made of wood that had once been gilt and covered in a soft floral Pekin silk, but this bergère had had to be winched up to her room upstairs through the window, as the stairway was too narrow, and so it could not be counted among the movable furniture.

Mademoiselle Baptistine’s ambition was to be able to buy a lounge made of carved mahogany in a swan’s-neck design and with cushions covered in yellow rose-print Utrecht velvet. But this would have set her back at least five hundred francs and since she’d only managed to save forty-two francs and ten sous2 for this object in five years, she’d finally given up the idea. Well, anyway, who ever manages to attain their ideal?

You couldn’t imagine anything simpler than the bishop’s bedroom. French doors opening onto the garden and facing them, an iron hospital bed with a green serge canopy; on the other side of the bed, behind a curtain, toiletries that still betrayed the old habits of an elegant man of the world; two doors, one close to the fireplace, opening into the oratory, the other, close to the bookcase, opening into the dining room; the bookcase, a big cabinet with glass doors full of books; the fireplace, its wooden surround painted to look like marble, usually without a fire; in the fireplace, a pair of wrought-iron firedogs decorated with two vases garlanded with flowers, the fluting once plated in silver, which was something of an episcopal luxury; above, where the mirror would normally go, a copper crucifix that had lost its silver paint was attached to a threadbare piece of black velvet in a wooden frame that had lost its gilt. Next to the French doors, a great big table with an inkstand, piled high with papers all in a heap and enormous tomes. In front of the table, the wicker armchair; in front of the bed, a prie-dieu borrowed from the oratory.

Two portraits in oval frames hung on the wall on either side of the bed. Small gilt inscriptions on the plain canvas mount around the faces indicated that the portraits represented the abbé of Chaliot, bishop of Saint-Claude, and the abbé de Tourteau, vicar-general of Agde, abbé of Grand-Champ, Order of Cîteaux,3 diocese of Chartres. When he took the room over from the hospital patients, the bishop had found these portraits and he had left them where they were. They were priests, probably donors—two good reasons to respect them. All he knew about these two characters was that they had been appointed by the king,4 one to his bishopric, the other to his living, on the same day, which happened to be April 27, 1785. When Madame Magloire took down the paintings to shake the dust off, the bishop had found this detail written in faded ink on a little square of paper yellow with age, stuck behind the portrait of the abbé of Grand-Champ with four sealing wafers.

At his window hung an ancient curtain made of coarse woolen material that got so old in the end that, to save buying a new one, Madame Magloire was forced to sew a great big patch smack in the middle. This patch was in the shape of a cross. The bishop often called attention to it. “Doesn’t that do you the world of good!” Every room in the house, upstairs and down, without exception, was whitewashed with slaked lime, just like army barracks or hospitals.

And yet, in later years, as we shall see further on, Madame Magloire found decorative paintings on the walls of Mademoiselle Baptistine’s chamber underneath the distempered wallpaper. Before becoming a hospital, the house had been an assembly hall where well-heeled burghers gathered together, and it had been decorated accordingly. The bedrooms were tiled in red bricks, which were washed once a week, with woven straw mats at the foot of the beds. For the rest, the place, being kept by two women, was always in a state of exquisite cleanliness from top to bottom. This was the sole luxury the bishop allowed. He used to say, “The poor don’t lose anything by it.” But we must confess that he still hung on to a few things left over from all he once possessed; these were a set of six silver knives and forks and a big soup ladle that Madame Magloire loved to see sparkling gorgeously every day against the coarse white linen tablecloth. And since we’re painting the bishop of Digne here in his true colours, warts and all, we must add that he was heard to say more than once, “It would be very hard for me to give up eating with silver.” We should add to the list of silverware, two big solid silver candlesticks that had come down to him as part of his inheritance from a great-aunt. These two candlesticks held two wax candles5 and they sat as a rule on the bishop’s mantelpiece. Whenever he had anyone to dinner, Madame Magloire would light the two candles and put the two candlesticks on the table.

In the bishop’s bedroom, of all places, at the head of his bed, there was a small cupboard in which Madame Magloire would lock up the silver cutlery and the soup ladle every night. Though we have to say that no one ever took the key out of the door.

The garden, which was somewhat spoiled by the rather ugly buildings we mentioned earlier, was laid out with four paths forming a cross centred around a drainage well. A separate path ran around the outer edge of the garden and along the white wall that enclosed it. Within the paths were four squares bordered with shrubs. In three of them, Madame Magloire grew vegetables; in the fourth, the bishop had planted flowers. There were a few fruit trees dotted around to boot.

Once Madame Magloire had said to him with a kind of gentle malice, “Monseigneur, you are always so keen to put everything to good use, yet there’s a useless garden bed for you!” “Madame Magloire,” the bishop replied, “you are mistaken. The beautiful is just as useful as the useful.” After a pause, he added, “Perhaps more so.” This square with its three or four beds kept the bishop nearly as busy as his books did. He would happily while away an hour or two pottering around pruning, weeding, and digging holes here and there to sow seeds. He was not as hostile to insects as a regular gardener would have liked. Besides, he had no pretentions to botany; he knew nothing at all about genera or other theories of classification such as “solidism”; he didn’t give the difference between Tournefort and the natural method a moment’s thought; he didn’t take sides either way in contests involving the utricles versus the cotyledons or Jussieu versus Linnaeus.6 He did not study plants, he loved flowers. He had a lot of respect for the learned, but even more respect for the ignorant, and, without ever falling short in either respect, he watered his beds every evening in summer with a tin watering can painted green.

The house did not have one single door that locked. The door of the dining room, which, as we have seen, opened straight onto the square in front of the cathedral, was once as loaded with locks and bolts as the door of a prison. The bishop had had all the locks and bolts removed and now, night and day, this door was closed only by a latch. Anyone passing by, whatever the hour, had merely to push it open. In the early days, the two women had been particularly tormented by this door that was never really shut, but the monseigneur of Digne had said to them, “Get locks put on your bedroom doors if you like.” They had wound up sharing his confidence or, at least, acting as though they did. Madame Magloire alone had the odd fright. But as far as the bishop himself went, you can find his thoughts explained, or at least noted, in these three lines written by him in the margin of a copy of the Bible: “Here’s the difference: a doctor’s door should never be closed, a priest’s door should always be open.” In another book, entitled Philosophie de la science médicale, he’d written this other note: “Am I not a doctor just as they are? I, too, have my patients; to start with, I have theirs, whom they call the unwell; and then, I have my own, whom I call the unfortunate.” Elsewhere he had written: “Do not ask the name of the person who asks you for a bed for the night. He whose name is a burden to him needs shelter more than anyone.” It happened that a worthy curé, I don’t remember if it was the curé from Couloubroux or the one from Pompierry, took it upon himself one day to ask him, probably at Madame Magloire’s instigation, if Monseigneur was quite sure he wasn’t being a little foolhardy in leaving his door open, day and night, at the disposal of whoever felt like coming in, and if he didn’t, at the end of the day, worry that something bad would finally occur in a house so unguarded. The bishop put his hand on the man’s shoulder with gentle gravity and said to him, “Nisi Dominus custodierit domum, in vanum vigilant qui custodiunt eam,”7 from the Psalms: Except the Lord keep the house, the watchman waketh but in vain. Then he changed the subject.

He liked to say, “There is such a thing as priestly courage just as there is the courage of the colonel of the dragoons. Only,” he would add, “ours should be quiet.” VII. CRAVATTE

THIS IS THE place for a fact that we must not leave out, for it is one of those that bring out most clearly what kind of man Monseigneur, the bishop of Digne, really was.

After the disbanding of Gaspard Bès’s gang of crooks,1 which had overrun the gorges of Ollioules, one of its lieutenants, a man named Cravatte, decided to seek refuge in the mountains. He hid for a while with his fellow bandits, the remnants of Gaspard Bès’s troop, in the county of Nice before cutting across to Piedmont.2 Then he suddenly popped up again in France, down Barcelonnette way. He was spotted in Jauziers first, then in Tuiles. He holed up in the caves of Joug-de-l’Aigle3 and from there he made raids on local hamlets and villages via the ravines of Ubaye and Ubayette. He even pushed as far as Embrun, broke into the cathedral there one night and emptied out the sacristy. His looting devastated the countryside. The police were set on him but in vain. He always got away, sometimes resisting with violence. He was a brazen bastard. The bishop turned up in the middle of this campaign of terror, doing his usual rounds. At Chastelar, the mayor came to fetch him and urged him to turn back. Cravatte held the mountains as far as Arche and beyond. It would be dangerous to venture farther even with an escort. It would mean risking the lives of three or four poor gendarmes for no purpose.

“And so,” said the bishop, “I intend to proceed without an escort.”

“You can’t be serious!” cried the mayor.

“I am so serious that I absolutely will not accept your gendarmes and I will be off in an hour.”

“Be off?”

“Be off.”

“Alone?”

“Alone.”

“Monseigneur! You can’t do that.”

“In the mountains,” the bishop resumed, “there is a humble little community, tiny, minuscule, that I haven’t seen for three years. They’re good friends of mine, gentle, honest mountain people—shepherds. They own only one in thirty of the goats they look after. They make extremely pretty wool yarn in different colours and they play mountain ditties on little six-holed flutes. They need someone to talk to them about the good Lord from time to time. What would they think of a bishop who was frightened off? What would they think if I didn’t go there?” “But, Monseigneur, what about the bandits? What happens if you run into the bandits!”

“Don’t worry,” said the bishop, “I haven’t forgotten about them. You’re right. I could run into them. They, too, surely need someone to tell them about the good Lord.” “But, Monseigneur! It’s a gang! They’re a pack of wolves!”

“My dear mayor, perhaps it’s precisely this flock that Jesus has made me pastor of. Who can tell the mysterious ways of Providence?”

“Monseigneur, they will take everything you’ve got.”

“I have nothing.”

“They’ll kill you.”

“A little old priest like me, getting along mumbling poppycock? Go on! Why would they bother?”

“God love us! Just imagine if you run into them!”

“I’ll ask them for money for my poor.”

“Monseigneur, don’t go, for Christ’s sake! You’re taking your life in your hands.”

“My dear mayor,” said the bishop, “isn’t that just the point? I’m not in this world to take care of my life. I’m here to take care of souls.”

There was nothing anyone could do to stop him. He set off, accompanied only by a boy who offered to act as his guide. His pigheadedness created quite a stir throughout the district and terrified the locals.

He did not want to take either his sister or Madame Magloire along and so he left them behind. He crossed the mountains by mule, met no one, arrived safe and sound in the bosom of his “good friends” the shepherds. He stayed there a fortnight, delivering sermons, administering rites, teaching, preaching. When the time drew near for him to leave, he resolved to sing a Te Deum4 with all the pomp of a pontificate and he spoke to the curé about it. But what were they to do? There were no episcopal props. All that could be placed at his disposal was a paltry village sacristy with a few old chasubles of worn-out damask dolled up with imitation braid.

“Bah!” said the bishop. “My dear father, we’ll go ahead and announce our Te Deum during the sermon. Things will work out somehow.”

All the neighbouring churches were scoured. But the assembled glories of all these humble parishes put together were not enough to suitably deck out a single cathedral chorister.

While they were in this predicament, a great chest was brought in and deposited in the presbytery for Monseigneur the bishop by two unknown horsemen who promptly turned their mounts and charged off. When the chest was opened it was found to contain a cope of gold cloth, a mitre studded with diamonds, an archbishop’s cross, and a magnificent crosier, all the pontifical raiment stolen the previous month from the treasure of Our Lady of Embrun.5 In the chest, there was also a scrap of paper on which were written these words: “Cravatte to Monseigneur Bienvenu.” “I told you things would work out!” said the bishop. And he added, with a smile, “To him who contents himself with a priest’s surplice, God shall send an archbishop’s cope.” “Monseigneur,” muttered the curé, shaking his head with a smile, “God—or the devil!”

The bishop looked the curé in the eye and replied with authority, “God!”

When he set out again for Chastelar, the people came out and lined the roadside to gawk at him out of curiosity. At the presbytery in Chastelar, he found Mademoiselle Baptistine and Madame Magloire waiting for him and he said to his sister: “Well, was I right or wasn’t I? The poor priest goes to those poor mountain folk with his hands empty and he comes back with his hands full. I set out with only my trust in God, and I bring back the treasure of a cathedral.” That night, before going to bed, he went on to say, “Never be afraid of thieves and murderers. They represent the dangers without, which are not worth worrying about. Be afraid of ourselves. Prejudices are the real thieves, vices are the murderers. The greatest dangers are within us. Who cares who threatens our heads or our purses! Let’s think only of what threatens our souls.” Then he turned to his sister and said, “My dear sister, a priest must never take precautions against his fellow man. What your fellow man does, God permits. Let’s confine ourselves to praying to God when we feel danger approaching us. Pray to him, not for ourselves, but so our brother does not fall into sin on our account.” Other than this, nothing much ever happened to him. We can only relate what we’ve heard, but generally he spent his life doing the same thing at the same time every day. A month of his year was like an hour of his day.

As for what became of the treasure of Embrun Cathedral, it would embarrass us to be questioned on that score. There certainly were some lovely items, most tempting and well worth stealing on behalf of those less fortunate. And anyway, they were already stolen. Half the job had already been done; it only remained to steer the treasures in another direction and help them along their journey into the hands of the poor. We are not saying this is what happened, of course. Only that among the bishop’s papers a rather obscure note was found which may have some bearing on this affair and which reads as follows: “The issue is whether it should be returned to the cathedral or go to the hospital.” VIII. PHILOSOPHY AFTER A DRINK OR TWO

THE SENATOR MENTIONED earlier was a smart man who had made his way in life with a single-mindedness oblivious to any of those stumbling blocks known as conscience, sworn oaths, justice, duty; he had gone straight for his goal without ever deviating from the path of self-interest and his own advancement. He had once been a prosecutor, but had gone soft with success; there was not a nasty bone in his body, and he was happy to do whatever he could for his sons, his sons-in-law, his relatives, even his friends, having sensibly opted for the best that life had to offer, the best opportunities, the best deals.

To do anything else struck him as positively dimwitted. He was witty and just literate enough to consider himself a disciple of Epicurus1 while being, perhaps, nothing more than a product of Pigault-Lebrun.2 He laughed easily, and infectiously, at anything to do with infinity and eternal life and “the twaddle of the dear old bishop.” He even laughed at times, with an amiable authority, in Monseigneur Myriel’s face, though the latter, of course, never seemed to take offence.

At some semi-official ceremony or other—I can’t remember what—the comte —— (this senator) and Monseigneur Myriel were lined up to dine with the prefect at home. During dessert, the senator, who was a bit tipsy by then, although still dignified, suddenly launched himself.

“I say, dear bishop, why don’t we get right down to it. It’s hard for a senator and a bishop to look each other in the eye without a wink and a nudge. We are both oracles. I have a confession to make to you. I have my own philosophy.” “And you’re right to do so,” replied the bishop. “As you make your philosophical bed, so shall you lie in it. You lie on a bed of purple, my dear senator.”

The senator, encouraged, took up the challenge: “Come on, let’s be good chaps.”

“Good devils, if you like,” the bishop cut in.

“I tell you,” the senator began again, “that the marquis d’Argen, Pyrrhon, Hobbes, and Monsieur Naigeon3 are no slouches. I have all my philosophers in my book collection—and gilt-edged, to boot.” “Like you yourself, my dear comte,” the bishop cut in.

The senator plowed on regardless: “I detest Diderot.4 He’s an ideologue, a raving lunatic, and a revolutionary, and underneath it all he believes in God and is even more of a bigot than Voltaire.5 Voltaire had the nerve to make fun of Needham,6 but he was wrong, for Needham’s eels prove that God is pointless. A drop of vinegar in a spoonful of dough replaces the fiat lux.7 Suppose the drop is fatter and the spoonful bigger and what have you got? The world! Man is the eel. So what’s the point of the Eternal Father? My dear bishop, the Jehovah hypothesis bores me rigid. All it’s good for is producing featherbrained weaklings. Down with the great All, who gives me the willies! Long live Zero, which leaves me in peace! Just between you and me, while we’re at it, I’ll make my confession to my confessor as is only right and admit I have common sense. I’m not mad about your Jesus preaching renunciation and sacrifice at the drop of a hat. Advice of a miser to beggars. Renunciation! What for? Sacrifice! What to? I don’t see a wolf setting itself on fire to make some other wolf happy. So let’s stick to nature. We are at the pinnacle, so let’s have a higher philosophy. What’s the good of being on top if you can’t see past the next man’s nose? Let’s live and be merry. Life is all there is. The notion that man has another life, elsewhere, up above, down below, somewhere—I don’t believe a single blasted word of it. Ah, they tell me to go in for sacrifice and renunciation, that I should watch my every step carefully; I’m supposed to give myself migraines worrying about good and evil, the just and the unjust, the fas and the nefas.8 Why? Because I’ll have to account for my actions, apparently. When? When I’m dead. What idle fancy! When I’m dead, it’ll take a smart man to collar me. You try and get a ghost’s hand to grab a handful of ashes. Let’s be honest, we who are in the know, who’ve looked up Isis’s skirt: there is neither good nor evil, there is only growth. Let’s go for what is real. Let’s dig deep. Let’s get to the bottom of things, for God’s sake! You need to sniff out the truth, scratch around in the dirt and grab it. When you do, it gives you untold joy. And you become strong and you laugh. Me, I call a spade a spade. My dear bishop, the immortality of man is a fabulous fairy tale. Oh, what an unbeatable promise! You had better believe it! What a winner Adam’s on! One is a spirit, one will be an angel, one will sprout blue wings from one’s back. Help me out here, is it not Tertullian9 who says that the blessed will go from star to star? So be it. We’ll be grasshoppers to the stars. And we will then see God. Blah blah blah. What utter piffle, all this stuff about paradise! Talk about chasing rainbows. God is a monstrous bit of balderdash. I wouldn’t say that in the Moniteur10—Christ, no! But I can whisper it among friends. Inter pocula.11 To give up the world for heaven means chasing rainbows. Being hoodwinked by infinity! I’m not that big an idiot! I am nothing. I call myself Monsieur le comte Nothing, senator. No, really. What am I? A bit of dust embodied by an organism. What am I supposed to be doing on this earth? I have a choice. To suffer or to enjoy myself. Where will suffering get me? Nowhere. But I will have suffered. Where will enjoying myself get me? Nowhere. But I will have enjoyed myself. I’ve made my choice. It’s eat or be eaten. I eat. Better to be the scythe than the blade of grass. That’s my philosophy for you. In the end, come what may, the gravedigger is waiting, the Panthéon12 for some of us, but we all end up in that big hole in the ground. The end. Finis. Total liquidation. That is the point of no return. Death is dead, believe me. The idea that there is someone there with something to tell me—I laugh just thinking about it. A nursemaid’s tall tale. A bogeyman for little kiddies, Jehovah for grown-ups. No, our tomorrow is darkness. Beyond the grave all that’s left is equal nothings. Whether you’re Sardanapalus or Vincent de Paul,13 it comes to the same old niente.14 That’s the real situation, if you want to know. So live it up. Make use of your self while you’ve got a self to use. Truly, my dear bishop, I tell you, I have my philosophy and I have my philosophers. I don’t let myself be hoodwinked by make-believe. But having said that, it is of course essential that the little people, the barefoot tramps, the small-timers, all those poor bastards, be given a few fables to swallow, chimeras, the soul, immortality, heaven, the stars. They eat that up. They butter their dry bread with it. Even if you have nothing else, you have the good Lord. Better than nothing. I don’t have a problem with that but I keep Monsieur Naigeon for myself. The good Lord is good only for the people.” The bishop clapped his hands.

“Great speech!” he cried. “This materialism of yours is a splendid thing, really, marvellous! Pity those who can’t bring it off. Ah, because when you can, you’re nobody’s fool anymore. You’re not about to let yourself be stupidly exiled, like Cato, or stoned to death like Stephen, or burned alive like Joan of Arc.15 Those who have managed to avail themselves of this admirable materialism have the joy of feeling totally irresponsible and of imagining they can devour everything without a worry—positions, sinecures, honours, power rightly or wrongly come by, lucrative recantations, handy betrayals, juicy little capitulations of conscience—and they’ll go to their grave, having digested the lot. How sweet it is! I’m not attacking you, of course, my dear senator. But I just can’t stop myself from congratulating you. You great lords have, as you say, a philosophy that is all your own and that is as exquisite and refined as you like, accessible only to the rich, fit for every occasion, wonderfully adding spice to the sensual pleasures of life. This philosophy has been dragged from the depths and unearthed by specialists in the field. But you are good princes and you don’t mind if the masses have their belief in God as a philosophy—a bit the way you don’t mind them eating goose with chestnuts: the poor man’s turkey with truffles.” IX. THE BROTHER AS THE SISTER TELLS IT

TO GIVE YOU an idea of the domestic life of Monseigneur, the bishop of Digne, and the way in which those two saintly women subordinated their actions, thoughts, and even their instincts as women easily frightened, to the habits and designs of the bishop, without his even needing to go to the trouble of putting anything into words, we cannot do better than to set down here a letter of Mademoiselle Baptistine to Madame la vicomtesse de Boischevron, her childhood friend. This letter is in our possession.

Digne, December 16, 18—

My dear Madame,

Not a day goes by without our talking about you. It is something of a habit we’ve fallen into. But there is another reason. Would you believe that when Madame Magloire was washing and dusting the walls and ceilings, she made a few discoveries? Now our two bedrooms, which used to be covered with old wallpaper whitewashed with lime, would not be out of place in a château as fine as your own. Madame Magloire ripped all the paper off. There were things underneath. My sitting room, which has no furniture in it and which we only use as a drying room on wash days, is fifteen feet high and eighteen feet wide, with a ceiling that was once gilded, and beams the same as at your place. It was covered in material from when it was a hospital. And on top of that, there was wainscoting from our grandmothers’ day. But it is my bedoom you should see. Under at least ten layers of paper that were stuck all over it, Madame Magloire uncovered paintings, not good, but not bad, either. There is Telemachus received as a knight by Minerva1 in one, another one of him in the gardens of … the name escapes me. Well, anyway, the place where Roman ladies used to go for just one night. What can I tell you? I have Romans, men and women [here the word is illegible]—the whole retinue. Madame Magloire has cleaned them all up and this summer she’s going to fix up a bit of damage here and there, revarnish the lot and the room will be a real little museum. She also found in a corner of the attic two wooden console tables, antique style. They were asking two écus six livres to regild them, but it would be better to give the money to the poor. Anyway, they are as ugly as can be, and I’d prefer a round table in mahogany.

I’m as happy as ever. My brother is so good. He gives everything he has to the sick and needy. We are feeling the pinch. The winters here are bitterly cold and of course we have to try and do something for those in need. We manage to stay warm and have light, though. You see how well off we are.

My brother has his little ways. When he mentions them, he says that’s just how a bishop should be. Just imagine—the front door of the house is never locked. Anyone can just walk in off the street and make themselves right at home in the middle of his room. He’s not afraid of anything, even at night. That’s his form of courage, as he says.

He doesn’t want me to be frightened for him or for Madame Magloire to be frightened. He exposes himself to every danger and he doesn’t want us to even look as though we notice. You’ve got to know him to know what he’s about.

He goes out in the rain, he walks in the water, he travels in winter. He is not afraid of the dark or of dangerous roads or of running into someone.

Last year, he went all on his own into territory full of thieves. He wouldn’t hear of taking us along. He stayed away for a fortnight. When he came back, nothing had happened to him, we thought he was dead and he was in great spirits, and he said: “You see how they robbed me!” And he opened up a chest full of all the jewels from Embrun Cathedral which the thieves had given him.

That last time I’d gone with some friends of his to meet him at a spot a couple of miles away, and as we were returning home, I couldn’t help but scold him a little, being careful only to talk when the carriage was making a racket, so no one else could hear.

In the old days, I used to say to myself: “There is no danger that can stop him, he’s terrible.” Now I’ve ended up getting used to it. I motion to Madame Magloire not to go against him. Let him take whatever risks he will. I cart Madame Magloire away, go to my room and I pray for him and I fall asleep. I’m perfectly calm, because I know full well that if anything happened to him, it would be the end of me. I’d go to the good Lord with my brother and my bishop. It’s been a lot harder for Madame Magloire to come to terms with what she calls his recklessness. But now we have our routine. We both pray, we are both frightened together, and we fall asleep. If the devil came into the house, we’d let him do his worst. After all, what can we be frightened of in this house? There is always someone with us who is the strongest. The devil might pass through, but the good Lord lives here.

That is it. My brother doesn’t even have to say a word to me now. I understand him without his needing to speak and we put ourselves in the hands of Providence.

And that is how one should be with a man with his greatness of spirit.

I asked my brother for the information you requested concerning the Faux family. You know how he knows everything and how good his memory is, for he is still a good royalist. They are really and truly a very old Norman family from the Caen region. They go back five hundred years to a Raoul de Faux, a Jean de Faux, and a Thomas de Faux, who were all noblemen, one of them being a seigneur de Rochefort. The last was Guy-Étienne-Alexandre and he was a colonel and something or other in the light horse of Brittany. His daughter, Marie-Louise, married Adrien-Charles de Gramont, son of the duc Louis de Gramont, a peer of France, colonel in the Gardes Françaises and lieutenant general in the army. It is spelled Faux, Fauq, and Faoucq.

My dear Madame, commend us to the prayers of your holy relative, the cardinal, won’t you? As for your dear Sylvie, she was right not to spend the brief moments she had at home with you in writing to me. She is well, works as you would like her to, and still loves me. That is all I could wish for. Her regards reached me through you and I am very happy to have them. My health is not too bad, though I get thinner by the day. Goodbye for now, I’m running out of paper so I must leave you here, very best wishes, BAPTISTINE.

P.S. Your sister-in-law is still here with her young family. Your grandnephew is a delight. Did you know he will be five soon? Yesterday he saw a horse going past; someone had put knee pads on it and he said: “What’s he got on his knees?” He is so sweet, that boy! His little brother drags an old broom around the apartment like a carrriage and says: “Giddyup!” As you can see from this letter, the two women managed to adapt themselves to the bishop’s way of life with that special genius of women who know a man better than he knows himself. The bishop of Digne, beneath that soft candid air that never failed him, sometimes committed acts of greatness, daring, even magnificent acts, without appearing remotely conscious of it. They would tremble, but they let him get on with it. Sometimes Madame Magloire tried to remonstrate with him before; never during or after. They never disturbed him, not even by a sign, once he had begun any course of action. At certain times, without his needing to say a word, when he himself, perhaps, was not aware of it, so perfect was his artlessness, they felt vaguely that he was acting the bishop; then they were nothing more than two shadows moving about the house. They would serve him quietly, and if compliance meant making themselves scarce, they disappeared. They knew, by a wonderfully subtle instinct, that certain kinds of concern can get in the way. So even when they thought he was in danger, they knew, I won’t say what he was thinking, but what he was like, to the point where they no longer watched over him. They entrusted him to God.

Besides, Baptistine used to say, as you have just read, that her brother’s death would be her own. Madame Magloire didn’t say so, but she knew it.

THE BISHOP BEFORE AN UNKNOWN LIGHT

NOT LONG AFTER the date of the letter quoted above, the bishop did something, if the entire village is to be believed, even more risky than the trip through the mountains held by the bandits.

In the countryside near Digne, there was a man who lived alone. This man had once been, not to mince words, a member of the National Convention.1 His name was G ——.

In the small world of Digne, G—— the Conventionist was spoken of in the hushed tones of horror. A Conventionist! Imagine! He went back to the days when people addressed each other familiarly as tu and used the word citizen. This man was more or less a monster. He had not exactly voted for the death of the king, but as good as. Which made him a semi-regicide.2 He had been terrible. Why, when the legitimate princes returned to power, was this man not put on trial in a provost court without appeal? They might not have cut his head off, if you like, since clemency is, of course, necessary; but a good banishment for life would have done the trick. Set an example, for heaven’s sake! And so on and so forth. The man was an atheist, into the bargain, like all his kind. It was like geese cackling around a vulture.

But was this G—— really a vulture? Yes, if you were to judge him by the fierceness of his isolation. Not having voted for the king’s death, he had not been included in the decrees of exile and so had been able to remain in France.

He lived three quarters of an hour outside town, far from any hamlet, far from any road, in a godforsaken hole of a place in an extremely wild valley. He had a sort of field there, they said, and a bolt-hole, a hideout. No neighbours, no one even passing through. Since he’d been living in the valley, the path to it had disappeared under grass. People spoke of the place as the house of the hangman.

Yet from time to time the bishop gazed at the horizon where a clump of trees marked the valley of the old Conventionist and he would say, “There is a soul there who is all alone.” And in the back of his mind, he would add, “I owe him a visit.”

But, to be frank, this idea, at first so natural, seemed to him, after a moment’s reflection, weird and impossible, almost repulsive. For at heart he shared the general view and the Conventionist inspired in him, without his being fully aware of it, that feeling which verges on hate and that is so aptly expressed by the word aversion.

Yet, should the sheep’s mange cause the shepherd to recoil? No. But what a sheep!

The good bishop was torn. Sometimes he would head off that way, but then he would turn around and come back.

One day the word went out around town that a kind of shepherd boy who looked after G—— the Conventionist in his pigsty had come to find a doctor; that the old geezer was dying, that he was half-paralysed, and that he wouldn’t last the night. “Thank God!” some chimed in.

The bishop grabbed his stick, put his overcoat on to hide his cassock, which was getting too threadbare, as we’ve seen, and also because the evening breeze would not be long in rising, and left.

The sun was low in the sky, almost touching the horizon, when the bishop reached the unholy spot. He knew by the way his heart pounded that he was nearing the lair. He leaped over a ditch, jumped over a hedge, lifted a gate, stepped into a tiny overgrown yard, rather boldly struck out across it and there, suddenly, at the end of an empty plot, behind a tall clump of bushes, he saw the cavern.

It was a very low-roofed hut, dilapidated, small and neat, with a climbing vine tacked onto the outside.

By the door, in an old wheelchair, the armchair of a peasant, was a man with white hair smiling at the sun.

Next to the old man sitting in the wheelchair stood a young boy, the little shepherd. He was handing the old man a bowl of milk.

While the bishop looked on, the old man spoke up. “Thank you,” he said, “I don’t need anything more.” And his smile switched from the sun to the boy.

The bishop came forward. At the sound of his footsteps, the old man turned his head and his face expressed all the surprise a person could muster at the end of a long life.

“In all the years I’ve lived here,” he said, “this is the first time anyone has been to my home. Who are you, Monsieur?”

The bishop answered: “I call myself Bienvenu Myriel.”

“Bienvenu Myriel! I’ve heard that name. Are you the one the people call Monseigneur Bienvenu?”

“That’s me.”

The old man continued with a tiny smile: “In that case, you are my bishop?”

“In a way.”

“Come in, Monsieur.”

The Conventionist held out his hand to the bishop but the bishop did not take it. The bishop did no more than comment:

“I’m happy to see that I’ve been misinformed. You certainly don’t look sick to me.”

“Monsieur,” the old man replied, “I’ll get over it.” He paused and then added: “I’ll be dead in three hours.”

And then he went on: “I’m a bit of a doctor; I know what happens in the final hour. Yesterday, only my feet were cold. Today, the cold has reached my knees; right now I can feel it climbing up to my stomach. When it gets as far as the heart, I will cease to be. The sun is beautiful, isn’t it? I had myself wheeled outside so I could cast my eyes over everything one last time. You can talk to me, it doesn’t wear me out. You’ve done the right thing, coming to see a man who is about to die. It’s good that such a moment has witnesses. We all have our quirks; I would have liked to have got as far as dawn. But I know I’m only good for another three hours, at most. It will be night. At the end of the day, it hardly matters. Giving up the ghost is a simple business. You don’t need the morning for that. So be it. I’ll die by starlight.” The old man turned to the boy.

“You, go to bed. You stayed up the other night. You’re tired.”

The boy went back inside the hut. The old man watched him go and then added, as though talking to himself: “I’ll die while he’s sleeping. We can keep each other company in sleep.” The bishop was not as moved as perhaps he might have been. He didn’t feel he could sense God in this way of dying. To spell it out, for the little contradictions of great souls clamour for recognition like all the rest: The man who laughed so heartily at “Your Highness” was a bit shocked not to be addressed as Monseigneur and he was almost tempted to lob a “Citizen” in reply. He felt an impulse to use the gruff familiarity common enough with doctors and priests, which was not at all his usual bedside manner. This man, after all, this Conventionist, this representative of the people, had been one of the masters of the universe; for perhaps the first time in his life, the bishop felt an urge to be harsh.

The Conventionist, on the other hand, gazed at him with a humble congeniality in which one might have discerned, perhaps, the humility that is appropriate when a person is so close to returning to dust.

The bishop, for his part, though normally careful not to show curiosity, curiosity being as far as he was concerned very nearly a crime, could not prevent himself from scrutinizing the Conventionist with an attention that, not having its source in sympathy, would have gone completely against his conscience if the man in question had been any other man. This Conventionist affected the bishop as an outlaw might, beyond the reach even of the law of charity.

Calm, practically straight-backed, voice vibrant, G—— was one of those great octogenarians that dumbfound physiologists. The Revolution produced plenty of men like him, equal to the era. You could see just by looking that the old man had been through the mill and been strengthened by it. Even now, so close to his end, he had preserved all the energy of health. There was something in his bright eyes, in his firm tone, in the robustness of his shoulders, that was enough to throw death off the scent. Azrael, the Mohammedan angel of the sepulchre,3 would have turned on his heels, feeling he’d come to the wrong door. G—— seemed to be dying only because that is what he wanted to do. His agony smacked of freedom. His legs alone were immobile. The dark had him by the lower limbs. His feet were already dead and cold but his head was alive with all life’s potency and seemed powerfully illuminated. At this solemn moment, G—— was like the king in the oriental tale, flesh above, marble below.

There was a stone nearby. The bishop sat down on it. He delivered his exordium ex abrupto.

“I must congratulate you,” he said in a tone of reprimand. “At least you didn’t vote for the death of the king.”

The Conventionist appeared not to hear the bitter innuendo implied in those words: At least, he had no trace of a smile on his face when he answered.

“Go easy with the congratulations, Monsieur, I voted for the end of the tyrant.”

This was said in a tone of austerity to match the tone of severity.

“What do you mean?” asked the bishop.

“I mean that man has a tyrant, ignorance. I voted for the demise of that particular tyrant. That particular tyrant has engendered royalty, which is authority based on falsehood, whereas science is authority based on truth. Man should be governed by science alone.” “And conscience,” added the bishop.

“It’s the same thing. Conscience is the quota of innate science we each have inside us.”

Monseigneur Bienvenu listened, a little amazed by this brand-new way of talking. The Conventionist went on: “As for Louis XVI, I said no. I don’t believe I have the right to kill a man; but I feel I have a duty to exterminate evil. I voted for the end of the tyrant. That is to say, the end of prostitution for women, the end of slavery for men, the end of darkness for children. In voting for the Republic, that is what I voted for. I voted for fraternity, for harmony, for the dawn of a new age! I helped hasten the downfall of prejudices and bad habits: When bad habits and prejudices come crashing down they create light. We brought down the old world, some of us, and the old world, that chamber pot of miseries, tipped over and turned into an urn pouring joy over humankind.” “Not all joy,” said the bishop.

“You could say clouded joy and now, after the fatal return of the past known as 1814,4 evaporated joy. Alas, our work was incomplete, I admit; we demolished the structures of the ancien régime, but we didn’t quite manage to obliterate its ideas. To wipe out abuse is not enough; you have to change people’s whole outlook. The mill is no longer standing, but the wind’s still there, blowing away.” “You demolished. Demolition may be useful; but I don’t trust any demolition that’s caught up in rage.”

“The law has its rage, my dear bishop, and the wrath of the law is part of progress. Come what may and no matter what they say about it, the French Revolution was the greatest leap forward for mankind since the coming of Christ. Incomplete, yes; but sublime. It released all kinds of social unknowns. It sweetened people’s minds; it soothed, relieved, enlightened; it caused waves of civilization to wash over the world. It was good. The French Revolution is mankind’s crowning achievement.” The bishop could not prevent himself from muttering: “Oh, yes? What about ‘93!”5

The Conventionist sat bolt upright in his chair with an almost mournful solemnity and, as much as a dying man can, he shouted: “Ah! You got there at last! Seventeen ninety-three! I was wondering when you’d get to it. A cloud had been hanging over us for fifteen hundred years. At the end of fifteen centuries, it finally burst. You want to take the thunderclap to task.” The bishop felt, without perhaps admitting it to himself, that something in him had cooled down, gone out. But he put a brave face on it. He replied: “The judge speaks in the name of justice, the priest speaks in the name of pity, which is only a more exalted kind of justice. The thunderclap should not err.” And he added, fixing the Conventionist with his eye: “What about Louis XVII?”6

The Conventionist reached out and clutched the bishop’s arm: “Louis XVII? Let’s see. Who are you crying over? Over the innocent child? You’re right, if so, and I cry with you. Over the royal child? Then I beg to reflect. For me, Cartouche’s brother,7 an innocent child, hung by the armpits in the place de Grève8 until death resulted, for the sole crime of having been Cartouche’s brother, is no less lamentable than the grandson of Louis XV, an innocent child, martyred in the Temple tower for the sole crime of having been the grandson of Louis XV.” “Monsieur,” said the bishop, “I don’t like those names being connected.”

“Cartouche? Louis XV? Which of them do you claim to represent?”

There was a moment of silence. The bishop almost regretted having come, and yet he felt obscurely and strangely shaken.

The Conventionist went on: “Ah! My dear priest, you don’t like your truth so raw. Christ loved it. He took a scourge and scoured the temple. His flashing whip was a rude teller of home truths. When he cried: Sinite parvulos9—suffer them to come unto me—he didn’t distinguish among the little children. He wouldn’t have been too hard put to make a connection between the dauphin of Barabbas and the dauphin of Herod.10 Monsieur, innocence is its own crown. Innocence has no truck with highness. It is as august in rags as it is draped in the fleur-de-lis.”11 “That’s true,” said the bishop in a low voice.

“I say again,” continued the Conventionist G——, “you brought up Louis XVII. Let’s understand each other. Are we to cry over all the innocents, all the martyrs, all the children, those at the bottom as well as those at the top? I am with you. But then, as I’ve told you, we have to go back further than ‘93 and it’s well before Louis XVII that we need to begin shedding tears. I will cry over the children of kings with you as long as you cry with me over the children of the people.” “I cry for them all,” said the bishop.

“Equally!” cried G——. “And if we must tip the balance, let it be on the side of the people, for they have been suffering longer.”

There was another silence. It was the Conventionist who broke it. He raised himself on one elbow, took a pinch of his cheek between his thumb and his crooked forefinger, as you do mechanically when you interrogate and judge, and he fired at the bishop a look that contained all the intense energy of approaching death. It was like an explosion.

“Yes, Monsieur, the people have been suffering for a long time. Then again, you realize, that is not all. What are you doing coming here and quizzing me and talking about Louis XVII? I don’t know you. Since I’ve been in the region, I’ve lived in this paddock, on my own, never set foot outside it, or seen anyone apart from the boy who gives me a hand. Your name, it’s true, has more or less reached me, and, I have to say, what I’ve heard of you is not all bad. But that doesn’t mean a thing; clever folk come up with all kinds of ways of trying to put one over on the good people. Speaking of which, I didn’t hear you roll up in a carriage—no doubt you left it behind the vine over there, at the fork in the road. I don’t know you, I say. You tell me you’re the bishop but that doesn’t tell me anything about what sort of man you are. So, I repeat my question: Who are you? You are a bishop, that is to say, a prince of the Church, one of those gilded, emblazoned, salaried men who have big fat prebends—the see of Digne, fifteen thousand francs fixed salary, ten thousand francs in commissions, total, twenty-five thousand francs—who have kitchens, who have liveried retinues, who entertain lavishly, who eat guinea fowl on Fridays, who parade around, lackeys in front, lackeys behind, in a gala-standard berlin,12 and who have palaces, and roll along in a carriage in the name of Jesus Christ who went barefoot! You are a prelate; meaning annuities, palaces, horses, valets, a fine table, all the sensual pleasures of life, you have all that, like the rest of them, and like the rest of them you enjoy it and that’s fine, but it says too much or not enough. It doesn’t enlighten me as to your intrinsic and essential worth, you who have come here most likely presuming to bring me enlightenment. Who am I talking to? Who are you?” The bishop dipped his head and replied: “Vermis sum.”13

“A worm in a carriage!” the Conventionist growled.

It was the Conventionist’s turn to show human weakness and the bishop’s turn to show humility.

Gently, the bishop replied: “So be it, Monsieur. But explain to me how my carriage, which is two paces away behind the trees, and my fine table and the guinea fowl I eat on Fridays and my twenty-five-thousand-francs income and my palaces and my lackeys prove that pity is not a virtue, that clemency is not a duty, and that ‘93 was not hideously ruthless.” The Conventionist passed his hand over his forehead as though to brush off a cloud.

“Before I answer you,” he said, “I beg your pardon. I was wrong just now, Monsieur. You are in my home, you are my guest. I owe you courtesy. You are debating my ideas, so I should confine myself to combating your arguments. Your wealth and your pleasures are advantages I have over you in the debate, but it is not in good taste for me to make use of them. I promise not to use them again.” “Thank you,” the bishop replied.

G—— went on: “Let’s go back to the explanation you requested. Where were we? What were you saying? That ‘93 was hideously ruthless?”

“Ruthless, yes,” said the bishop. “What do you make of Marat applauding the guillotine?”14

“What do you make of Bossuet singing the Te Deum as the dragoons savaged the Protestants?”15

The comeback was tough but it hit home with the sharpness of a rapier’s blade. The bishop winced; he had no riposte, but he was taken aback to hear Bossuet’s name used in this way. The best minds have their soft spots and sometimes feel somewhat bruised by the scant respect of logic.

The Conventionist began to gasp for breath; the asthma produced by approaching death, which makes the last intakes of air so laboured, broke up his voice, and yet the perfect lucidity of his soul shone on in his eyes. He continued: “I’d like us to keep talking a bit. Beyond the Revolution, which, taken as a whole, is an immense affirmation of humanity, ‘93 alas! was a refutation. You find it hideously ruthless, but what about the whole of the monarchy, Monsieur? Carrier was a crook, but what do you call Montrevel? Fouquier-Tinville was a ghoul, but what is your opinion of Lamoignon-Bâville? Maillard was appalling, but what do you say of Saulx-Tavannes? ‘Le père Duchêne’ was ferocious, but how would you describe ‘le père Le Tellier’ for me? Jourdan-Coupe-Tête was a monster, but not as big a monster as the marquis de Louvois.16 Monsieur, Monsieur, I feel sorry for Marie Antoinette, archduchess and queen.17 But I also feel sorry for the poor Huguenot woman who, in 1685, under Louis le Grand,18 Monsieur, was breast-feeding her baby when she was tied to a post, naked to the waist, the baby held at a distance. Her breast swelled with milk and her heart swelled with anguish. The little mite was pale and hungry and he could see her breast and he was dying for a feed and he bawled and sobbed and the executioner said to the woman: Recant! forcing her to choose between the death of her child and the death of her conscience. What do you say to that bit of torture, worthy of Tantalus,19 applied to a mother? Monsieur, remember this: The French Revolution had its reasons. Its fury will be absolved by the future. Its outcome is a better world. Its most terrible actions led to tender loving care for the human race. I’ll leave it at that. I must stop, it’s too easy—I hold all the cards. Anyway, I’m dying.” And, ceasing to gaze at the bishop, the Conventionist polished off his argument with these few quiet words: “Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are done, we recognize one thing: that the human race has been badly manhandled, but that it has moved forward.” Little did the Conventionist suspect that he had swept aside, one after the other, all the bishop’s entrenched internal defences. There was one left, however, and from this supreme entrenchment, the last fastness of Monseigneur Bienvenu’s resistance, these words poured forth, almost as harshly as his opening gambit: “Progress should believe in God. Good can’t be served by impiety. An atheist is a bad leader of the human race.” The old representative of the people did not answer. A shiver ran through his body. He looked up at the sky and a tear formed slowly in his eye. When his eyes were full to brimming, his tears ran down his livid cheeks and he said, almost stammering, in a low voice, to himself, his eyes lost in the depths: “O you! O ideal! You alone exist!” The bishop experienced an inexpressible commotion.

After a moment’s silence, the old man raised a finger to the sky and said: “Infinity is. It is there. If infinity had no self, the self would be its limit; it would not be infinite. In other words, it would not be. But it is. So it has a self. This self of infinity is God.” The dying man had uttered those words in a loud voice and with a shudder of ecstasy as though he could see someone. When he finished speaking, his eyes closed. The effort had exhausted him. It was clear that he had just lived the few hours remaining to him in one moment. What he had just said had brought him closer to the one who stands at death’s door. The final moment was coming.

The bishop knew that time was running out. It was as a priest that he had come; his initial extreme coldness had gradually turned to extreme emotion. He looked at the closed eyes, he took the age-ravaged hand, wrinkled and icy, and he leaned toward the dying man: “This hour is the hour of God. Don’t you think it would be a shame if we had met in vain?” The Conventionist opened his eyes again. A gravity in which there was a shadow was stamped upon his face.

“My dear bishop,” he said, with a slowness that came more, perhaps, from the dignity of the soul than from his waning strength, “I’ve spent my life in meditation, study, and contemplation. I was sixty years old when my country called me, and commanded me to take part in its affairs. I heeded the call. There were abuses, I fought them; there were rights and principles, I confessed them and professed them. The land was invaded and I defended it; France was threatened, I offered my breast. I was never rich; now I am poor. I was one of the masters of the state, the vaults of the Treasury were piled so high with coins that we were forced to prop up the walls which were ready to burst under the weight of all that gold and silver; I dined in the rue de l’Arbre-Sec at twenty-two sous a head. I succored the oppressed, I relieved the suffering. I tore up the altar cloth, it’s true, but only to bandage the wounds of my homeland. I have always supported the forward march of the human race toward the light and I have sometimes resisted progress pitilessly. I have, on occasion, protected my own enemies—you lot. And at Peteghem in Flanders, on the very spot where the Merovingian kings had their summer palace, there is an Urbanist convent, the abbey of Sainte-Claire en Beaulieu, which I saved in 1793. I’ve done my duty as much as my strength would allow, and what good I could. After which I was hunted, hounded, pursued, persecuted, slandered, scoffed at, spat on, cursed, ostracized. For many years now, from the time my hair turned white, I’ve sensed that many people think they have the right to look on me with contempt; for the poor ignorant hordes, I wear the face of the damned and, hating no one, I accept the isolation hate brings. Now I am eighty-six years old; I am about to die. What have you come to ask of me?” “Your blessing,” said the bishop.20 And he went down on his knees.

When the bishop raised his head again, the face of the Conventionist had become august. He had died.

The bishop returned home deeply absorbed in we know not what thoughts. He spent the whole night in prayer. The next day, a few brave busybodies tried to talk to him about the Conventionist, G——. All he did was point to the sky. From that moment, he became more gentle and fraternal than ever toward the little children and the suffering.

Any allusion to “that old rotter G——” caused him to lapse into a strange meditative trance. No one could say that his spirit’s passing encounter with that spirit and the reflection of that great conscience over his own did not have something to do with his approaching perfection.

That particular “pastoral visit” was naturally an occasion that set the little local coteries buzzing: “Was the place for a bishop by the bedside of a man like that, even if he was dying? Obviously he couldn’t have been expecting a conversion from that quarter. All these revolutionaries are irreligious. So why go there? What did he think he’d find? He must have been really keen to see a soul carted off by the devil.” One day, a dowager of the breed that mistake impertinence for wit took a swipe at him: “Monseigneur, we are all wondering when Your Grace will get your red bonnet.” “Oh, well, red’s a pretty rich colour,” the bishop shot back. “Luckily those who despise it in a bonnet revere it in a hat.” XI. A QUALIFICATION

YOU WOULD RISK getting it badly wrong if you imagined from this that Monseigneur Bienvenu was “a philosopher bishop” or “a patriot priest.”1 His meeting, we might almost say, his communion, with G——, the Conventionist, left him in a state of amazement that made him sweeter than ever. That’s all.

Although Monseigneur Bienvenu was anything but a political animal, this might well be the place to sum up, very briefly, his position in relation to the events of the day, assuming Monseigneur Bienvenu ever thought of having a position.

For this, we need to go back a few years.

Some time after the elevation of Monsieur Myriel to the episcopacy, the emperor had made him a baron of the empire, along with several other bishops. The arrest of the pope, as we know, took place during the night of July 5–6, 1809;2 on that occasion, Monsieur Myriel was appointed by Napoléon to the synod of the bishops3 of France and Italy, convened in Paris. This synod was held in Notre-Dame and assembled for the first time on June 15, 1811, under the presidency of Cardinal Fesch. Monsieur Myriel was one of the ninety-five bishops who made the journey. But he only attended one sitting and three or four special conferences. It seems that as the bishop of a mountainous diocese, living such a basic, rustic life so close to nature, he brought to this assembly of eminent personages ideas that dampened the whole atmosphere. He rushed back to Digne, and when queried about his prompt return, said: “I got on their nerves. I brought a draft from the great outdoors in with me. It was like I’d left the door open.” Another time, he said: “What do you expect? Those gents are princes. I’m just a poor country bumpkin of a bishop.”

The fact is he put them off. Among other odd things, he let slip one evening when he found himself at the home of one of the most eminent of his colleagues: “What fine clocks! What fine rugs! What fine liveries! It must make you most uneasy! Heavens! I’m glad I don’t have all these luxuries bellowing forever in my ears: ‘There are people who are starving! There are people who are shivering with cold! There are people who have nothing! There are people who have nothing!’” We should note in passing that hatred of luxury is not an especially bright form of hatred. Such hatred implies hatred of the arts. And yet, in a man of the Church, outside ritual and ceremony, luxury is a sin. It would seem to stimulate habits that have nothing much to do with charity. A wealthy priest is a contradiction in terms. A priest should stay close to the poor. Now, is it possible to be in constant contact, day and night, with every kind of distress, every kind of calamity, every kind of destitution, without some of this saintly misery rubbing off on oneself, like dirt from hard work? Can we imagine a man standing close to a fire and not feeling warm? Can we imagine a labourer toiling away incessantly at a furnace without either a hair on his head getting burned or a nail blackened or a drop of sweat or a speck of ash settling on his face? The first proof of charity in a priest, and especially in a bishop, is poverty.

That, no doubt, is what the bishop of Digne thought.

Besides, you must not think that he shared, on certain delicate points, what used to be called “the ideas of the century.” He rarely got involved in the theological quarrels of the day and he kept his silence on matters where the Church and the State were compromised; but if you applied pressure, it appears you would have found him to be more of an Ultramontane than a Gallican.4 Since we are painting a portrait of the warts-and-all kind, we are obliged to add that the decline of Napoléon left him unmoved. From 1813, he supported and applauded all demonstrations of hostility toward him. He refused to go and gawk5 at the emperor as he passed through on his return from the island of Elba and declined to prescribe public prayers in his diocese for him during the Hundred Days.

Apart from his sister, Mademoiselle Baptistine, he had two brothers: One was a general, the other, a prefect of police. He wrote fairly often to both. He was pretty stiff with the first for a while because, having a command in Provence at the time of Napoléon’s landing in Cannes, the general had placed himself at the head of twelve hundred men and pursued the emperor so half-heartedly you’d have sworn he was determined to let him get away.6 His correspondence remained more affectionate with the other brother, the former police prefect, a brave and worthy gentleman who lived in retirement in Paris, in the rue Cassette.

And so Monseigneur Bienvenu, like anyone else, had his hour of partisanship, his hour of bitterness, his dark cloud. The shadow of the passions of the day passed over this sweet and exalted soul, busy as he was with eternal things. It goes without saying that such a man deserved not to have political opinions. Don’t get me wrong; we are not confusing what are called political opinions with the great aspiration toward progress, with that sublime patriotic, democratic, human faith which, these days, should be the very foundation of all generous intelligence. Without going further into issues that only indirectly touch on the subject of this book, we will simply say this: It would have been a good thing if Monseigneur Bienvenu had not been a royalist and if his gaze had not been turned for a single moment from that serene contemplation where we see, shining clearly above the stormy hustle and bustle of human affairs, those three pure lights, Truth, Justice, and Charity.

While we agree that it was not for some political role that God had created Monseigneur Bienvenu, we would have understood and admired him if he had protested in the name of right and liberty, if he had put up fierce opposition, perilous and just resistance to Napoléon, when Napoléon was all-powerful. But what pleases us in those on the way up, does not please us as much when they are on the way down. We don’t like fighting unless there is danger; and, in any case, only those who have fought from the very beginning have the right to annihilate at the very end. A man who has not been a relentless opponent in fair weather, when the enemy is at his peak, should keep quiet in foul, when the enemy collapses. Only the man who has denounced the enemy’s success can legitimately proclaim the justice of his downfall. As for ourselves, when Providence intervenes, we let it do its worst. The year 1812 comes along and disarms us. In 1813, the cowardly breach of silence on the part of the taciturn legislative body, emboldened by disaster, was worthy only of outrage, and it was a crime to applaud; in 1814, faced with those treacherous marshals, faced with a senate that lurched from one dirty deed to another, insulting where once it had deified, faced with this idolatry collapsing and then spitting on the idol, it was a duty to turn away. In 1815, as the ultimate disasters were in the air,7 as France shuddered at their sinister approach, as Waterloo could dimly be perceived opening up before Napoléon, the sorrowful acclaim of the army and of the people, cheering on a man who had been condemned by destiny, had nothing laughable about it, and with all our reservations about the despot, a heart like the bishop of Digne’s should not, perhaps, have been so impervious to all that was noble and moving, at the edge of the abyss, in the tight embrace of a great nation and a great man.

With that one exception, he was and always would be, in everything, just, true, fair, intelligent, humble and dignified, beneficent and benevolent, which is another form of beneficence. He was a priest, a sage, and a man. Even in the political stance we have just chided him for and that we are inclined to judge almost severely, we have to say he was tolerant and even-keeled, which is, perhaps, more than can be said for the man addressing you now. The doorkeeper of the mairie had been put in place by the emperor. He was an old non-commissioned officer of the old guard, a legionnaire of Austerlitz,8 as Bonapartist as the eagle.9 From time to time thoughtless words would escape this poor devil’s lips, which the law of the day defined as seditious. Since the imperial profile had vanished10 from the insignia of the Legion of Honour, he never dressed in regulation dress, as he liked to say, so as not to be forced to wear his Legion of Honour cross. He had himself religiously removed the imperial effigy from the cross Napoléon had given him; this created a hole that he did not want to fill with anything else. “I’d rather die,” he would say, “than wear those three toads11 over my heart!” He laughed out loud at Louis XVIII. “That gouty old bastard12 with his English gaiters!” he would say. “Let him take his pigtail and bugger off to Prussia!”—only too happy to be able to get the two things he hated most, Prussia and England,13 into the same imprecation. He said more than he should have and finally lost his job. There he was on the street with his wife and kids without a scrap of bread. The bishop sent for him, gently chastised him, and appointed him verger of the cathedral.

Monsieur Myriel was the real pastor of the diocese, a friend to all.

In nine years, by dint of holy works and gentle manners, Monseigneur Bienvenu had filled the town of Digne with a sort of tender, filial veneration. Even his attitude toward Napoléon had been accepted and more or less tacitly forgiven by the people, a good but feeble flock who worshipped their emperor but loved their bishop.

XII. MONSEIGNEUR BIENVENU’S SOLITUDE

THERE IS ALMOST always a squad of small-time abbés around a bishop, just as there is a covey of junior officers around a general. They are what the delightful Saint Francis de Sales1 somewhere describes as “whippersnapper priests.” Every profession has its cadets2 who mill around those at the top. There is no figure of authority who doesn’t have his entourage; no man of fortune without his court. Those in quest of a future flutter around the leading lights of the present. Every metropolis3 has its general staff. Every bishop worth his salt has his squadron of cherubic seminarians on patrol maintaining order in the episcopal palace and mounting guard over monseigneur’s smile. Pleasing a bishop is a foot in the door for a subdeacon.4 After all, a person has to carve out a niche for himself and so clerics never disdain sinecures.

Just as there are bigwigs elsewhere, so there are big mitres in the Church. These are the bishops in vogue, rich, well-heeled, smart men of the world, men who doubtless know how to pray but also know how to lobby, not too scrupulous about setting themselves up as conduits for a whole diocese, hyphens between the sacristy and the diplomatic world, more abbés than priests,5 more prelates than bishops. You know you’ve got it made if you are one of the happy few who manage to get near them! With their stocks so high, they shower those around them—overzealous sycophants and favourites alike and all the young men who’ve learned how to flatter them—with fat parishes, livings, archdeaconates, chaplaincies, and cathedral posts, as a prelude to episcopal honours. By advancing themselves, they bring their satellites forward; a whole solar system swings into motion. Their radiance bathes their retinue in reflected rays of purple. Their prosperity scatters its crumbs over those waiting in the wings in the form of handy little promotions. The bigger the patron’s diocese, the bigger the favourite’s parish. And then there is always Rome. A bishop who gets himself made an archbishop, an archbishop who gets himself made a cardinal, takes you along for the ride as a conclavist;6 you get onto the Rota,7 you are handed a pallium8 to wear, suddenly you are an auditor, suddenly you are a chamberlain, suddenly you are a monseigneur, and from His Grace to His Eminence there is just a step, and between His Eminence and His Holiness there is just the smoke of a burned ballot. Any clergyman in a skullcap can dream of the papal tiara. Nowadays the priest is the only man who can routinely become king—and what a king! The ultimate king. And so, what a hotbed of ambition is a seminary! How many blushing choirboys, how many fresh-faced abbés, run around like the dreamy milkmaid Perrette,9 with a milk jug on their heads! How easily ambition calls itself vocation, maybe—who knows?—in all good faith, even hoodwinking itself, drooling with rapture as it is!

Monseigneur Bienvenu, humble, poor, peculiar, did not rate as one of the big mitres. This could be seen by the complete lack of young priests flocking around him. We saw that he “didn’t take” in Paris. No glorious future on the make sought to hitch his star to this lonely old man. No budding ambition was silly enough to attempt to blossom in his shadow. His canons and grand-vicars were good old codgers, a bit common like himself and immured like him in the diocese with no way of rising to the cardinalate, and they resembled their bishop, with this difference: They were finished and he was complete. The impossibility of getting anywhere under Monseigneur Bienvenu was so palpable that, scarcely out of the seminary, the young men ordained by him promptly got themselves recommendations to the archbishops of Aix or Auch and swiftly disappeared. For, after all, we all need a push. A saint who leads a life of excessive self-denial is dangerous to be around. He could well infect you by contagion with incurable poverty, numbing of the joints used for climbing the ladder, and, in short, a tad more renunciation than you’d like. People flee from such squalid virtue. Hence the isolation of Monseigneur Bienvenu. We live in a sombre society. How to get ahead, succeed—that is the lesson that trickles down, drop by drop, from the overriding corruption on high.

We might say, by the way, that success is pretty awful. Its deceptive resemblance to merit has people fooled. For the hordes, success looks just like supremacy. Success, that dead ringer for talent, has a dupe: history. Only Juvenal and Tacitus10 grumble about it. In our time, a more or less official philosophy has entered into service as Success’s handmaiden, wears its livery and works its antechamber. Succeed: That’s the whole idea. Prosperity presupposes Capability. Win the lottery and you are a clever man. The winner is revered. Be born with a silver spoon in your mouth, that’s all that counts. Be lucky and the rest will fall into place. Be fortunate, and you’ll be thought great. Apart from the five or six illustrious examples that are the glory of their age, contemporary admiration is as shortsighted as it is possible to be. All that glitters is gold. There’s nothing wrong with being an arriviste as long as you’ve arrived. Vulgarity is an old Narcissus who adores himself and applauds the common vulgarity. That mighty genius by which one becomes a Moses, an Aeschylus, a Dante, a Michelangelo, or a Napoléon11 is discerned by the multitude and wildly applauded in any man at all who achieves what he set out to achieve, no matter what that may be. Let a notary rise to become a deputy, let a sham Corneille write Tiridate,12 let a eunuch come into possession of a harem, let some military Prudhomme13 accidentally win the decisive battle of an era, let an apothecary invent cardboard soles for the Sambre-et-Meuse army14 and let him, with this cardboard sold as leather, build himself four hundred thousand livres a year in income, let a hawker get into bed with usury and cause it to give birth to seven or eight million of which he is the father and she the mother, let a preacher become a bishop by talking through his hat, let an intendant of a great estate be so loaded on leaving the service that he is made minister of finance—people call that Genius, just as they call Mousqueton’s face Beauty and Claude’s15 bearing Majesty. They mistake the constellations of the cosmic void for the stars made by ducks’ feet in the soft mud of the bog.

XIII. WHAT HE BELIEVED

FROM THE POINT of view of orthodoxy, it is not up to us to sound out the bishop of Digne. Before such a soul, we can feel nothing but respect. The conscience of a just man should be taken at face value. Besides, with certain kinds of people, we allow for the potential development of all the beauties of human virtue within a faith that is different from our own.

What did he think of this dogma or that mystery? These secrets of the profound inner life are known only to the grave, which all souls enter naked. What we are certain of is that for the bishop problems of faith were never resolved by hypocrisy. There can be no possible corruption in a diamond. He believed as much as he could. Credo in Patrem1 was his cry. Besides, he drew from good works that degree of satisfaction that meets the demands of conscience and whispers softly to you, “You are with God.” What we feel we should point out is that, outside his faith, so to speak, and beyond it, the bishop had an oversupply of love. And it was due to this, quia multum amavit,2 that he was judged vulnerable by the “serious,” the “solemn,” and the “sensible”; those favourite labels of our sad little world where egoism borrows its clichés from pedantry. What was this surplus of love? It was a serene benevolence, flowing over all people, as we have seen, and sometimes extending even to things. He lived without scorn. He was indulgent toward God’s creation. Every man, even the best, has in him an unthinking harshness that he holds in reserve for animals. The bishop of Digne had none of that harshness, peculiar though it is to many priests. He did not go as far as the Brahmans,3 but he seemed to have taken these words of Ecclesiastes to heart: “Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?”4 External ugliness or the deformities of instinct did not worry him or make him angry. He was stirred by them, very nearly moved to tears. He seemed to be thoughtfully looking beyond the life of appearances to the underlying cause, explanation, or excuse. He seemed at times to be asking God to hand down lighter sentences. He examined, dispassionately and with the eye of a linguist deciphering a palimpsest, the level of chaos that exists even in nature. Such reveries occasionally caused strange words to pass his lips. One morning, he was in his garden; he thought he was alone, but his sister was strolling behind him without his being aware of it; all of a sudden he stopped and peered at something on the ground. It was a huge spider, black, hairy, horrible. His sister heard him say: “Poor creature! It’s not her fault.” Why not record this almost divine infantilism, evidence as it is of goodness? Puerile trifles, if you like; childishness, but sublime childishness such as that of Saint Francis of Assisi and Marcus Aurelius.5 One day he actually twisted his ankle trying to avoid treading on an ant.

And that is how this godly man lived. Sometimes he nodded off in the garden and when he did, there was nothing more venerable.

In the past, if we believe the tales told about him as a young man and even as a more mature man, Monseigneur Bienvenu had been a man of passion, perhaps even a violent man. His universal goodwill was not so much a natural instinct as a firm conviction that had trickled into his heart from life, slowly dripping into him, thought by thought; for a person’s nature, like a rock, can be drilled into by drops of water. Such channels bored through are ineffaceable; such formations, indestructible.

In 1815, as I think we might have said, he had reached the age of seventy-five, but he did not look a day older than sixty. He was not tall; he was a bit over-weight, and to combat it, he cheerfully went on long walks; his step was firm and he was only very slightly stooped, a detail from which we do not claim to draw any conclusion. Pope Gregory XVI,6 at eighty, held himself perfectly straight and smiling, but this did not stop him from being an awful pope. Monseigneur Bienvenu had what is commonly known as “a handsome head,” but he was so sweet that you forgot he was handsome.

Whenever he chatted away with the childlike gaiety that was one of his graces, and that we have already mentioned, you felt at ease in his company; joy seemed to stream from his whole being. His ruddy, fresh colouring, the full set of pearly white teeth that he’d held on to and that his laugh showed off, gave him that open, easygoing air that prompts people to describe a young man as “a good lad” and an old man as “a good old stick.” This was, as you’ll recall, the effect he produced on Napoléon. At first, and especially at first sight, he hardly seemed to be anything more, indeed, than a good old stick. But if you then spent a few hours with him, and saw him in a thoughtful mood, the good old stick was gradually transfigured and took on an ineffably imposing quality; his broad and serious forehead, made noble by a full head of white hair, was also ennobled by meditation; grandeur emanated from his goodness, but without that goodness ceasing to shine. You felt something of the emotion you would experience if you saw a smiling angel spread its wings without ceasing to smile. Respect, a respect beyond words, spread through you by degrees and made its way to your heart and you couldn’t help but feel that you were in the presence of one of those great spirits, tried and tested and full of compassion, whose thinking is on such a large scale that it can’t be anything but gentle.

As we have seen, prayer, celebration of religious offices, charity, consoling the afflicted, cultivating a little patch of ground, fraternity, frugality, hospitality, self-denial, trust, study, and work filled every day of his life. Filled is exactly the word, for the bishop’s day was full to the brim of good thoughts, good words, and good deeds. And yet it was not complete if cold weather or rain stopped him from passing an hour or two every night, after the two women had retired, in his garden before he went to bed. It seemed as though this was a kind of rite with him, a way of preparing for sleep by meditating in full view of the great spectacle of the night sky. Sometimes, even well into the small hours, if the two old ladies could not sleep, they would hear him slowly circling the property. Then, he was alone with himself, rapt, peaceful, adoring, connecting the serenity of his heart with the serenity of the ether, overcome in the darkness by the visible splendours of the constellations and the invisible splendours of God, opening his soul to the thoughts that rain down from the Unknown. In moments like these, offering up his heart at the hour that night flowers offer up their perfume, lit up like a lamp in the middle of the starry night, full of ecstasy in the middle of the universal radiance of creation, he could not perhaps have said himself what was happening in his spirit; he felt something soar up out of him and something fly down into him. Mysterious exchanges between the bottomless well of the soul and the bottomless well of the universe!

He would muse about the greatness and the living presence of God; about the strange mystery of the eternal future; about the even stranger mystery of the eternal past; about all the infinities streaming in every direction before his very eyes; and, without trying to comprehend the incomprehensible, he saw it. He did not study God, he was dazzled by Him. He considered the magnificent collisions of the atoms that produce what we see of matter, showing the forces at work by observing them, creating individuality within unity, proportion within extension, the numberless within the infinite, and producing beauty through light. Such collisions are constantly taking shape, bringing things together and pulling them apart; it is a matter of life and death.

He would sit on a wooden bench with his back against a decrepit trellis and he would gaze at the stars through the scrawny stunted silhouettes of his fruit trees. This quarter-acre patch of ground, so sparsely planted, so crowded with sheds and shacks, was dear to him, was all he needed.

What more could an old man need when he divided whatever spare time his life allowed, he who had so little spare time, between gardening of a day and contemplation of a night? Surely this small enclosure, with the sky as a ceiling, was enough to enable him to worship God by regarding His loveliest works and His most sublime works, one by one? Isn’t that all there is? Indeed, what more could you want? A little garden to amble about in, and infinite space to dream in. At his feet, whatever could be grown and gathered; over his head, whatever could be studied and meditated upon; a few flowers on the ground and all the stars in the sky.

XIV. WHAT HE THOUGHT

ONE LAST WORD.

These sorts of details, particularly in this day and age, might give the bishop of Digne a certain “pantheist” profile, to use an expression currently in vogue, and promote the idea, either to his debit or his credit, that he had one of those personal philosophies peculiar to the age that sometimes take root in solitary souls and build and grow there until they replace religion. So we must insist on this: No one who knew Monseigneur Bienvenu would have allowed themselves to think anything of the sort. What showed this man’s way with such clarity was his heart. His enlightenment came from the light the heart sheds.

No theories, just lots of good works. Abstruse speculations are dizzying, and nothing indicates that he polluted his mind with mystical claptrap. An apostle may be reckless, but a bishop has to tread carefully. He probably made a point of not going too far in certain issues and conundrums reserved to a certain extent for towering and terrifying minds. There is holy horror at the gates to enigma; the doors gape open wide but something tells you, you, life’s passerby, not to go there. Woe betide the person who does! In the unfathomable depths of abstraction and pure speculation that, for all intents and purposes, lie beyond dogma, geniuses offer up their ideas to God. Their prayer boldly invites debate. Their worship is probing. This is direct religion, full of anxiety and liability for those who risk themselves on its dizzying cliffs.

Human thought knows no bounds. At its own peril, it analyzes and explores its own dazzlement. You could almost say that, through a kind of magnificent reaction, it dazzles nature; the mysterious world that surrounds us gives back what it takes, and it seems likely that the contemplators are contemplated. Whatever the case may be, there are in this world men—if that is what they are—who clearly perceive the pinnacles of the absolute at the far horizons of dream and who have a terrible vision of the infinite mountain. Monseigneur Bienvenu was not one of those men. Monseigneur Bienvenu was no genius. He would have dreaded those sublime peaks from which a few rare, not to say great, men, like Swedenborg or Pascal,1 have slid down into madness. Of course such powerful daydreams have their moral usefulness and it is only by such arduous roads that we can approach ideal perfection. But our man took the shortcut: the Gospel.

He did not try to fold his chasuble in imitation of Elijah’s mantle;2 he did not throw any ray of light from the future onto the shadowy unfolding of events; he did not seek to condense the glimmer of things into a flame; there was nothing of the prophet or the seer about him. This humble soul was filled with love, that’s all.

More than likely he inflated his praying into a superhuman longing; but you can’t pray too much any more than you can love too much. And, if it was heresy to pray outside the sacred texts, then Saint Teresa and Saint Jerome3 were heretics.

He gravitated toward those in pain and those who wished for atonement. The world seemed to him like one massive disease; he could feel fever everywhere; everywhere he heard the rattle and wheeze of suffering in people’s chests with his special stethoscope and, without seeking to solve the enigma, he tried to staunch the wound. The awesome spectacle of things as they are produced in him compassion; his sole concern was to find for himself and to help others to find the best way to sympathize and bring relief. All that exists was for this good and rare priest constant grounds for the sadness that seeks to console.

There are men who work hard, digging for gold; he worked hard, digging for pity. The misery of the world was his mine. Pain everywhere was an occasion for goodness always. Love one another:4 He declared this to be complete, desired nothing more; it was the sum total of his doctrine. One day, the above-mentioned senator, who styled himself a philosopher, said to the bishop: “But just take a good look at the world; it’s the war of each against all; might is right. Your love one another is nonsense.” “Ah, well,” replied Monseigneur Bienvenu without arguing, “if it’s nonsense, the soul should shut itself up in it like a pearl in an oyster.” And so, he shut himself up in it, he lived in it, he was utterly happy there, leaving aside the prodigious questions that lure and terrify, the unfathomable perspectives of abstraction, the heady precipices of metaphysics, all these profundities that converge, for the apostle, on God, and, for the atheist, on nothingness: fate, good and evil, the war of being against being, man’s conscience, the pensive sleepwalking of animals, transformation by death, the summing up of existences in the grave, the incomprehensible grafting of successive loves on the enduring self, essence, substance, being and nothingness, the soul, nature, freedom, necessity—thorny problems that are sheer drops, murky depths, over which the colossal archangels of the human mind hover; awesome abysses that the likes of Lucretius, Manu, Saint-Paul, and Dante5 contemplate with blazing eyes that, by staring hard at infinity, seem to cause stars to hatch there.

Monseigneur Bienvenu was, quite simply, a man who observed mysterious matters from the outside without scrutinizing them too closely, without stirring them up, and without troubling his own mind with them, a man who had in his soul a serious respect for the unknown.