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His conversation was gay and affable.
He put himself on a level with the two old women who had passed
their lives beside him. When he laughed, it was the laugh of a
schoolboy.
Madame Magloire liked to call him Your Grace [Votre Grandeur].
One day he rose from his arm-chair, and went to his library in
search of a book. This book was on one of the upper shelves.
As the bishop was rather short of stature, he could not reach
it.
"Madame Magloire," said he, "fetch me a chair.
My greatness [grandeur] does not reach as far as that shelf."
One of his distant relatives, Madame la Comtesse de Lo, rarely
allowed an opportunity to escape of enumerating, in his presence,
what she designated as "the expectations" of her three
sons. She had numerous relatives, who were very old and near to
death, and of whom her sons were the natural heirs.
The youngest of the three was to receive from a grand-aunt
a good hundred thousand livres of income; the second was the heir
by entail to the title of the Duke, his uncle; the eldest was
to succeed to the peerage of his grandfather.
The Bishop was accustomed to listen in silence to these innocent
and pardonable maternal boasts.
On one occasion, however, he appeared to be more thoughtful
than usual, while Madame de Lo was relating once again the details
of all these inheritances and all these "expectations."
She interrupted herself impatiently: "Mon Dieu, cousin!
What are you thinking about?"
"I am thinking," replied the Bishop, "of a
singular remark, which is to be found, I believe, in St. Augustine,--`Place
your hopes in the man from whom you do not inherit.'"
At another time, on receiving a notification of the decease
of a gentleman of the country-side, wherein not only the dignities
of the dead man, but also the feudal and noble qualifications
of all his relatives, spread over an entire page:
"What a stout back Death has!" he exclaimed.
"What a strange burden of titles is cheerfully imposed
on him, and how much wit must men have, in order thus to press
the tomb into the service of vanity!"
He was gifted, on occasion, with a gentle raillery, which
almost always concealed a serious meaning.
In the course of one Lent, a youthful vicar came to D----,
and preached in the cathedral. He was tolerably eloquent.
The subject of his sermon was charity. He urged the rich to
give to the poor, in order to avoid hell, which he depicted in
the most frightful manner of which he was capable, and to win
paradise, which he represented as charming and desirable. Among
the audience there was a wealthy retired merchant, who was somewhat
of a usurer, named M. Geborand, who had amassed two millions in
the manufacture of coarse cloth, serges, and woollen galloons.
Never in his whole life had M. Geborand bestowed alms on any poor
wretch. After the delivery of that sermon, it was observed that
he gave a sou every Sunday to the poor old beggar-women at the
door of the cathedral. There were six of them to share it.
One day the Bishop caught sight of him in the act of bestowing
this charity, and said to his sister, with a smile, "There
is M. Geborand purchasing paradise for a sou."
When it was a question of charity, he was not to be rebuffed
even by a refusal, and on such occasions he gave utterance to
remarks which induced reflection.
Once he was begging for the poor in a drawing-room of the
town; there was present the Marquis de Champtercier, a wealthy
and avaricious old man, who contrived to be, at one and the same
time, an ultra-royalist and an ultra-Voltairian. This variety
of man has actually existed.
When the Bishop came to him, he touched his arm, "You
must give me something, M. le Marquis." The Marquis turned
round and answered dryly, "I have poor people of my own,
Monseigneur."
"Give them to me," replied the Bishop.
One day he preached the following sermon in the cathedral:--
"My very dear brethren, my good friends, there are thirteen
hundred and twenty thousand peasants' dwellings in France which
have but three openings; eighteen hundred and seventeen thousand
hovels which have but two openings, the door and one window; and
three hundred and forty-six thousand cabins besides which have
but one opening, the door.
And this arises from a thing which is called the tax on doors
and windows.
Just put poor families, old women and little children, in
those buildings, and behold the fevers and maladies which result!
Alas!
God gives air to men; the law sells it to them. I do not blame
the law, but I bless God.
In the department of the Isere, in the Var, in the two departments
of the Alpes, the Hautes, and the Basses, the peasants have not
even wheelbarrows; they transport their manure on the backs of
men; they have no candles, and they burn resinous sticks, and
bits of rope dipped in pitch. That is the state of affairs throughout
the whole of the hilly country of Dauphine.
They make bread for six months at one time; they bake it with
dried cow-dung. In the winter they break this bread up with an
axe, and they soak it for twenty-four hours, in order to render
it eatable.
My brethren, have pity! behold the suffering on all sides
of you!"
Born a Provencal, he easily familiarized himself with the
dialect of the south.
He said, "En be! moussu, ses sage?" as in lower
Languedoc; "Onte anaras passa?" as in the Basses-Alpes;
"Puerte un bouen moutu embe un bouen fromage grase,"
as in upper Dauphine.
This pleased the people extremely, and contributed not a little
to win him access to all spirits.
He was perfectly at home in the thatched cottage and in the
mountains.
He understood how to say the grandest things in the most vulgar
of idioms.
As he spoke all tongues, he entered into all hearts.
Moreover, he was the same towards people of the world and
towards the lower classes.
He condemned nothing in haste and without taking circumstances
into account.
He said, "Examine the road over which the fault has passed."
Being, as he described himself with a smile, an ex-sinner,
he had none of the asperities of austerity, and he professed,
with a good deal of distinctness, and without the frown of the
ferociously virtuous, a doctrine which may be summed up as follows:--
"Man has upon him his flesh, which is at once his burden
and his temptation.
He drags it with him and yields to it. He must watch it, cheek
it, repress it, and obey it only at the last extremity.
There may be some fault even in this obedience; but the fault
thus committed is venial; it is a fall, but a fall on the knees
which may terminate in prayer.
"To be a saint is the exception; to be an upright man
is the rule. Err, fall, sin if you will, but be upright.
"The least possible sin is the law of man.
No sin at all is the dream of the angel.
All which is terrestrial is subject to sin. Sin is a gravitation."
When he saw everyone exclaiming very loudly, and growing angry
very quickly, "Oh! oh!" he said, with a smile; "to
all appearance, this is a great crime which all the world commits.
These are hypocrisies which have taken fright, and are in
haste to make protest and to put themselves under shelter."
He was indulgent towards women and poor people, on whom the
burden of human society rest.
He said, "The faults of women, of children, of the feeble,
the indigent, and the ignorant, are the fault of the husbands,
the fathers, the masters, the strong, the rich, and the wise."
He said, moreover, "Teach those who are ignorant as many
things as possible; society is culpable, in that it does not afford
instruction gratis; it is responsible for the night which it produces.
This soul is full of shadow; sin is therein committed.
The guilty one is not the person who has committed the sin,
but the person who has created the shadow."
It will be perceived that he had a peculiar manner of his
own of judging things:
I suspect that he obtained it from the Gospel.
One day he heard a criminal case, which was in preparation
and on the point of trial, discussed in a drawing-room. A wretched
man, being at the end of his resources, had coined counterfeit
money, out of love for a woman, and for the child which he had
had by her. Counterfeiting was still punishable with death at
that epoch. The woman had been arrested in the act of passing
the first false piece made by the man.
She was held, but there were no proofs except against her.
She alone could accuse her lover, and destroy him by her confession.
She denied; they insisted.
She persisted in her denial.
Thereupon an idea occurred to the attorney for the crown.
He invented an infidelity on the part of the lover, and succeeded,
by means of fragments of letters cunningly presented, in persuading
the unfortunate woman that she had a rival, and that the man was
deceiving her.
Thereupon, exasperated by jealousy, she denounced her lover,
confessed all, proved all.
The man was ruined.
He was shortly to be tried at Aix with his accomplice.
They were relating the matter, and each one was expressing
enthusiasm over the cleverness of the magistrate. By bringing
jealousy into play, he had caused the truth to burst forth in
wrath, he had educed the justice of revenge.
The Bishop listened to all this in silence.
When they had finished, he inquired,--
"Where are this man and woman to be tried?"
"At the Court of Assizes."
He went on, "And where will the advocate of the crown
be tried?"
A tragic event occurred at D---- A man was condemned to death
for murder.
He was a wretched fellow, not exactly educated, not exactly
ignorant, who had been a mountebank at fairs, and a writer for
the public.
The town took a great interest in the trial. On the eve of
the day fixed for the execution of the condemned man, the chaplain
of the prison fell ill.
A priest was needed to attend the criminal in his last moments.
They sent for the cure. It seems that he refused to come,
saying, "That is no affair of mine.
I have nothing to do with that unpleasant task, and with that
mountebank:
I, too, am ill; and besides, it is not my place." This
reply was reported to the Bishop, who said, "Monsieur le
Cure is right:
it is not his place; it is mine."
He went instantly to the prison, descended to the cell of
the "mountebank," called him by name, took him by the
hand, and spoke to him. He passed the entire day with him, forgetful
of food and sleep, praying to God for the soul of the condemned
man, and praying the condemned man for his own.
He told him the best truths, which are also the most simple.
He was father, brother, friend; he was bishop only to bless.
He taught him everything, encouraged and consoled him. The
man was on the point of dying in despair.
Death was an abyss to him. As he stood trembling on its mournful
brink, he recoiled with horror. He was not sufficiently ignorant
to be absolutely indifferent. His condemnation, which had been
a profound shock, had, in a manner, broken through, here and there,
that wall which separates us from the mystery of things, and which
we call life.
He gazed incessantly beyond this world through these fatal
breaches, and beheld only darkness.
The Bishop made him see light.
On the following day, when they came to fetch the unhappy
wretch, the Bishop was still there.
He followed him, and exhibited himself to the eyes of the
crowd in his purple camail and with his episcopal cross upon his
neck, side by side with the criminal bound with cords.
He mounted the tumbril with him, he mounted the scaffold with
him. The sufferer, who had been so gloomy and cast down on the
preceding day, was radiant.
He felt that his soul was reconciled, and he hoped in God.
The Bishop embraced him, and at the moment when the knife
was about to fall, he said to him:
"God raises from the dead him whom man slays; he whom
his brothers have rejected finds his Father once more.
Pray, believe, enter into life:
the Father is there." When he descended from the scaffold,
there was something in his look which made the people draw aside
to let him pass.
They did not know which was most worthy of admiration, his
pallor or his serenity. On his return to the humble dwelling,
which he designated, with a smile, as his palace, he said to his
sister, "I have just officiated pontifically."
Since the most sublime things are often those which are the
least understood, there were people in the town who said, when
commenting on this conduct of the Bishop, "It is affectation."
This, however, was a remark which was confined to the drawing-rooms.
The populace, which perceives no jest in holy deeds, was touched,
and admired him.
As for the Bishop, it was a shock to him to have beheld the
guillotine, and it was a long time before he recovered from it.
In fact, when the scaffold is there, all erected and prepared,
it has something about it which produces hallucination. One may
feel a certain indifference to the death penalty, one may refrain
from pronouncing upon it, from saying yes or no, so long as one
has not seen a guillotine with one's own eyes: but if one encounters
one of them, the shock is violent; one is forced to decide, and
to take part for or against. Some admire it, like de Maistre;
others execrate it, like Beccaria. The guillotine is the concretion
of the law; it is called vindicte; it is not neutral, and it does
not permit you to remain neutral. He who sees it shivers with
the most mysterious of shivers. All social problems erect their
interrogation point around this chopping-knife. The scaffold is
a vision.
The scaffold is not a piece of carpentry; the scaffold is
not a machine; the scaffold is not an inert bit of mechanism constructed
of wood, iron and cords.
It seems as though it were a being, possessed of I know not
what sombre initiative; one would say that this piece of carpenter's
work saw, that this machine heard, that this mechanism understood,
that this wood, this iron, and these cords were possessed of will.
In the frightful meditation into which its presence casts the
soul the scaffold appears in terrible guise, and as though taking
part in what is going on.
The scaffold is the accomplice of the executioner; it devours,
it eats flesh, it drinks blood; the scaffold is a sort of monster
fabricated by the judge and the carpenter, a spectre which seems
to live with a horrible vitality composed of all the death which
it has inflicted.
Therefore, the impression was terrible and profound; on the
day following the execution, and on many succeeding days, the
Bishop appeared to be crushed.
The almost violent serenity of the funereal moment had disappeared;
the phantom of social justice tormented him.
He, who generally returned from all his deeds with a radiant
satisfaction, seemed to be reproaching himself. At times he talked
to himself, and stammered lugubrious monologues in a low voice.
This is one which his sister overheard one evening and preserved:
"I did not think that it was so monstrous. It is wrong
to become absorbed in the divine law to such a degree as not to
perceive human law.
Death belongs to God alone. By what right do men touch that
unknown thing?"
In course of time these impressions weakened and probably
vanished. Nevertheless, it was observed that the Bishop thenceforth
avoided passing the place of execution.
M. Myriel could be summoned at any hour to the bedside of
the sick and dying.
He did not ignore the fact that therein lay his greatest duty
and his greatest labor.
Widowed and orphaned families had no need to summon him; he
came of his own accord.
He understood how to sit down and hold his peace for long
hours beside the man who had lost the wife of his love, of the
mother who had lost her child.
As he knew the moment for silence he knew also the moment
for speech.
Oh, admirable consoler!
He sought not to efface sorrow by forgetfulness, but to magnify
and dignify it by hope.
He said:--
"Have a care of the manner in which you turn towards
the dead. Think not of that which perishes.
Gaze steadily.
You will perceive the living light of your well-beloved dead
in the depths of heaven." He knew that faith is wholesome.
He sought to counsel and calm the despairing man, by pointing
out to him the resigned man, and to transform the grief which
gazes upon a grave by showing him the grief which fixes its gaze
upon a star.
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