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A RESTRICTION
We should incur a great risk of deceiving ourselves, were
we to conclude from this that Monseigneur Welcome was "a
philosophical bishop," or a "patriotic cure."
His meeting, which may almost be designated as his union,
with conventionary G----, left behind it in his mind a sort of
astonishment, which rendered him still more gentle. That is all.
Although Monseigneur Bienvenu was far from being a politician,
this is, perhaps, the place to indicate very briefly what his
attitude was in the events of that epoch, supposing that Monseigneur
Bienvenu ever dreamed of having an attitude.
Let us, then, go back a few years.
Some time after the elevation of M. Myriel to the episcopate,
the Emperor had made him a baron of the Empire, in company with
many other bishops.
The arrest of the Pope took place, as every one knows, on
the night of the 5th to the 6th of July, 1809; on this occasion,
M. Myriel was summoned by Napoleon to the synod of the bishops
of France and Italy convened at Paris.
This synod was held at Notre-Dame, and assembled for the first
time on the 15th of June, 1811, under the presidency of Cardinal
Fesch.
M. Myriel was one of the ninety-five bishops who attended
it.
But he was present only at one sitting and at three or four
private conferences. Bishop of a mountain diocese, living so very
close to nature, in rusticity and deprivation, it appeared that
he imported among these eminent personages, ideas which altered
the temperature of the assembly.
He very soon returned to D---- He was interrogated as to this
speedy return, and he replied:
"I embarrassed them. The outside air penetrated to them
through me.
I produced on them the effect of an open door."
On another occasion he said, "What would you have?
Those gentlemen are princes.
I am only a poor peasant bishop."
The fact is that he displeased them.
Among other strange things, it is said that he chanced to
remark one evening, when he found himself at the house of one
of his most notable colleagues:
"What beautiful clocks!
What beautiful carpets!
What beautiful liveries! They must be a great trouble.
I would not have all those superfluities, crying incessantly
in my ears:
`There are people who are hungry! There are people who are
cold!
There are poor people!
There are poor people!'"
Let us remark, by the way, that the hatred of luxury is not
an intelligent hatred.
This hatred would involve the hatred of the arts.
Nevertheless, in churchmen, luxury is wrong, except in connection
with representations and ceremonies.
It seems to reveal habits which have very little that is charitable
about them. An opulent priest is a contradiction.
The priest must keep close to the poor.
Now, can one come in contact incessantly night and day with
all this distress, all these misfortunes, and this poverty, without
having about one's own person a little of that misery, like the
dust of labor?
Is it possible to imagine a man near a brazier who is not
warm?
Can one imagine a workman who is working near a furnace, and
who has neither a singed hair, nor blackened nails, nor a drop
of sweat, nor a speck of ashes on his face?
The first proof of charity in the priest, in the bishop especially,
is poverty.
This is, no doubt, what the Bishop of D---- thought.
It must not be supposed, however, that he shared what we call
the "ideas of the century" on certain delicate points.
He took very little part in the theological quarrels of the
moment, and maintained silence on questions in which Church and
State were implicated; but if he had been strongly pressed, it
seems that he would have been found to be an ultramontane rather
than a gallican.
Since we are making a portrait, and since we do not wish to
conceal anything, we are forced to add that he was glacial towards
Napoleon in his decline. Beginning with 1813, he gave in his adherence
to or applauded all hostile manifestations.
He refused to see him, as he passed through on his return
from the island of Elba, and he abstained from ordering public
prayers for the Emperor in his diocese during the Hundred Days.
Besides his sister, Mademoiselle Baptistine, he had two brothers,
one a general, the other a prefect.
He wrote to both with tolerable frequency.
He was harsh for a time towards the former, because, holding
a command in Provence at the epoch of the disembarkation at Cannes,
the general had put himself at the head of twelve hundred men
and had pursued the Emperor as though the latter had been a person
whom one is desirous of allowing to escape.
His correspondence with the other brother, the ex-prefect,
a fine, worthy man who lived in retirement at Paris, Rue Cassette,
remained more affectionate.
Thus Monseigneur Bienvenu also had his hour of party spirit,
his hour of bitterness, his cloud.
The shadow of the passions of the moment traversed this grand
and gentle spirit occupied with eternal things. Certainly, such
a man would have done well not to entertain any political opinions.
Let there be no mistake as to our meaning: we are not confounding
what is called "political opinions" with the grand aspiration
for progress, with the sublime faith, patriotic, democratic, humane,
which in our day should be the very foundation of every generous
intellect.
Without going deeply into questions which are only indirectly
connected with the subject of this book, we will simply say this:
It would have been well if Monseigneur Bienvenu had not been
a Royalist, and if his glance had never been, for a single instant,
turned away from that serene contemplation in which is distinctly
discernible, above the fictions and the hatreds of this world,
above the stormy vicissitudes of human things, the beaming of
those three pure radiances, truth, justice, and charity.
While admitting that it was not for a political office that
God created Monseigneur Welcome, we should have understood and
admired his protest in the name of right and liberty, his proud
opposition, his just but perilous resistance to the all-powerful
Napoleon. But that which pleases us in people who are rising pleases
us less in the case of people who are falling.
We only love the fray so long as there is danger, and in any
case, the combatants of the first hour have alone the right to
be the exterminators of the last.
He who has not been a stubborn accuser in prosperity should
hold his peace in the face of ruin.
The denunciator of success is the only legitimate executioner
of the fall. As for us, when Providence intervenes and strikes,
we let it work. 1812 commenced to disarm us.
In 1813 the cowardly breach of silence of that taciturn legislative
body, emboldened by catastrophe, possessed only traits which aroused
indignation.
And it was a crime to applaud, in 1814, in the presence of
those marshals who betrayed; in the presence of that senate which
passed from one dunghill to another, insulting after having deified;
in the presence of that idolatry which was loosing its footing
and spitting on its idol,-- it was a duty to turn aside the head.
In 1815, when the supreme disasters filled the air, when France
was seized with a shiver at their sinister approach, when Waterloo
could be dimly discerned opening before Napoleon, the mournful
acclamation of the army and the people to the condemned of destiny
had nothing laughable in it, and, after making all allowance for
the despot, a heart like that of the Bishop of D----, ought not
perhaps to have failed to recognize the august and touching features
presented by the embrace of a great nation and a great man on
the brink of the abyss.
With this exception, he was in all things just, true, equitable,
intelligent, humble and dignified, beneficent and kindly, which
is only another sort of benevolence.
He was a priest, a sage, and a man.
It must be admitted, that even in the political views with
which we have just reproached him, and which we are disposed to
judge almost with severity, he was tolerant and easy, more so,
perhaps, than we who are speaking here.
The porter of the town-hall had been placed there by the Emperor.
He was an old non-commissioned officer of the old guard, a
member of the Legion of Honor at Austerlitz, as much of a Bonapartist
as the eagle. This poor fellow occasionally let slip inconsiderate
remarks, which the law then stigmatized as seditious speeches.
After the imperial profile disappeared from the Legion of
Honor, he never dressed himself in his regimentals, as he said,
so that he should not be obliged to wear his cross.
He had himself devoutly removed the imperial effigy from the
cross which Napoleon had given him; this made a hole, and he would
not put anything in its place. "I will die," he said,
"rather than wear the three frogs upon my heart!"
He liked to scoff aloud at Louis XVIII.
"The gouty old creature in English gaiters!" he
said; "let him take himself off to Prussia with that queue
of his."
He was happy to combine in the same imprecation the two things
which he most detested, Prussia and England.
He did it so often that he lost his place. There he was, turned
out of the house, with his wife and children, and without bread.
The Bishop sent for him, reproved him gently, and appointed
him beadle in the cathedral.
In the course of nine years Monseigneur Bienvenu had, by dint
of holy deeds and gentle manners, filled the town of D---- with
a sort of tender and filial reverence.
Even his conduct towards Napoleon had been accepted and tacitly
pardoned, as it were, by the people, the good and weakly flock
who adored their emperor, but loved their bishop.
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