Les Misérables
“I am pleased to see that I have been misinformed. You certainly do not
seem to me to be ill.”
“Monsieur,” replied the old man, “I am going to recover.”
He paused, and then said:—
“I shall die three hours hence.”
Then he continued:—
“I am something of a doctor; I know in what fashion the last hour draws
on. Yesterday, only my feet were cold; to-day, the chill has ascended
to my knees; now I feel it mounting to my waist; when it reaches the
heart, I shall stop. The sun is beautiful, is it not? I had myself
wheeled out here to take a last look at things. You can talk to me; it
does not fatigue me. You have done well to come and look at a man who
is on the point of death. It is well that there should be witnesses at
that moment. One has one’s caprices; I should have liked to last until
the dawn, but I know that I shall hardly live three hours. It will be
night then. What does it matter, after all? Dying is a simple affair.
One has no need of the light for that. So be it. I shall die by
starlight.”
The old man turned to the shepherd lad:—
“Go to thy bed; thou wert awake all last night; thou art tired.”
The child entered the hut.
The old man followed him with his eyes, and added, as though speaking
to himself:—
“I shall die while he sleeps. The two slumbers may be good neighbors.”
The Bishop was not touched as it seems that he should have been. He did
not think he discerned God in this manner of dying; let us say the
whole, for these petty contradictions of great hearts must be indicated
like the rest: he, who on occasion, was so fond of laughing at “His
Grace,” was rather shocked at not being addressed as Monseigneur, and
he was almost tempted to retort “citizen.” He was assailed by a fancy
for peevish familiarity, common enough to doctors and priests, but
which was not habitual with him. This man, after all, this member of
the Convention, this representative of the people, had been one of the
powerful ones of the earth; for the first time in his life, probably,
the Bishop felt in a mood to be severe.
Meanwhile, the member of the Convention had been surveying him with a
modest cordiality, in which one could have distinguished, possibly,
that humility which is so fitting when one is on the verge of returning
to dust.
The Bishop, on his side, although he generally restrained his
curiosity, which, in his opinion, bordered on a fault, could not
refrain from examining the member of the Convention with an attention
which, as it did not have its course in sympathy, would have served his
conscience as a matter of reproach, in connection with any other man. A
member of the Convention produced on him somewhat the effect of being
outside the pale of the law, even of the law of charity. G——, calm, his
body almost upright, his voice vibrating, was one of those
octogenarians who form the subject of astonishment to the physiologist.
The Revolution had many of these men, proportioned to the epoch. In
this old man one was conscious of a man put to the proof. Though so
near to his end, he preserved all the gestures of health. In his clear
glance, in his firm tone, in the robust movement of his shoulders,
there was something calculated to disconcert death. Azrael, the
Mohammedan angel of the sepulchre, would have turned back, and thought
that he had mistaken the door. G—— seemed to be dying because he willed
it so. There was freedom in his agony. His legs alone were motionless.
It was there that the shadows held him fast. His feet were cold and
dead, but his head survived with all the power of life, and seemed full
of light. G——, at this solemn moment, resembled the king in that tale
of the Orient who was flesh above and marble below.
There was a stone there. The Bishop sat down. The exordium was abrupt.
“I congratulate you,” said he, in the tone which one uses for a
reprimand. “You did not vote for the death of the king, after all.”
The old member of the Convention did not appear to notice the bitter
meaning underlying the words “after all.” He replied. The smile had
quite disappeared from his face.
“Do not congratulate me too much, sir. I did vote for the death of the
tyrant.”
It was the tone of austerity answering the tone of severity.
“What do you mean to say?” resumed the Bishop.
“I mean to say that man has a tyrant,—ignorance. I voted for the death
of that tyrant. That tyrant engendered royalty, which is authority
falsely understood, while science is authority rightly understood. Man
should be governed only by science.”
“And conscience,” added the Bishop.
“It is the same thing. Conscience is the quantity of innate science
which we have within us.”
Monseigneur Bienvenu listened in some astonishment to this language,
which was very new to him.
The member of the Convention resumed:—
“So far as Louis XVI. was concerned, I said ‘no.’ I did not think that
I had the right to kill a man; but I felt it my duty to exterminate
evil. I voted the end of the tyrant, that is to say, the end of
prostitution for woman, the end of slavery for man, the end of night
for the child. In voting for the Republic, I voted for that. I voted
for fraternity, concord, the dawn. I have aided in the overthrow of
prejudices and errors. The crumbling away of prejudices and errors
causes light. We have caused the fall of the old world, and the old
world, that vase of miseries, has become, through its upsetting upon
the human race, an urn of joy.”
“Mixed joy,” said the Bishop.
“You may say troubled joy, and to-day, after that fatal return of the
past, which is called 1814, joy which has disappeared! Alas! The work
was incomplete, I admit: we demolished the ancient regime in deeds; we
were not able to suppress it entirely in ideas. To destroy abuses is
not sufficient; customs must be modified. The mill is there no longer;
the wind is still there.”
“You have demolished. It may be of use to demolish, but I distrust a
demolition complicated with wrath.”
“Right has its wrath, Bishop; and the wrath of right is an element of
progress. In any case, and in spite of whatever may be said, the French
Revolution is the most important step of the human race since the
advent of Christ. Incomplete, it may be, but sublime. It set free all
the unknown social quantities; it softened spirits, it calmed,
appeased, enlightened; it caused the waves of civilization to flow over
the earth. It was a good thing. The French Revolution is the
consecration of humanity.”
The Bishop could not refrain from murmuring:—
“Yes? ’93!”
The member of the Convention straightened himself up in his chair with
an almost lugubrious solemnity, and exclaimed, so far as a dying man is
capable of exclamation:—
“Ah, there you go; ’93! I was expecting that word. A cloud had been
forming for the space of fifteen hundred years; at the end of fifteen
hundred years it burst. You are putting the thunderbolt on its trial.”
The Bishop felt, without, perhaps, confessing it, that something within
him had suffered extinction. Nevertheless, he put a good face on the
matter. He replied:—
“The judge speaks in the name of justice; the priest speaks in the name
of pity, which is nothing but a more lofty justice. A thunderbolt
should commit no error.” And he added, regarding the member of the
Convention steadily the while, “Louis XVII.?”
The conventionary stretched forth his hand and grasped the Bishop’s
arm.
“Louis XVII.! let us see. For whom do you mourn? is it for the innocent
child? very good; in that case I mourn with you. Is it for the royal
child? I demand time for reflection. To me, the brother of Cartouche,
an innocent child who was hung up by the armpits in the Place de Grève,
until death ensued, for the sole crime of having been the brother of
Cartouche, is no less painful than the grandson of Louis XV., an
innocent child, martyred in the tower of the Temple, for the sole crime
of having been grandson of Louis XV.”
“Monsieur,” said the Bishop, “I like not this conjunction of names.”
“Cartouche? Louis XV.? To which of the two do you object?”
A momentary silence ensued. The Bishop almost regretted having come,
and yet he felt vaguely and strangely shaken.
The conventionary resumed:—
“Ah, Monsieur Priest, you love not the crudities of the true. Christ
loved them. He seized a rod and cleared out the Temple. His scourge,
full of lightnings, was a harsh speaker of truths. When he cried,
_‘Sinite parvulos,’_ he made no distinction between the little
children. It would not have embarrassed him to bring together the
Dauphin of Barabbas and the Dauphin of Herod. Innocence, Monsieur, is
its own crown. Innocence has no need to be a highness. It is as august
in rags as in fleurs de lys.”
“That is true,” said the Bishop in a low voice.
“I persist,” continued the conventionary G—— “You have mentioned Louis
XVII. to me. Let us come to an understanding. Shall we weep for all the
innocent, all martyrs, all children, the lowly as well as the exalted?
I agree to that. But in that case, as I have told you, we must go back
further than ’93, and our tears must begin before Louis XVII. I will
weep with you over the children of kings, provided that you will weep
with me over the children of the people.”
“I weep for all,” said the Bishop.
“Equally!” exclaimed conventionary G——; “and if the balance must
incline, let it be on the side of the people. They have been suffering
longer.”
Another silence ensued. The conventionary was the first to break it. He
raised himself on one elbow, took a bit of his cheek between his thumb
and his forefinger, as one does mechanically when one interrogates and
judges, and appealed to the Bishop with a gaze full of all the forces
of the death agony. It was almost an explosion.
“Yes, sir, the people have been suffering a long while. And hold! that
is not all, either; why have you just questioned me and talked to me
about Louis XVII.? I know you not. Ever since I have been in these
parts I have dwelt in this enclosure alone, never setting foot outside,
and seeing no one but that child who helps me. Your name has reached me
in a confused manner, it is true, and very badly pronounced, I must
admit; but that signifies nothing: clever men have so many ways of
imposing on that honest goodman, the people. By the way, I did not hear
the sound of your carriage; you have left it yonder, behind the coppice
at the fork of the roads, no doubt. I do not know you, I tell you. You
have told me that you are the Bishop; but that affords me no
information as to your moral personality. In short, I repeat my
question. Who are you? You are a bishop; that is to say, a prince of
the church, one of those gilded men with heraldic bearings and
revenues, who have vast prebends,—the bishopric of D—— fifteen thousand
francs settled income, ten thousand in perquisites; total, twenty-five
thousand francs,—who have kitchens, who have liveries, who make good
cheer, who eat moor-hens on Friday, who strut about, a lackey before, a
lackey behind, in a gala coach, and who have palaces, and who roll in
their carriages in the name of Jesus Christ who went barefoot! You are
a prelate,—revenues, palace, horses, servants, good table, all the
sensualities of life; you have this like the rest, and like the rest,
you enjoy it; it is well; but this says either too much or too little;
this does not enlighten me upon the intrinsic and essential value of
the man who comes with the probable intention of bringing wisdom to me.
To whom do I speak? Who are you?”
The Bishop hung his head and replied, _“Vermis sum_—I am a worm.”
“A worm of the earth in a carriage?” growled the conventionary.
It was the conventionary’s turn to be arrogant, and the Bishop’s to be
humble.