Les Misérables
The Bishop resumed mildly:—
“So be it, sir. But explain to me how my carriage, which is a few paces
off behind the trees yonder, how my good table and the moor-hens which
I eat on Friday, how my twenty-five thousand francs income, how my
palace and my lackeys prove that clemency is not a duty, and that ’93
was not inexorable.”
The conventionary passed his hand across his brow, as though to sweep
away a cloud.
“Before replying to you,” he said, “I beseech you to pardon me. I have
just committed a wrong, sir. You are at my house, you are my guest, I
owe you courtesy. You discuss my ideas, and it becomes me to confine
myself to combating your arguments. Your riches and your pleasures are
advantages which I hold over you in the debate; but good taste dictates
that I shall not make use of them. I promise you to make no use of them
in the future.”
“I thank you,” said the Bishop.
G—— resumed.
“Let us return to the explanation which you have asked of me. Where
were we? What were you saying to me? That ’93 was inexorable?”
“Inexorable; yes,” said the Bishop. “What think you of Marat clapping
his hands at the guillotine?”
“What think you of Bossuet chanting the _Te Deum_ over the
dragonnades?”
The retort was a harsh one, but it attained its mark with the
directness of a point of steel. The Bishop quivered under it; no reply
occurred to him; but he was offended by this mode of alluding to
Bossuet. The best of minds will have their fetiches, and they sometimes
feel vaguely wounded by the want of respect of logic.
The conventionary began to pant; the asthma of the agony which is
mingled with the last breaths interrupted his voice; still, there was a
perfect lucidity of soul in his eyes. He went on:—
“Let me say a few words more in this and that direction; I am willing.
Apart from the Revolution, which, taken as a whole, is an immense human
affirmation, ’93 is, alas! a rejoinder. You think it inexorable, sir;
but what of the whole monarchy, sir? Carrier is a bandit; but what name
do you give to Montrevel? Fouquier-Tainville is a rascal; but what is
your opinion as to Lamoignon-Bâville? Maillard is terrible; but
Saulx-Tavannes, if you please? Duchêne senior is ferocious; but what
epithet will you allow me for the elder Letellier? Jourdan-Coupe-Tetê
is a monster; but not so great a one as M. the Marquis de Louvois. Sir,
sir, I am sorry for Marie Antoinette, archduchess and queen; but I am
also sorry for that poor Huguenot woman, who, in 1685, under Louis the
Great, sir, while with a nursing infant, was bound, naked to the waist,
to a stake, and the child kept at a distance; her breast swelled with
milk and her heart with anguish; the little one, hungry and pale,
beheld that breast and cried and agonized; the executioner said to the
woman, a mother and a nurse, ‘Abjure!’ giving her her choice between
the death of her infant and the death of her conscience. What say you
to that torture of Tantalus as applied to a mother? Bear this well in
mind sir: the French Revolution had its reasons for existence; its
wrath will be absolved by the future; its result is the world made
better. From its most terrible blows there comes forth a caress for the
human race. I abridge, I stop, I have too much the advantage; moreover,
I am dying.”
And ceasing to gaze at the Bishop, the conventionary concluded his
thoughts in these tranquil words:—
“Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are
over, this fact is recognized,—that the human race has been treated
harshly, but that it has progressed.”
The conventionary doubted not that he had successively conquered all
the inmost intrenchments of the Bishop. One remained, however, and from
this intrenchment, the last resource of Monseigneur Bienvenu’s
resistance, came forth this reply, wherein appeared nearly all the
harshness of the beginning:—
“Progress should believe in God. Good cannot have an impious servitor.
He who is an atheist is but a bad leader for the human race.”
The former representative of the people made no reply. He was seized
with a fit of trembling. He looked towards heaven, and in his glance a
tear gathered slowly. When the eyelid was full, the tear trickled down
his livid cheek, and he said, almost in a stammer, quite low, and to
himself, while his eyes were plunged in the depths:—
“O thou! O ideal! Thou alone existest!”
The Bishop experienced an indescribable shock.
After a pause, the old man raised a finger heavenward and said:—
“The infinite is. He is there. If the infinite had no person, person
would be without limit; it would not be infinite; in other words, it
would not exist. There is, then, an _I_. That _I_ of the infinite is
God.”
The dying man had pronounced these last words in a loud voice, and with
the shiver of ecstasy, as though he beheld some one. When he had
spoken, his eyes closed. The effort had exhausted him. It was evident
that he had just lived through in a moment the few hours which had been
left to him. That which he had said brought him nearer to him who is in
death. The supreme moment was approaching.
The Bishop understood this; time pressed; it was as a priest that he
had come: from extreme coldness he had passed by degrees to extreme
emotion; he gazed at those closed eyes, he took that wrinkled, aged and
ice-cold hand in his, and bent over the dying man.
“This hour is the hour of God. Do you not think that it would be
regrettable if we had met in vain?”
The conventionary opened his eyes again. A gravity mingled with gloom
was imprinted on his countenance.
“Bishop,” said he, with a slowness which probably arose more from his
dignity of soul than from the failing of his strength, “I have passed
my life in meditation, study, and contemplation. I was sixty years of
age when my country called me and commanded me to concern myself with
its affairs. I obeyed. Abuses existed, I combated them; tyrannies
existed, I destroyed them; rights and principles existed, I proclaimed
and confessed them. Our territory was invaded, I defended it; France
was menaced, I offered my breast. I was not rich; I am poor. I have
been one of the masters of the state; the vaults of the treasury were
encumbered with specie to such a degree that we were forced to shore up
the walls, which were on the point of bursting beneath the weight of
gold and silver; I dined in Dead Tree Street, at twenty-two sous. I
have succored the oppressed, I have comforted the suffering. I tore the
cloth from the altar, it is true; but it was to bind up the wounds of
my country. I have always upheld the march forward of the human race,
forward towards the light, and I have sometimes resisted progress
without pity. I have, when the occasion offered, protected my own
adversaries, men of your profession. And there is at Peteghem, in
Flanders, at the very spot where the Merovingian kings had their summer
palace, a convent of Urbanists, the Abbey of Sainte Claire en Beaulieu,
which I saved in 1793. I have done my duty according to my powers, and
all the good that I was able. After which, I was hunted down, pursued,
persecuted, blackened, jeered at, scorned, cursed, proscribed. For many
years past, I with my white hair have been conscious that many people
think they have the right to despise me; to the poor ignorant masses I
present the visage of one damned. And I accept this isolation of
hatred, without hating any one myself. Now I am eighty-six years old; I
am on the point of death. What is it that you have come to ask of me?”
_“Your blessing,”_ said the Bishop.
And he knelt down.
When the Bishop raised his head again, the face of the conventionary
had become august. He had just expired.
The Bishop returned home, deeply absorbed in thoughts which cannot be
known to us. He passed the whole night in prayer. On the following
morning some bold and curious persons attempted to speak to him about
member of the Convention G——; he contented himself with pointing
heavenward.
From that moment he redoubled his tenderness and brotherly feeling
towards all children and sufferers.
Any allusion to “that old wretch of a G——” caused him to fall into a
singular preoccupation. No one could say that the passage of that soul
before his, and the reflection of that grand conscience upon his, did
not count for something in his approach to perfection.
This “pastoral visit” naturally furnished an occasion for a murmur of
comment in all the little local coteries.
“Was the bedside of such a dying man as that the proper place for a
bishop? There was evidently no conversion to be expected. All those
revolutionists are backsliders. Then why go there? What was there to be
seen there? He must have been very curious indeed to see a soul carried
off by the devil.”
One day a dowager of the impertinent variety who thinks herself
spiritual, addressed this sally to him, “Monseigneur, people are
inquiring when Your Greatness will receive the red cap!”—“Oh! oh!
that’s a coarse color,” replied the Bishop. “It is lucky that those who
despise it in a cap revere it in a hat.”
CHAPTER XI—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 curé.” 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