He was gentle and indulgent on these tours of office, preaching less than he talked. He treated no virtue as though it were beyond ordinary reach, nor did he use far-fetched reasoning and examples. To the people of a district which dealt harshly with its poor he would quote the example of their neighbours. ‘Take the people of Briançon. They allow the needy, the widows and orphans, to cut their hay three days earlier than the rest. When their homes are in ruins they repair them for nothing. And so that is a region blessed by God. In the past hundred years they have not had a single murder.’
To villages over-intent upon yield and profit he said: ‘Take the people of Embrun. If at harvest-time the father of a family is left single-handed, with his sons in the army and his daughters in service in the town, or if he is sick or disabled, the priest mentions the fact in his sermon; and on Sunday, after Mass, all the people of the village, men, women, and children, go to help him with his harvesting and carry the straw and grain into his barn.’ To families at odds over questions of money and inheritance he said: ‘Take the hill-people of Devoluy, a region so bleak that the nightingale is not heard there once in fifty years. When the father dies the sons go elsewhere to seek their fortune, leaving the property to the daughters so that they may find husbands.’ In districts much given to litigation, where the farmers wasted their substance on official documents, he said: ‘Take the peasants in the Queyras valley, three thousand souls. I tell you, it is like a little republic. They have no judge or bailiff. The mayor does everything. He apportions the taxes, from each according to his means; he resolves quarrels, divides patrimonies, delivers judgement, all without charge. He is obeyed because he is a just man among simple people.’ And he also cited the example of Queyras in villages where there was no schoolmaster: ‘Do you know what they do? Since a hamlet of ten or fifteen dwellings cannot afford a schoolmaster they have teachers paid by the valley as a whole who go from village to village, spending a week here and ten days there. These teachers also visit the fairs, as I myself have seen. You may recognize them by the quills stuck in their hatbands. Those who only teach reading wear a single quill, those who teach reading and arithmetic wear two quills, and the teachers of reading, arithmetic and Latin wear three. Those last are very learned men. But how shameful it is to be ignorant! You should do as they do in Queyras.’
That was how he talked, gravely and paternally, inventing parables when no example came to hand, going straight to the point with little phrase-making and frequent imagery, using Christ’s own eloquence, persuaded and persuading.
IV
Works matching words
His conversation was friendly and light-hearted. He put himself on the level of the two old women who shared his life, and when he laughed it was the laughter of a schoolboy.
Mme Magloire was pleased to address him as Your Greatness. On one occasion he rose from his armchair to get a book which was on a top shelf. He was short in stature and could not reach it. ‘Mme Magloire,’ he said, ‘will you be so good as to fetch a chair. My greatness does not extend so high.’
A distant connection, the Comtesse de Lo, seldom missed an opportunity, when she was with him, of talking about what she called the ‘hopes’ of her three sons. She had several very aged relatives of whom her sons were the natural heirs. The youngest was due to inherit an income of a hundred thousand francs from a great-aunt; the second was the adopted heir of his uncle, a duke; and the oldest was direct heir to a peerage. As a rule the bishop listened in silence to these blameless and forgivable maternal effusions. But on one occasion he appeared more abstracted than usual. ‘For Heaven’s sake, Cousin,’ said the lady in mild exasperation, ‘what are you thinking about?’ – ‘I am thinking,’ said the bishop, ‘of the words uttered by, I believe, St Augustine – “Put your hope in Him who has no successor.”’
On another occasion, upon receiving a letter informing him of the death of one of the local gentry which set forth in great detail the deceased’s many titles of nobility and those of his family, he exclaimed: ‘Death has a broad back! What a great load of honours it can be made to bear, and how assiduous are the minds of men that they can use even the tomb in the service of vanity.’
He had recourse at times to gentle raillery in which there was nearly always a serious note. During one Lent a youthful vicar came to preach in the cathedral at Digne and did so with some eloquence. His theme was charity. He urged the rich to give to the poor so that they might escape the torments of Hell, which he depicted in hideous terms, and attain to Paradise, which he made to sound altogether delightful. Among the congregation was a Monsieur Geborand, a wealthy and grasping retired merchant, who had made a fortune in the cloth-trade but had never been known to give anything to the poor. It was observed, after this sermon, that on Sundays he handed a single sou to the old beggar-women clustered outside the cathedral door. There were six of them to share it. Noting the event, the bishop smiled and said to his sister: ‘Monsieur Geborand is buying a penny-worth of Paradise.’
He was not to be deterred in his labours for charity even by a direct refusal, and he found things to say which lingered in the mind. Among the company in a fashionable salon where he went to solicit alms was the Marquis de Champtercier, a rich, elderly miser who contrived to be both ultra-royalist and ultra-Voltairian. The type existed in those days. The bishop touched him on the arm and said, ‘Monsieur le Marquis, you must indeed give me something.’ The marquis turned away, saying curtly, ‘Monseigneur, I have my own poor.’ – ‘Give them to me,’ said the bishop.
He preached the following sermon in the cathedral:
‘My brothers and friends, there are in France thirteen hundred and twenty thousand peasant cottages which have only three outlets, eighteen hundred and seventeen thousand which have only two, a door and one window, and three hundred and forty-six thousand which have only a door. This is due to something known as the tax on doors and windows. Consider the fate of poor families, old women and young children, living in those hovels, the fevers and other maladies! God gives air to mankind and the law sells it. I do not assail the law but I give thanks to God. In Isère, in Var, and in the upper and lower Alps the peasants do not even possess barrows but carry the dung on their backs. They have no candles but burn twigs and lengths of rope steeped in resin. That is what happens throughout the highlands of Dauphiné. They make bread every six months, baking it over a fire of dried dung. In winter they break the loaves with a hatchet and soak the bread for twenty-four hours before it can be eaten. My brothers, be merciful. Consider the sufferings of those around you.’
Having been born in Provence he had had no difficulty in familiarizing himself with the dialects of the Midi, whether of Languedoc or the lower Alps or Upper Dauphiné. This pleased the people and had greatly helped to bring him close to them. He was at home in the peasant’s hut and in the mountains. He could expound great matters in the simplest terms, and speaking all tongues could find his way to all hearts.
For the rest, he was the same to all men, the fashionable world and the ordinary people. He judged nothing in haste, or without taking account of the circumstances. He said, ‘Let me see how the fault arose.’ Being, as he said with a smile, himself a former sinner, he lacked all sactimoniousness, and without self-righteous flourishes preached in forthright terms a doctrine which may be summed up as follows:
‘The flesh is at once man’s burden and his temptation. He bears it and yields to it. He must keep watch over it and restrain it, and obey it only in the last resort. Such obedience may be a fault, but it is a venial fault. It is a fall, but a fall on to the knees which may end in prayer. To be a saint is to be an exception; to be a true man is the rule. Err, fail, sin if you must, but be upright. To sin as little as possible is the law for men; to sin not at all is a dream for angels. All earthly things are subject to sin; it is like the force of gravity.’
Any ill-considered outburst of popular indignation would cause him to smile. ‘It appears,’ he would say, ‘that this is
a crime which everyone commits. See how outraged hypocrisy hurries to cover itself!’
He was indulgent to women and to the poor, oppressed by the weight of society. ‘The faults of women, children and servants,’ he said, ‘and of the weak, the poor and the ignorant, are the faults of husbands, fathers and masters, and of the strong, the rich and the learned.’ He also said: ‘Teach the ignorant as much as you can. Society is to blame for not giving free education; it is responsible for the darkness it creates. The soul in darkness sins, but the real sinner is he who caused the darkness.’
As we can see, he had his own way of looking at things. I think he derived it from the Gospel.
He listened one day to a drawing-room discussion of a crime which was then under interrogation and was shortly to be tried. For love of a woman and the child she had borne him a wretched man, at the end of his resources, had coined false currency. Counterfeiting at that time was punishable by death. The woman had been arrested when attempting to pass the first coin the man had forged. She was detained, but there was no evidence except against her, and she alone could destroy her lover by testifying against him. She denied everything and persisted in her denial. The Public Prosecutor then advised a plan. By the cunning use of fragments of letters he persuaded the unhappy woman that her lover had been unfaithful to her, and in a fit of jealousy she divulged everything. The man was doomed. Both would be tried and he would be convicted. The tale was told, and everyone was in raptures over the artfulness of the Prosecutor, who had brought the truth to light and caused justice to be done by appealing to jealousy and the instinct of revenge. The bishop listened to it all in silence and finally asked:
‘Where are this man and woman to be tried?’
‘At the Assizes in Aix.’
‘And where will the Prosecutor be tried?’
A tragic event occurred in Digne. A man was sentenced to death for murder. He was a man, neither wholly educated nor illiterate, who had been a fairground performer and public letter-writer. His trial had aroused great interest in the town. On the even of the day fixed for his execution the prison almoner fell ill. A priest was needed to solace the condemned man’s last moments. The curé was sent for, but it seems that he refused to come, saying that it was no concern of his, that he had had nothing to do with the mountebank in question, that he was himself unwell and that in any case it was not his place. When this was reported to the bishop he said: ‘The curé is right. It is not his place but mine.’
He went at once to the prison and to the ‘mountebank’s’ cell, where he addressed him by name, took his hand and talked to him. He spent the rest of the day and the night with him, without food or sleep, praying to God for his soul and exhorting the man to have regard for it himself. He repeated the greatest truths, which are the simplest. He was the man’s father, brother, friend; his bishop only to bless him. The man had been about to die in utter despair. Death to him was an abyss, and trembling upon that awful threshold he recoiled in horror. He was not so ignorant as to be wholly unmoved. The profound shock of his condemnation had in some sort pierced the veil which separates us from the mystery of things and which we call life. Peering beyond this world through those fateful rents he saw nothing but darkness. The bishop caused him to see light.
When they came for the man next day the bishop went with him showing himself to the crowd at the side of the fettered wretch, in his purple hood and with the episcopal cross hanging from his neck. He went with him in the tumbril and on to the scaffold. The man who had been so desolate the day before was now radiant. His soul was at peace and he hoped for God. The bishop kissed him and said when the knife was about to fall: ‘Whom man kills God restores to life; whom the brothers pursue the Father redeems. Pray and believe and go onward into life. Your Father is there.’ When he came down from the scaffold there was something in his gaze which caused the people to draw back. No one could have said which was the more striking, his pallor or his serenity. Returning to the humble abode which he smilingly called his palace, he said to his sister: ‘I have been performing one of the duties of my office.’
Since the most sublime acts are often the least understood, there were people in the town who said it was all affectation. But this was drawing-room comment. The common people, who do not look for shabbiness where none exists, were deeply moved.
As for the bishop himself, the spectacle of the guillotine caused him a shock from which he was slow to recover.
A scaffold, when it is erected and prepared, has indeed a profoundly disturbing effect. We may remain more or less open-minded on the subject of the death penalty, indisposed to commit ourselves, so long as we have not seen a guillotine with our own eyes. But to do so is to be so shaken that we are obliged to take our stand for or against. Joseph de Maistre approved of the death penalty, Cesar de Beccaria abominated it. The guillotine is the ultimate expression of Law, and its name is vengeance; it is not neutral, nor does it allow us to remain neutral. He who sees it shudders in the most confounding dismay. All social questions achieve their finality around that blade. The scaffold is an image. It is not merely a framework, a machine, a lifeless mechanism of wood, iron, and rope. It is as though it were a being having its own dark purpose, as though the framework saw, the machine listened, the mechanism understood; as though that arrangement of wood and iron and rope expressed a will. In the hideous picture which its presence evokes it seems to be most terribly a part of what it does. It is the executioner’s accomplice; it consumes, devouring flesh and drinking blood. It is a kind of monster created by the judge and the craftsman; a spectre seeming to live an awful life born of the death it deals.
This was the effect it had upon the bishop, and on the day following the execution, and for many days after, he seemed to be overwhelmed. The almost violent serenity of the fateful moment vanished: he was haunted by the ghost of social justice. Whereas ordinarily he returned from the performance of his duties with a glow of satisfaction, he seemed now to be assailed with a sense of guilt. There were times when he talked to himself, muttering gloomy monologues under his breath. This is a fragment that his sister overheard: ‘I did not know that it was so monstrous. It is wrong to become so absorbed in Divine Law that one is no longer aware of human law. Death belongs only to God. What right have men to lay hands on a thing so unknown?’
Gradually those impressions faded and perhaps died away altogether. But it was observed that the bishop thenceforth avoided passing the place of executions.
M. Myriel could be summoned at any hour to the bedside of the sick and the dying. He did not forget that this was his first and greatest duty. Widowed and orphaned families had no need to send for him, he came of his own accord. He would sit for hours in silence with the man who had lost the wife he loved or the mother who had lost her child. But if he knew when to keep silent he also knew when to speak. The wisest of comforters, he did not seek to banish sorrow in forgetfulness but to ennoble and dignify it with hope. ‘Take care how you view the dead,’ he said. ‘Do not think of that which rots. Look steadily and you will see the living light of your beloved in the bosom of Heaven.’ He knew that faith gives health. He sought to counsel and soothe the despairing by pointing to the resigned, and to transform the grief which sees only a pit into the grief which sees a star.
V
How Monseigneur Bienvenu made his cassocks last too long
M. Myriel’s private life was shaped by the same thoughts as his life in public. To anyone privileged to witness it at first hand, the self-imposed austerity of the Bishop of Digne was at once impressive and charming.
Like all old men and most thinkers, he slept little; but his brief slumbers were profound. In the morning, he spent an hour in meditation and then said Mass, either in the cathedral or in his oratory. Having done so he breakfasted on rye bread soaked in the milk of his own cows. Then he started work.
A bishop is a busy man. He has to see the clerk of the diocese every day, and on most days one or more of his vicars. He has
to preside over meetings, grant dispensations, cast an eye over the flow of church publications, and attend to countless parochial affairs. He has to write pastoral letters, approve sermons, and resolve differences between curés and mayors, besides conducting a correspondence which is both clerical and administrative, with the State on one hand and the Holy See on the other. In short, he has a thousand matters to attend to.
Such free time as these occupations (as well as the daily offices and his breviary), allowed him, M. Myriel devoted to the needy and afflicted; and in the remaining time he worked. That is to say, he dug his garden or read and wrote, and for him both kinds of work bore the same name; both he called gardening. ‘The spirit is a garden,’ he said.
He dined at midday, a meal little different from his breakfast.
At about two o’clock, if the weather was fine, he would set out on foot through the countryside or the streets of the town, often visiting the humblest homes. He was to be seen walking alone with his head bowed in thought, leaning on his long stick, wrapped in a very warm quilted purple cloak, with purple stockings and heavy shoes, and wearing on his head the flat tricorn hat with gilt tassels hanging from its points.
There was a stir wherever he went, as though with his very passing he brought warmth and light. Children and old men came to the doorstep to greet him as they might greet the sunshine. Those in need were shown the way to his dwelling. He blessed and was blessed. Now and then he stopped to talk to the children and smile at their mothers. He visited the poor when he had money; when he had none he visited the rich.
Since he wore his cassocks until they were threadbare and did not wish the fact to be noticed, he never went into the town except in that padded cloak, which in summer was rather uncomfortable.
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