บทที่ บทที่ 2 · M. MYRIEL

In 1815, M. Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D—— He was

an old man of about seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see

of D—— since 1806.

Although this detail has no connection whatever with the real substance

of what we are about to relate, it will not be superfluous, if merely

for the sake of exactness in all points, to mention here the various

rumors and remarks which had been in circulation about him from the

very moment when he arrived in the diocese. True or false, that which

is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and

above all in their destinies, as that which they do. M. Myriel was the

son of a councillor of the Parliament of Aix; hence he belonged to the

nobility of the bar. It was said that his father, destining him to be

the heir of his own post, had married him at a very early age, eighteen

or twenty, in accordance with a custom which is rather widely prevalent

in parliamentary families. In spite of this marriage, however, it was

said that Charles Myriel created a great deal of talk. He was well

formed, though rather short in stature, elegant, graceful, intelligent;

the whole of the first portion of his life had been devoted to the

world and to gallantry.

The Revolution came; events succeeded each other with precipitation;

the parliamentary families, decimated, pursued, hunted down, were

dispersed. M. Charles Myriel emigrated to Italy at the very beginning

of the Revolution. There his wife died of a malady of the chest, from

which she had long suffered. He had no children. What took place next

in the fate of M. Myriel? The ruin of the French society of the olden

days, the fall of his own family, the tragic spectacles of ’93, which

were, perhaps, even more alarming to the emigrants who viewed them from

a distance, with the magnifying powers of terror,—did these cause the

ideas of renunciation and solitude to germinate in him? Was he, in the

midst of these distractions, these affections which absorbed his life,

suddenly smitten with one of those mysterious and terrible blows which

sometimes overwhelm, by striking to his heart, a man whom public

catastrophes would not shake, by striking at his existence and his

fortune? No one could have told: all that was known was, that when he

returned from Italy he was a priest.

In 1804, M. Myriel was the Curé of B—— [Brignolles]. He was already

advanced in years, and lived in a very retired manner.

About the epoch of the coronation, some petty affair connected with his

curacy—just what, is not precisely known—took him to Paris. Among other

powerful persons to whom he went to solicit aid for his parishioners

was M. le Cardinal Fesch. One day, when the Emperor had come to visit

his uncle, the worthy Curé, who was waiting in the anteroom, found

himself present when His Majesty passed. Napoleon, on finding himself

observed with a certain curiosity by this old man, turned round and

said abruptly:—

“Who is this good man who is staring at me?”

“Sire,” said M. Myriel, “you are looking at a good man, and I at a

great man. Each of us can profit by it.”

That very evening, the Emperor asked the Cardinal the name of the Curé,

and some time afterwards M. Myriel was utterly astonished to learn that

he had been appointed Bishop of D——

What truth was there, after all, in the stories which were invented as

to the early portion of M. Myriel’s life? No one knew. Very few

families had been acquainted with the Myriel family before the

Revolution.

M. Myriel had to undergo the fate of every newcomer in a little town,

where there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think.

He was obliged to undergo it although he was a bishop, and because he

was a bishop. But after all, the rumors with which his name was

connected were rumors only,—noise, sayings, words; less than

words—_palabres_, as the energetic language of the South expresses it.

However that may be, after nine years of episcopal power and of

residence in D——, all the stories and subjects of conversation which

engross petty towns and petty people at the outset had fallen into

profound oblivion. No one would have dared to mention them; no one

would have dared to recall them.

M. Myriel had arrived at D—— accompanied by an elderly spinster,

Mademoiselle Baptistine, who was his sister, and ten years his junior.

Their only domestic was a female servant of the same age as

Mademoiselle Baptistine, and named Madame Magloire, who, after having

been _the servant of M. le Curé_, now assumed the double title of maid

to Mademoiselle and housekeeper to Monseigneur.

Mademoiselle Baptistine was a long, pale, thin, gentle creature; she

realized the ideal expressed by the word “respectable”; for it seems

that a woman must needs be a mother in order to be venerable. She had

never been pretty; her whole life, which had been nothing but a

succession of holy deeds, had finally conferred upon her a sort of

pallor and transparency; and as she advanced in years she had acquired

what may be called the beauty of goodness. What had been leanness in

her youth had become transparency in her maturity; and this diaphaneity

allowed the angel to be seen. She was a soul rather than a virgin. Her

person seemed made of a shadow; there was hardly sufficient body to

provide for sex; a little matter enclosing a light; large eyes forever

drooping;—a mere pretext for a soul’s remaining on the earth.

Madame Magloire was a little, fat, white old woman, corpulent and

bustling; always out of breath,—in the first place, because of her

activity, and in the next, because of her asthma.

On his arrival, M. Myriel was installed in the episcopal palace with

the honors required by the Imperial decrees, which class a bishop

immediately after a major-general. The mayor and the president paid the

first call on him, and he, in turn, paid the first call on the general

and the prefect.

The installation over, the town waited to see its bishop at work.