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LES
MISÉRABLES
By Victor Hugo

Translated by Isabel F.
Hapgood

Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.

No. 13, Astor Place
New York

Copyright 1887

LES
MISÉRABLES

VOLUME I.—
FANTINE.
 PREFACE
So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damnation
pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilization of earth, and
adding the element of human fate to divine destiny; so long as the three great problems
of the century—the degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman
through hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light—are unsolved; so long
as social asphyxia is possible in any part of the world;—in other words, and with a still
wider significance, so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature
of Les Misérables cannot fail to be of use.
HAUTEVILLE HOUSE, 1862.

FANTINE

BOOK FIRST—A
JUST MAN

CHAPTER I—M.
MYRIEL
In 1815, M. Charles-Francois-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.

CHAPTER II—M.
MYRIEL
 BECOMES M.
WELCOME
The episcopal palace of D—— adjoins the hospital.
The episcopal palace was a huge and beautiful house, built of stone at the beginning
of the last century by M. Henri Puget, Doctor of Theology of the Faculty of Paris, Abbé
of Simore, who had been Bishop of D—— in 1712. This palace was a genuine
seignorial residence. Everything about it had a grand air,—the apartments of the Bishop,
the drawing-rooms, the chambers, the principal courtyard, which was very large, with
walks encircling it under arcades in the old Florentine fashion, and gardens planted with
magnificent trees. In the dining-room, a long and superb gallery which was situated on
the ground-floor and opened on the gardens, M. Henri Puget had entertained in state,
on July 29, 1714, My Lords Charles Brulart de Genlis, archbishop; Prince d'Embrun;
Antoine de Mesgrigny, the capuchin, Bishop of Grasse; Philippe de Vendome, Grand
Prior of France, Abbé of Saint Honore de Lerins; Francois de Berton de Crillon, bishop,
Baron de Vence; Cesar de Sabran de Forcalquier, bishop, Seignor of Glandeve; and
Jean Soanen, Priest of the Oratory, preacher in ordinary to the king, bishop, Seignor of
Senez. The portraits of these seven reverend personages decorated this apartment; and
this memorable date, the 29th of July, 1714, was there engraved in letters of gold on a
table of white marble.
The hospital was a low and narrow building of a single story, with a small garden.
Three days after his arrival, the Bishop visited the hospital. The visit ended, he had
the director requested to be so good as to come to his house.
"Monsieur the director of the hospital," said he to him, "how many sick people have
you at the present moment?"
"Twenty-six, Monseigneur."
"That was the number which I counted," said the Bishop.
"The beds," pursued the director, "are very much crowded against each other."
"That is what I observed."
"The halls are nothing but rooms, and it is with difficulty that the air can be changed
in them."
"So it seems to me."
"And then, when there is a ray of sun, the garden is very small for the convalescents."
"That was what I said to myself."
"In case of epidemics,—we have had the typhus fever this year; we had the sweating
sickness two years ago, and a hundred patients at times,—we know not what to do."
"That is the thought which occurred to me."
 "What would you have, Monseigneur?" said the director. "One must resign one's
self."
This conversation took place in the gallery dining-room on the ground-floor.
The Bishop remained silent for a moment; then he turned abruptly to the director of
the hospital.
"Monsieur," said he, "how many beds do you think this hall alone would hold?"
"Monseigneur's dining-room?" exclaimed the stupefied director.
The Bishop cast a glance round the apartment, and seemed to be taking measures and
calculations with his eyes.
"It would hold full twenty beds," said he, as though speaking to himself. Then, raising
his voice:—
"Hold, Monsieur the director of the hospital, I will tell you something. There is
evidently a mistake here. There are thirty-six of you, in five or six small rooms. There
are three of us here, and we have room for sixty. There is some mistake, I tell you; you
have my house, and I have yours. Give me back my house; you are at home here."
On the following day the thirty-six patients were installed in the Bishop's palace, and
the Bishop was settled in the hospital.
M. Myriel had no property, his family having been ruined by the Revolution. His
sister was in receipt of a yearly income of five hundred francs, which sufficed for her
personal wants at the vicarage. M. Myriel received from the State, in his quality of
bishop, a salary of fifteen thousand francs. On the very day when he took up his abode
in the hospital, M. Myriel settled on the disposition of this sum once for all, in the
following manner. We transcribe here a note made by his own hand:—
NOTE ON THE REGULATION OF MY HOUSEHOLD EXPENSES.
For the little seminary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,500 livres
Society of the mission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 "
For the Lazarists of Montdidier . . . . . . . . . . 100 "
Seminary for foreign missions in Paris . . . . . . 200 "
Congregation of the Holy Spirit . . . . . . . . . . 150 "
Religious establishments of the Holy Land . . . . . 100 "
Charitable maternity societies . . . . . . . . . . 300 "
Extra, for that of Arles . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 "
Work for the amelioration of prisons . . . . . . . 400 "
Work for the relief and delivery of prisoners . . . 500 "
To liberate fathers of families incarcerated for debt 1,000 "
Addition to the salary of the poor teachers of the
diocese . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2,000 "
Public granary of the Hautes-Alpes . . . . . . . . 100 "
Congregation of the ladies of D——, of Manosque, and of
Sisteron, for the gratuitous instruction of poor
girls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,500 "
For the poor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6,000 "
My personal expenses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,000 "
———
Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15,000 "
 M. Myriel made no change in this arrangement during the entire period that he
occupied the see of D—— As has been seen, he called it regulating his household
expenses.
This arrangement was accepted with absolute submission by Mademoiselle
Baptistine. This holy woman regarded Monseigneur of D—— as at one and the same
time her brother and her bishop, her friend according to the flesh and her superior
according to the Church. She simply loved and venerated him. When he spoke, she
bowed; when he acted, she yielded her adherence. Their only servant, Madame
Magloire, grumbled a little. It will be observed that Monsieur the Bishop had reserved
for himself only one thousand livres, which, added to the pension of Mademoiselle
Baptistine, made fifteen hundred francs a year. On these fifteen hundred francs these
two old women and the old man subsisted.
And when a village curate came to D——, the Bishop still found means to entertain
him, thanks to the severe economy of Madame Magloire, and to the intelligent
administration of Mademoiselle Baptistine.
One day, after he had been in D—— about three months, the Bishop said:—
"And still I am quite cramped with it all!"
"I should think so!" exclaimed Madame Magloire. "Monseigneur has not even
claimed the allowance which the department owes him for the expense of his carriage
in town, and for his journeys about the diocese. It was customary for bishops in former
days."
"Hold!" cried the Bishop, "you are quite right, Madame Magloire."
And he made his demand.
Some time afterwards the General Council took this demand under consideration, and
voted him an annual sum of three thousand francs, under this heading: Allowance to M.
the Bishop for expenses of carriage, expenses of posting, and expenses of pastoral visits.
This provoked a great outcry among the local burgesses; and a senator of the Empire,
a former member of the Council of the Five Hundred which favored the 18 Brumaire,
and who was provided with a magnificent senatorial office in the vicinity of the town
of D——, wrote to M. Bigot de Preameneu, the minister of public worship, a very angry
and confidential note on the subject, from which we extract these authentic lines:—
"Expenses of carriage? What can be done with it in a town of less than four thousand
inhabitants? Expenses of journeys? What is the use of these trips, in the first place?
Next, how can the posting be accomplished in these mountainous parts? There are no
roads. No one travels otherwise than on horseback. Even the bridge between Durance
and Chateau-Arnoux can barely support ox-teams. These priests are all thus, greedy and
avaricious. This man played the good priest when he first came. Now he does like the
rest; he must have a carriage and a posting-chaise, he must have luxuries, like the
bishops of the olden days. Oh, all this priesthood! Things will not go well, M. le Comte,
until the Emperor has freed us from these black-capped rascals. Down with the Pope!
[Matters were getting embroiled with Rome.] For my part, I am for Caesar alone." Etc.,
etc.
On the other hand, this affair afforded great delight to Madame Magloire. "Good,"
said she to Mademoiselle Baptistine; "Monseigneur began with other people, but he has
had to wind up with himself, after all. He has regulated all his charities. Now here are
three thousand francs for us! At last!"
That same evening the Bishop wrote out and handed to his sister a memorandum
conceived in the following terms:—
EXPENSES OF CARRIAGE AND CIRCUIT.
For furnishing meat soup to the patients in the hospital. 1,500
livres
For the maternity charitable society of Aix . . . . . . . 250 "
For the maternity charitable society of Draguignan . . . 250 "
For foundlings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 500 "
For orphans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 500 "
——-
Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3,000 "
Such was M. Myriel's budget.
As for the chance episcopal perquisites, the fees for marriage bans, dispensations,
private baptisms, sermons, benedictions, of churches or chapels, marriages, etc., the
Bishop levied them on the wealthy with all the more asperity, since he bestowed them
on the needy.
After a time, offerings of money flowed in. Those who had and those who lacked
knocked at M. Myriel's door,—the latter in search of the alms which the former came
to deposit. In less than a year the Bishop had become the treasurer of all benevolence
and the cashier of all those in distress. Considerable sums of money passed through his
hands, but nothing could induce him to make any change whatever in his mode of life,
or add anything superfluous to his bare necessities.
Far from it. As there is always more wretchedness below than there is brotherhood
above, all was given away, so to speak, before it was received. It was like water on dry
soil; no matter how much money he received, he never had any. Then he stripped
himself.
The usage being that bishops shall announce their baptismal names at the head of
their charges and their pastoral letters, the poor people of the country-side had selected,
with a sort of affectionate instinct, among the names and prenomens of their bishop,
that which had a meaning for them; and they never called him anything except
Monseigneur Bienvenu [Welcome]. We will follow their example, and will also call
him thus when we have occasion to name him. Moreover, this appellation pleased him.
"I like that name," said he. "Bienvenu makes up for the Monseigneur."
We do not claim that the portrait herewith presented is probable; we confine ourselves
to stating that it resembles the original.
 CHAPTER III—A
HARD BISHOPRIC
FOR A GOOD
BISHOP
The Bishop did not omit his pastoral visits because he had converted his carriage into
alms. The diocese of D—— is a fatiguing one. There are very few plains and a great
many mountains; hardly any roads, as we have just seen; thirty-two curacies, forty-one
vicarships, and two hundred and eighty-five auxiliary chapels. To visit all these is quite
a task.
The Bishop managed to do it. He went on foot when it was in the neighborhood, in a
tilted spring-cart when it was on the plain, and on a donkey in the mountains. The two
old women accompanied him. When the trip was too hard for them, he went alone.
One day he arrived at Senez, which is an ancient episcopal city. He was mounted on
an ass. His purse, which was very dry at that moment, did not permit him any other
equipage. The mayor of the town came to receive him at the gate of the town, and
watched him dismount from his ass, with scandalized eyes. Some of the citizens were
laughing around him. "Monsieur the Mayor," said the Bishop, "and Messieurs Citizens,
I perceive that I shock you. You think it very arrogant in a poor priest to ride an animal
which was used by Jesus Christ. I have done so from necessity, I assure you, and not
from vanity."
In the course of these trips he was kind and indulgent, and talked rather than preached.
He never went far in search of his arguments and his examples. He quoted to the
inhabitants of one district the example of a neighboring district. In the cantons where
they were harsh to the poor, he said: "Look at the people of Briancon! They have
conferred on the poor, on widows and orphans, the right to have their meadows mown
three days in advance of every one else. They rebuild their houses for them gratuitously
when they are ruined. Therefore it is a country which is blessed by God. For a whole
century, there has not been a single murderer among them."
In villages which were greedy for profit and harvest, he said: "Look at the people of
Embrun! If, at the harvest season, the father of a family has his son away on service in
the army, and his daughters at service in the town, and if he is ill and incapacitated, the
cure recommends him to the prayers of the congregation; and on Sunday, after the mass,
all the inhabitants of the village—men, women, and children—go to the poor man's
field and do his harvesting for him, and carry his straw and his grain to his granary." To
families divided by questions of money and inheritance he said: "Look at the
mountaineers of Devolny, a country so wild that the nightingale is not heard there once
in fifty years. Well, when the father of a family dies, the boys go off to seek their
fortunes, leaving the property to the girls, so that they may find husbands." To the
cantons which had a taste for lawsuits, and where the farmers ruined themselves in
stamped paper, he said: "Look at those good peasants in the valley of Queyras! There
are three thousand souls of them. Mon Dieu! it is like a little republic. Neither judge nor
bailiff is known there. The mayor does everything. He allots the imposts, taxes each
person conscientiously, judges quarrels for nothing, divides inheritances without
charge, pronounces sentences gratuitously; and he is obeyed, because he is a just man
among simple men." To villages where he found no schoolmaster, he quoted once more
the people of Queyras: "Do you know how they manage?" he said. "Since a little country
of a dozen or fifteen hearths cannot always support a teacher, they have school-masters
who are paid by the whole valley, who make the round of the villages, spending a week
in this one, ten days in that, and instruct them. These teachers go to the fairs. I have
seen them there. They are to be recognized by the quill pens which they wear in the
cord of their hat. Those who teach reading only have one pen; those who teach reading
and reckoning have two pens; those who teach reading, reckoning, and Latin have three
pens. But what a disgrace to be ignorant! Do like the people of Queyras!"
Thus he discoursed gravely and paternally; in default of examples, he invented
parables, going directly to the point, with few phrases and many images, which
characteristic formed the real eloquence of Jesus Christ. And being convinced himself,
he was persuasive.

CHAPTER IV—
WORKS
CORRESPONDING
TO WORDS
His conversation was gay and affable. He put himself on a level with the two old
women who had passed their lives beside him. When he laughed, it was the laugh of a
schoolboy. Madame Magloire liked to call him Your Grace [Votre Grandeur]. One day
he rose from his arm-chair, and went to his library in search of a book. This book was
on one of the upper shelves. As the bishop was rather short of stature, he could not reach
it. "Madame Magloire," said he, "fetch me a chair. My greatness [grandeur] does not
reach as far as that shelf."
 One of his distant relatives, Madame la Comtesse de Lo, rarely allowed an
opportunity to escape of enumerating, in his presence, what she designated as "the
expectations" of her three sons. She had numerous relatives, who were very old and
near to death, and of whom her sons were the natural heirs. The youngest of the three
was to receive from a grand-aunt a good hundred thousand livres of income; the second
was the heir by entail to the title of the Duke, his uncle; the eldest was to succeed to the
peerage of his grandfather. The Bishop was accustomed to listen in silence to these
innocent and pardonable maternal boasts. On one occasion, however, he appeared to be
more thoughtful than usual, while Madame de Lo was relating once again the details of
all these inheritances and all these "expectations." She interrupted herself impatiently:
"Mon Dieu, cousin! What are you thinking about?" "I am thinking," replied the Bishop,
"of a singular remark, which is to be found, I believe, in St. Augustine,—'Place your
hopes in the man from whom you do not inherit.'"
At another time, on receiving a notification of the decease of a gentleman of the
country-side, wherein not only the dignities of the dead man, but also the feudal and
noble qualifications of all his relatives, spread over an entire page: "What a stout back
Death has!" he exclaimed. "What a strange burden of titles is cheerfully imposed on
him, and how much wit must men have, in order thus to press the tomb into the service
of vanity!"
He was gifted, on occasion, with a gentle raillery, which almost always concealed a
serious meaning. In the course of one Lent, a youthful vicar came to D——, and
preached in the cathedral. He was tolerably eloquent. The subject of his sermon was
charity. He urged the rich to give to the poor, in order to avoid hell, which he depicted
in the most frightful manner of which he was capable, and to win paradise, which he
represented as charming and desirable. Among the audience there was a wealthy retired
merchant, who was somewhat of a usurer, named M. Geborand, who had amassed two
millions in the manufacture of coarse cloth, serges, and woollen galloons. Never in his
whole life had M. Geborand bestowed alms on any poor wretch. After the delivery of
that sermon, it was observed that he gave a sou every Sunday to the poor old beggar-
women at the door of the cathedral. There were six of them to share it. One day the
Bishop caught sight of him in the act of bestowing this charity, and said to his sister,
with a smile, "There is M. Geborand purchasing paradise for a sou."
When it was a question of charity, he was not to be rebuffed even by a refusal, and
on such occasions he gave utterance to remarks which induced reflection. Once he was
begging for the poor in a drawing-room of the town; there was present the Marquis de
Champtercier, a wealthy and avaricious old man, who contrived to be, at one and the
same time, an ultra-royalist and an ultra-Voltairian. This variety of man has actually
existed. When the Bishop came to him, he touched his arm, "You must give me
something, M. le Marquis." The Marquis turned round and answered dryly, "I have poor
people of my own, Monseigneur." "Give them to me," replied the Bishop.
 One day he preached the following sermon in the cathedral:—
"My very dear brethren, my good friends, there are thirteen hundred and twenty
thousand peasants' dwellings in France which have but three openings; eighteen
hundred and seventeen thousand hovels which have but two openings, the door and one
window; and three hundred and forty-six thousand cabins besides which have but one
opening, the door. And this arises from a thing which is called the tax on doors and
windows. Just put poor families, old women and little children, in those buildings, and
behold the fevers and maladies which result! Alas! God gives air to men; the law sells
it to them. I do not blame the law, but I bless God. In the department of the Isere, in the
Var, in the two departments of the Alpes, the Hautes, and the Basses, the peasants have
not even wheelbarrows; they transport their manure on the backs of men; they have no
candles, and they burn resinous sticks, and bits of rope dipped in pitch. That is the state
of affairs throughout the whole of the hilly country of Dauphine. They make bread for
six months at one time; they bake it with dried cow-dung. In the winter they break this
bread up with an axe, and they soak it for twenty-four hours, in order to render it eatable.
My brethren, have pity! behold the suffering on all sides of you!"
Born a Provencal, he easily familiarized himself with the dialect of the south. He said,
"En be! moussu, ses sage?" as in lower Languedoc; "Onte anaras passa?" as in the
Basses-Alpes; "Puerte un bouen moutu embe un bouen fromage grase," as in upper
Dauphine. This pleased the people extremely, and contributed not a little to win him
access to all spirits. He was perfectly at home in the thatched cottage and in the
mountains. He understood how to say the grandest things in the most vulgar of idioms.
As he spoke all tongues, he entered into all hearts.
Moreover, he was the same towards people of the world and towards the lower
classes. He condemned nothing in haste and without taking circumstances into account.
He said, "Examine the road over which the fault has passed."
Being, as he described himself with a smile, an ex-sinner, he had none of the asperities
of austerity, and he professed, with a good deal of distinctness, and without the frown
of the ferociously virtuous, a doctrine which may be summed up as follows:—
"Man has upon him his flesh, which is at once his burden and his temptation. He
drags it with him and yields to it. He must watch it, cheek it, repress it, and obey it only
at the last extremity. There may be some fault even in this obedience; but the fault thus
committed is venial; it is a fall, but a fall on the knees which may terminate in prayer.
"To be a saint is the exception; to be an upright man is the rule. Err, fall, sin if you
will, but be upright.
"The least possible sin is the law of man. No sin at all is the dream of the angel. All
which is terrestrial is subject to sin. Sin is a gravitation."
When he saw everyone exclaiming very loudly, and growing angry very quickly,
"Oh! oh!" he said, with a smile; "to all appearance, this is a great crime which all the
world commits. These are hypocrisies which have taken fright, and are in haste to make
protest and to put themselves under shelter."
He was indulgent towards women and poor people, on whom the burden of human
society rest. He said, "The faults of women, of children, of the feeble, the indigent, and
the ignorant, are the fault of the husbands, the fathers, the masters, the strong, the rich,
and the wise."
He said, moreover, "Teach those who are ignorant as many things as possible; society
is culpable, in that it does not afford instruction gratis; it is responsible for the night
which it produces. This soul is full of shadow; sin is therein committed. The guilty one
is not the person who has committed the sin, but the person who has created the
shadow."
It will be perceived that he had a peculiar manner of his own of judging things: I
suspect that he obtained it from the Gospel.
One day he heard a criminal case, which was in preparation and on the point of trial,
discussed in a drawing-room. A wretched man, being at the end of his resources, had
coined counterfeit money, out of love for a woman, and for the child which he had had
by her. Counterfeiting was still punishable with death at that epoch. The woman had
been arrested in the act of passing the first false piece made by the man. She was held,
but there were no proofs except against her. She alone could accuse her lover, and
destroy him by her confession. She denied; they insisted. She persisted in her denial.
Thereupon an idea occurred to the attorney for the crown. He invented an infidelity on
the part of the lover, and succeeded, by means of fragments of letters cunningly
presented, in persuading the unfortunate woman that she had a rival, and that the man
was deceiving her. Thereupon, exasperated by jealousy, she denounced her lover,
confessed all, proved all.
The man was ruined. He was shortly to be tried at Aix with his accomplice. They
were relating the matter, and each one was expressing enthusiasm over the cleverness
of the magistrate. By bringing jealousy into play, he had caused the truth to burst forth
in wrath, he had educed the justice of revenge. The Bishop listened to all this in silence.
When they had finished, he inquired,—
"Where are this man and woman to be tried?"
"At the Court of Assizes."
He went on, "And where will the advocate of the crown be tried?"
A tragic event occurred at D—— A man was condemned to death for murder. He
was a wretched fellow, not exactly educated, not exactly ignorant, who had been a
mountebank at fairs, and a writer for the public. The town took a great interest in the
trial. On the eve of the day fixed for the execution of the condemned man, the chaplain
of the prison fell ill. A priest was needed to attend the criminal in his last moments.
They sent for the cure. It seems that he refused to come, saying, "That is no affair of
mine. I have nothing to do with that unpleasant task, and with that mountebank: I, too,
am ill; and besides, it is not my place." This reply was reported to the Bishop, who said,
"Monsieur le Curé is right: it is not his place; it is mine."
He went instantly to the prison, descended to the cell of the "mountebank," called
him by name, took him by the hand, and spoke to him. He passed the entire day with
him, forgetful of food and sleep, praying to God for the soul of the condemned man,
and praying the condemned man for his own. He told him the best truths, which are also
the most simple. He was father, brother, friend; he was bishop only to bless. He taught
him everything, encouraged and consoled him. The man was on the point of dying in
despair. Death was an abyss to him. As he stood trembling on its mournful brink, he
recoiled with horror. He was not sufficiently ignorant to be absolutely indifferent. His
condemnation, which had been a profound shock, had, in a manner, broken through,
here and there, that wall which separates us from the mystery of things, and which we
call life. He gazed incessantly beyond this world through these fatal breaches, and
beheld only darkness. The Bishop made him see light.
On the following day, when they came to fetch the unhappy wretch, the Bishop was
still there. He followed him, and exhibited himself to the eyes of the crowd in his purple
camail and with his episcopal cross upon his neck, side by side with the criminal bound
with cords.
He mounted the tumbril with him, he mounted the scaffold with him. The sufferer,
who had been so gloomy and cast down on the preceding day, was radiant. He felt that
his soul was reconciled, and he hoped in God. The Bishop embraced him, and at the
moment when the knife was about to fall, he said to him: "God raises from the dead him
whom man slays; he whom his brothers have rejected finds his Father once more. Pray,
believe, enter into life: the Father is there." When he descended from the scaffold, there
was something in his look which made the people draw aside to let him pass. They did
not know which was most worthy of admiration, his pallor or his serenity. On his return
to the humble dwelling, which he designated, with a smile, as his palace, he said to his
sister, "I have just officiated pontifically."
Since the most sublime things are often those which are the least understood, there
were people in the town who said, when commenting on this conduct of the Bishop, "It
is affectation."
This, however, was a remark which was confined to the drawing-rooms. The
populace, which perceives no jest in holy deeds, was touched, and admired him.
As for the Bishop, it was a shock to him to have beheld the guillotine, and it was a
long time before he recovered from it.
In fact, when the scaffold is there, all erected and prepared, it has something about it
which produces hallucination. One may feel a certain indifference to the death penalty,
one may refrain from pronouncing upon it, from saying yes or no, so long as one has
not seen a guillotine with one's own eyes: but if one encounters one of them, the shock
is violent; one is forced to decide, and to take part for or against. Some admire it, like
de Maistre; others execrate it, like Beccaria. The guillotine is the concretion of the law;
it is called vindicte; it is not neutral, and it does not permit you to remain neutral. He
who sees it shivers with the most mysterious of shivers. All social problems erect their
interrogation point around this chopping-knife. The scaffold is a vision. The scaffold is
not a piece of carpentry; the scaffold is not a machine; the scaffold is not an inert bit of
mechanism constructed of wood, iron and cords.
It seems as though it were a being, possessed of I know not what sombre initiative;
one would say that this piece of carpenter's work saw, that this machine heard, that this
mechanism understood, that this wood, this iron, and these cords were possessed of
will. In the frightful meditation into which its presence casts the soul the scaffold
appears in terrible guise, and as though taking part in what is going on. The scaffold is
the accomplice of the executioner; it devours, it eats flesh, it drinks blood; the scaffold
is a sort of monster fabricated by the judge and the carpenter, a spectre which seems to
live with a horrible vitality composed of all the death which it has inflicted.
Therefore, the impression was terrible and profound; on the day following the
execution, and on many succeeding days, the Bishop appeared to be crushed. The
almost violent serenity of the funereal moment had disappeared; the phantom of social
justice tormented him. He, who generally returned from all his deeds with a radiant
satisfaction, seemed to be reproaching himself. At times he talked to himself, and
stammered lugubrious monologues in a low voice. This is one which his sister
overheard one evening and preserved: "I did not think that it was so monstrous. It is
wrong to become absorbed in the divine law to such a degree as not to perceive human
law. Death belongs to God alone. By what right do men touch that unknown thing?"
In course of time these impressions weakened and probably vanished. Nevertheless,
it was observed that the Bishop thenceforth avoided passing the place of execution.
M. Myriel could be summoned at any hour to the bedside of the sick and dying. He
did not ignore the fact that therein lay his greatest duty and his greatest labor. Widowed
and orphaned families had no need to summon him; he came of his own accord. He
understood how to sit down and hold his peace for long hours beside the man who had
lost the wife of his love, of the mother who had lost her child. As he knew the moment
for silence he knew also the moment for speech. Oh, admirable consoler! He sought not
to efface sorrow by forgetfulness, but to magnify and dignify it by hope. He said:—
"Have a care of the manner in which you turn towards the dead. Think not of that
which perishes. Gaze steadily. You will perceive the living light of your well-beloved
dead in the depths of heaven." He knew that faith is wholesome. He sought to counsel
and calm the despairing man, by pointing out to him the resigned man, and to transform
the grief which gazes upon a grave by showing him the grief which fixes its gaze upon
a star.
 CHAPTER V—
MONSEIGNEUR
BIENVENU MADE
HIS CASSOCKS
LAST TOO LONG
The private life of M. Myriel was filled with the same thoughts as his public life. The
voluntary poverty in which the Bishop of D—— lived, would have been a solemn and
charming sight for any one who could have viewed it close at hand.
Like all old men, and like the majority of thinkers, he slept little. This brief slumber
was profound. In the morning he meditated for an hour, then he said his mass, either at
the cathedral or in his own house. His mass said, he broke his fast on rye bread dipped
in the milk of his own cows. Then he set to work.
A Bishop is a very busy man: he must every day receive the secretary of the bishopric,
who is generally a canon, and nearly every day his vicars-general. He has congregations
to reprove, privileges to grant, a whole ecclesiastical library to examine,—prayer-
books, diocesan catechisms, books of hours, etc.,—charges to write, sermons to
authorize, cures and mayors to reconcile, a clerical correspondence, an administrative
correspondence; on one side the State, on the other the Holy See; and a thousand matters
of business.
What time was left to him, after these thousand details of business, and his offices
and his breviary, he bestowed first on the necessitous, the sick, and the afflicted; the
time which was left to him from the afflicted, the sick, and the necessitous, he devoted
to work. Sometimes he dug in his garden; again, he read or wrote. He had but one word
for both these kinds of toil; he called them gardening. "The mind is a garden," said he.
Towards mid-day, when the weather was fine, he went forth and took a stroll in the
country or in town, often entering lowly dwellings. He was seen walking alone, buried
in his own thoughts, his eyes cast down, supporting himself on his long cane, clad in
his wadded purple garment of silk, which was very warm, wearing purple stockings
inside his coarse shoes, and surmounted by a flat hat which allowed three golden tassels
of large bullion to droop from its three points.
It was a perfect festival wherever he appeared. One would have said that his presence
had something warming and luminous about it. The children and the old people came
out to the doorsteps for the Bishop as for the sun. He bestowed his blessing, and they
blessed him. They pointed out his house to any one who was in need of anything.
Enlarge
 Here and there he halted, accosted the little boys and girls, and smiled upon the
mothers. He visited the poor so long as he had any money; when he no longer had any,
he visited the rich.
As he made his cassocks last a long while, and did not wish to have it noticed, he
never went out in the town without his wadded purple cloak. This inconvenienced him
somewhat in summer.
On his return, he dined. The dinner resembled his breakfast.
At half-past eight in the evening he supped with his sister, Madame Magloire standing
behind them and serving them at table. Nothing could be more frugal than this repast.
If, however, the Bishop had one of his cures to supper, Madame Magloire took
advantage of the opportunity to serve Monseigneur with some excellent fish from the
lake, or with some fine game from the mountains. Every cure furnished the pretext for
a good meal: the Bishop did not interfere. With that exception, his ordinary diet
consisted only of vegetables boiled in water, and oil soup. Thus it was said in the town,
when the Bishop does not indulge in the cheer of a cure, he indulges in the cheer of a
trappist.
After supper he conversed for half an hour with Mademoiselle Baptistine and
Madame Magloire; then he retired to his own room and set to writing, sometimes on
loose sheets, and again on the margin of some folio. He was a man of letters and rather
learned. He left behind him five or six very curious manuscripts; among others, a
dissertation on this verse in Genesis, In the beginning, the spirit of God floated upon
the waters. With this verse he compares three texts: the Arabic verse which says, The
winds of God blew; Flavius Josephus who says, A wind from above was precipitated
upon the earth; and finally, the Chaldaic paraphrase of Onkelos, which renders it, A
wind coming from God blew upon the face of the waters. In another dissertation, he
examines the theological works of Hugo, Bishop of Ptolemais, great-grand-uncle to the
writer of this book, and establishes the fact, that to this bishop must be attributed the
divers little works published during the last century, under the pseudonym of
Barleycourt.
Sometimes, in the midst of his reading, no matter what the book might be which he
had in his hand, he would suddenly fall into a profound meditation, whence he only
emerged to write a few lines on the pages of the volume itself. These lines have often
no connection whatever with the book which contains them. We now have under our
eyes a note written by him on the margin of a quarto entitled Correspondence of Lord
Germain with Generals Clinton, Cornwallis, and the Admirals on the American station.
Versailles, Poincot, book-seller; and Paris, Pissot, bookseller, Quai des Augustins.
Here is the note:—
"Oh, you who are!
"Ecclesiastes calls you the All-powerful; the Maccabees call you the Creator; the
Epistle to the Ephesians calls you liberty; Baruch calls you Immensity; the Psalms call
you Wisdom and Truth; John calls you Light; the Books of Kings call you Lord; Exodus
calls you Providence; Leviticus, Sanctity; Esdras, Justice; the creation calls you God;
man calls you Father; but Solomon calls you Compassion, and that is the most beautiful
of all your names."
Toward nine o'clock in the evening the two women retired and betook themselves to
their chambers on the first floor, leaving him alone until morning on the ground floor.
It is necessary that we should, in this place, give an exact idea of the dwelling of the
Bishop of D——

CHAPTER VI—
WHO GUARDED
HIS HOUSE FOR
HIM
The house in which he lived consisted, as we have said, of a ground floor, and one
story above; three rooms on the ground floor, three chambers on the first, and an attic
above. Behind the house was a garden, a quarter of an acre in extent. The two women
occupied the first floor; the Bishop was lodged below. The first room, opening on the
street, served him as dining-room, the second was his bedroom, and the third his
oratory. There was no exit possible from this oratory, except by passing through the
bedroom, nor from the bedroom, without passing through the dining-room. At the end
of the suite, in the oratory, there was a detached alcove with a bed, for use in cases of
hospitality. The Bishop offered this bed to country curates whom business or the
requirements of their parishes brought to D——
The pharmacy of the hospital, a small building which had been added to the house,
and abutted on the garden, had been transformed into a kitchen and cellar. In addition
to this, there was in the garden a stable, which had formerly been the kitchen of the
hospital, and in which the Bishop kept two cows. No matter what the quantity of milk
they gave, he invariably sent half of it every morning to the sick people in the hospital.
"I am paying my tithes," he said.
His bedroom was tolerably large, and rather difficult to warm in bad weather. As
wood is extremely dear at D——, he hit upon the idea of having a compartment of
boards constructed in the cow-shed. Here he passed his evenings during seasons of
severe cold: he called it his winter salon.
In this winter salon, as in the dining-room, there was no other furniture than a square
table in white wood, and four straw-seated chairs. In addition to this the dining-room
was ornamented with an antique sideboard, painted pink, in water colors. Out of a
similar sideboard, properly draped with white napery and imitation lace, the Bishop had
constructed the altar which decorated his oratory.
His wealthy penitents and the sainted women of D—— had more than once assessed
themselves to raise the money for a new altar for Monseigneur's oratory; on each
occasion he had taken the money and had given it to the poor. "The most beautiful of
altars," he said, "is the soul of an unhappy creature consoled and thanking God."
In his oratory there were two straw prie-Dieu, and there was an arm-chair, also in
straw, in his bedroom. When, by chance, he received seven or eight persons at one time,
the prefect, or the general, or the staff of the regiment in garrison, or several pupils from
the little seminary, the chairs had to be fetched from the winter salon in the stable, the
prie-Dieu from the oratory, and the arm-chair from the bedroom: in this way as many
as eleven chairs could be collected for the visitors. A room was dismantled for each
new guest.
It sometimes happened that there were twelve in the party; the Bishop then relieved
the embarrassment of the situation by standing in front of the chimney if it was winter,
or by strolling in the garden if it was summer.
There was still another chair in the detached alcove, but the straw was half gone from
it, and it had but three legs, so that it was of service only when propped against the wall.
Mademoiselle Baptistine had also in her own room a very large easy-chair of wood,
which had formerly been gilded, and which was covered with flowered pekin; but they
had been obliged to hoist this bergere up to the first story through the window, as the
staircase was too narrow; it could not, therefore, be reckoned among the possibilities in
the way of furniture.
Mademoiselle Baptistine's ambition had been to be able to purchase a set of drawing-
room furniture in yellow Utrecht velvet, stamped with a rose pattern, and with
mahogany in swan's neck style, with a sofa. But this would have cost five hundred
francs at least, and in view of the fact that she had only been able to lay by forty-two
francs and ten sous for this purpose in the course of five years, she had ended by
renouncing the idea. However, who is there who has attained his ideal?
Nothing is more easy to present to the imagination than the Bishop's bedchamber. A
glazed door opened on the garden; opposite this was the bed,—a hospital bed of iron,
with a canopy of green serge; in the shadow of the bed, behind a curtain, were the
utensils of the toilet, which still betrayed the elegant habits of the man of the world:
there were two doors, one near the chimney, opening into the oratory; the other near the
bookcase, opening into the dining-room. The bookcase was a large cupboard with glass
doors filled with books; the chimney was of wood painted to represent marble, and
habitually without fire. In the chimney stood a pair of firedogs of iron, ornamented
above with two garlanded vases, and flutings which had formerly been silvered with
silver leaf, which was a sort of episcopal luxury; above the chimney-piece hung a
crucifix of copper, with the silver worn off, fixed on a background of threadbare velvet
in a wooden frame from which the gilding had fallen; near the glass door a large table
with an inkstand, loaded with a confusion of papers and with huge volumes; before the
table an arm-chair of straw; in front of the bed a prie-Dieu, borrowed from the oratory.
Two portraits in oval frames were fastened to the wall on each side of the bed. Small
gilt inscriptions on the plain surface of the cloth at the side of these figures indicated
that the portraits represented, one the Abbé of Chaliot, bishop of Saint Claude; the other,
the Abbé Tourteau, vicar-general of Agde, abbe of Grand-Champ, order of Citeaux,
diocese of Chartres. When the Bishop succeeded to this apartment, after the hospital
patients, he had found these portraits there, and had left them. They were priests, and
probably donors—two reasons for respecting them. All that he knew about these two
persons was, that they had been appointed by the king, the one to his bishopric, the other
to his benefice, on the same day, the 27th of April, 1785. Madame Magloire having
taken the pictures down to dust, the Bishop had discovered these particulars written in
whitish ink on a little square of paper, yellowed by time, and attached to the back of the
portrait of the Abbé of Grand-Champ with four wafers.
At his window he had an antique curtain of a coarse woollen stuff, which finally
became so old, that, in order to avoid the expense of a new one, Madame Magloire was
forced to take a large seam in the very middle of it. This seam took the form of a cross.
The Bishop often called attention to it: "How delightful that is!" he said.
All the rooms in the house, without exception, those on the ground floor as well as
those on the first floor, were white-washed, which is a fashion in barracks and hospitals.
However, in their latter years, Madame Magloire discovered beneath the paper which
had been washed over, paintings, ornamenting the apartment of Mademoiselle
Baptistine, as we shall see further on. Before becoming a hospital, this house had been
the ancient parliament house of the Bourgeois. Hence this decoration. The chambers
were paved in red bricks, which were washed every week, with straw mats in front of
all the beds. Altogether, this dwelling, which was attended to by the two women, was
exquisitely clean from top to bottom. This was the sole luxury which the Bishop
permitted. He said, "That takes nothing from the poor."
It must be confessed, however, that he still retained from his former possessions six
silver knives and forks and a soup-ladle, which Madame Magloire contemplated every
day with delight, as they glistened splendidly upon the coarse linen cloth. And since we
are now painting the Bishop of D—— as he was in reality, we must add that he had said
more than once, "I find it difficult to renounce eating from silver dishes."
To this silverware must be added two large candlesticks of massive silver, which he
had inherited from a great-aunt. These candlesticks held two wax candles, and usually
figured on the Bishop's chimney-piece. When he had any one to dinner, Madame
Magloire lighted the two candles and set the candlesticks on the table.
 In the Bishop's own chamber, at the head of his bed, there was a small cupboard, in
which Madame Magloire locked up the six silver knives and forks and the big spoon
every night. But it is necessary to add, that the key was never removed.
The garden, which had been rather spoiled by the ugly buildings which we have
mentioned, was composed of four alleys in cross-form, radiating from a tank. Another
walk made the circuit of the garden, and skirted the white wall which enclosed it. These
alleys left behind them four square plots rimmed with box. In three of these, Madame
Magloire cultivated vegetables; in the fourth, the Bishop had planted some flowers; here
and there stood a few fruit-trees. Madame Magloire had once remarked, with a sort of
gentle malice: "Monseigneur, you who turn everything to account, have, nevertheless,
one useless plot. It would be better to grow salads there than bouquets." "Madame
Magloire," retorted the Bishop, "you are mistaken. The beautiful is as useful as the
useful." He added after a pause, "More so, perhaps."
This plot, consisting of three or four beds, occupied the Bishop almost as much as did
his books. He liked to pass an hour or two there, trimming, hoeing, and making holes
here and there in the earth, into which he dropped seeds. He was not as hostile to insects
as a gardener could have wished to see him. Moreover, he made no pretensions to
botany; he ignored groups and consistency; he made not the slightest effort to decide
between Tournefort and the natural method; he took part neither with the buds against
the cotyledons, nor with Jussieu against Linnaeus. He did not study plants; he loved
flowers. He respected learned men greatly; he respected the ignorant still more; and,
without ever failing in these two respects, he watered his flower-beds every summer
evening with a tin watering-pot painted green.
The house had not a single door which could be locked. The door of the dining-room,
which, as we have said, opened directly on the cathedral square, had formerly been
ornamented with locks and bolts like the door of a prison. The Bishop had had all this
ironwork removed, and this door was never fastened, either by night or by day, with
anything except the latch. All that the first passerby had to do at any hour, was to give
it a push. At first, the two women had been very much tried by this door, which was
never fastened, but Monsieur de D—— had said to them, "Have bolts put on your
rooms, if that will please you." They had ended by sharing his confidence, or by at least
acting as though they shared it. Madame Magloire alone had frights from time to time.
As for the Bishop, his thought can be found explained, or at least indicated, in the three
lines which he wrote on the margin of a Bible, "This is the shade of difference: the door
of the physician should never be shut, the door of the priest should always be open."
On another book, entitled Philosophy of the Medical Science, he had written this
other note: "Am not I a physician like them? I also have my patients, and then, too, I
have some whom I call my unfortunates."
Again he wrote: "Do not inquire the name of him who asks a shelter of you. The very
man who is embarrassed by his name is the one who needs shelter."
 It chanced that a worthy cure, I know not whether it was the cure of Couloubroux or
the cure of Pompierry, took it into his head to ask him one day, probably at the
instigation of Madame Magloire, whether Monsieur was sure that he was not
committing an indiscretion, to a certain extent, in leaving his door unfastened day and
night, at the mercy of any one who should choose to enter, and whether, in short, he did
not fear lest some misfortune might occur in a house so little guarded. The Bishop
touched his shoulder, with gentle gravity, and said to him, "Nisi Dominus custodierit
domum, in vanum vigilant qui custodiunt eam," Unless the Lord guard the house, in
vain do they watch who guard it.
Then he spoke of something else.
He was fond of saying, "There is a bravery of the priest as well as the bravery of a
colonel of dragoons,—only," he added, "ours must be tranquil."

CHAPTER VII—
CRAVATTE
It is here that a fact falls naturally into place, which we must not omit, because it is
one of the sort which show us best what sort of a man the Bishop of D—— was.
After the destruction of the band of Gaspard Bes, who had infested the gorges of
Ollioules, one of his lieutenants, Cravatte, took refuge in the mountains. He concealed
himself for some time with his bandits, the remnant of Gaspard Bes's troop, in the
county of Nice; then he made his way to Piedmont, and suddenly reappeared in France,
in the vicinity of Barcelonette. He was first seen at Jauziers, then at Tuiles. He hid
himself in the caverns of the Joug-de-l'Aigle, and thence he descended towards the
hamlets and villages through the ravines of Ubaye and Ubayette.
He even pushed as far as Embrun, entered the cathedral one night, and despoiled the
sacristy. His highway robberies laid waste the country-side. The gendarmes were set on
his track, but in vain. He always escaped; sometimes he resisted by main force. He was
a bold wretch. In the midst of all this terror the Bishop arrived. He was making his
circuit to Chastelar. The mayor came to meet him, and urged him to retrace his steps.
Cravatte was in possession of the mountains as far as Arche, and beyond; there was
danger even with an escort; it merely exposed three or four unfortunate gendarmes to
no purpose.
"Therefore," said the Bishop, "I intend to go without escort."
"You do not really mean that, Monseigneur!" exclaimed the mayor.
 "I do mean it so thoroughly that I absolutely refuse any gendarmes, and shall set out
in an hour."
"Set out?"
"Set out."
"Alone?"
"Alone."
"Monseigneur, you will not do that!"
"There exists yonder in the mountains," said the Bishop, "a tiny community no bigger
than that, which I have not seen for three years. They are my good friends, those gentle
and honest shepherds. They own one goat out of every thirty that they tend. They make
very pretty woollen cords of various colors, and they play the mountain airs on little
flutes with six holes. They need to be told of the good God now and then. What would
they say to a bishop who was afraid? What would they say if I did not go?"
"But the brigands, Monseigneur?"
"Hold," said the Bishop, "I must think of that. You are right. I may meet them. They,
too, need to be told of the good God."
"But, Monseigneur, there is a band of them! A flock of wolves!"
"Monsieur le maire, it may be that it is of this very flock of wolves that Jesus has
constituted me the shepherd. Who knows the ways of Providence?"
"They will rob you, Monseigneur."
"I have nothing."
"They will kill you."
"An old goodman of a priest, who passes along mumbling his prayers? Bah! To what
purpose?"
"Oh, mon Dieu! what if you should meet them!"
"I should beg alms of them for my poor."
"Do not go, Monseigneur. In the name of Heaven! You are risking your life!"
"Monsieur le maire," said the Bishop, "is that really all? I am not in the world to guard
my own life, but to guard souls."
They had to allow him to do as he pleased. He set out, accompanied only by a child
who offered to serve as a guide. His obstinacy was bruited about the country-side, and
caused great consternation.
He would take neither his sister nor Madame Magloire. He traversed the mountain on
mule-back, encountered no one, and arrived safe and sound at the residence of his "good
friends," the shepherds. He remained there for a fortnight, preaching, administering the
sacrament, teaching, exhorting. When the time of his departure approached, he resolved
to chant a Te Deum pontifically. He mentioned it to the cure. But what was to be done?
There were no episcopal ornaments. They could only place at his disposal a wretched
village sacristy, with a few ancient chasubles of threadbare damask adorned with
imitation lace.
"Bah!" said the Bishop. "Let us announce our Te Deum from the pulpit, nevertheless,
Monsieur le Curé. Things will arrange themselves."
They instituted a search in the churches of the neighborhood. All the magnificence of
these humble parishes combined would not have sufficed to clothe the chorister of a
cathedral properly.
While they were thus embarrassed, a large chest was brought and deposited in the
presbytery for the Bishop, by two unknown horsemen, who departed on the instant. The
chest was opened; it contained a cope of cloth of gold, a mitre ornamented with
diamonds, an archbishop's cross, a magnificent crosier,—all the pontifical vestments
which had been stolen a month previously from the treasury of Notre Dame d'Embrun.
In the chest was a paper, on which these words were written, "From Cravatte to
Monseigneur Bienvenu."
"Did not I say that things would come right of themselves?" said the Bishop. Then he
added, with a smile, "To him who contents himself with the surplice of a curate, God
sends the cope of an archbishop."
"Monseigneur," murmured the cure, throwing back his head with a smile. "God—or
the Devil."
The Bishop looked steadily at the cure, and repeated with authority, "God!"
When he returned to Chastelar, the people came out to stare at him as at a curiosity,
all along the road. At the priest's house in Chastelar he rejoined Mademoiselle
Baptistine and Madame Magloire, who were waiting for him, and he said to his sister:
"Well! was I in the right? The poor priest went to his poor mountaineers with empty
hands, and he returns from them with his hands full. I set out bearing only my faith in
God; I have brought back the treasure of a cathedral."
That evening, before he went to bed, he said again: "Let us never fear robbers nor
murderers. Those are dangers from without, petty dangers. Let us fear ourselves.
Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the real murderers. The great dangers lie within
ourselves. What matters it what threatens our head or our purse! Let us think only of
that which threatens our soul."
Then, turning to his sister: "Sister, never a precaution on the part of the priest, against
his fellow-man. That which his fellow does, God permits. Let us confine ourselves to
prayer, when we think that a danger is approaching us. Let us pray, not for ourselves,
but that our brother may not fall into sin on our account."
However, such incidents were rare in his life. We relate those of which we know; but
generally he passed his life in doing the same things at the same moment. One month
of his year resembled one hour of his day.
 As to what became of "the treasure" of the cathedral of Embrun, we should be
embarrassed by any inquiry in that direction. It consisted of very handsome things, very
tempting things, and things which were very well adapted to be stolen for the benefit of
the unfortunate. Stolen they had already been elsewhere. Half of the adventure was
completed; it only remained to impart a new direction to the theft, and to cause it to take
a short trip in the direction of the poor. However, we make no assertions on this point.
Only, a rather obscure note was found among the Bishop's papers, which may bear some
relation to this matter, and which is couched in these terms, "The question is, to decide
whether this should be turned over to the cathedral or to the hospital."

CHAPTER VIII—
PHILOSOPHY
AFTER DRINKING
The senator above mentioned was a clever man, who had made his own way, heedless
of those things which present obstacles, and which are called conscience, sworn faith,
justice, duty: he had marched straight to his goal, without once flinching in the line of
his advancement and his interest. He was an old attorney, softened by success; not a
bad man by any means, who rendered all the small services in his power to his sons, his
sons-in-law, his relations, and even to his friends, having wisely seized upon, in life,
good sides, good opportunities, good windfalls. Everything else seemed to him very
stupid. He was intelligent, and just sufficiently educated to think himself a disciple of
Epicurus; while he was, in reality, only a product of Pigault-Lebrun. He laughed
willingly and pleasantly over infinite and eternal things, and at the "Crotchets of that
good old fellow the Bishop." He even sometimes laughed at him with an amiable
authority in the presence of M. Myriel himself, who listened to him.
On some semi-official occasion or other, I do not recollect what, Count*** [this
senator] and M. Myriel were to dine with the prefect. At dessert, the senator, who was
slightly exhilarated, though still perfectly dignified, exclaimed:—
"Egad, Bishop, let's have a discussion. It is hard for a senator and a bishop to look at
each other without winking. We are two augurs. I am going to make a confession to
you. I have a philosophy of my own."
"And you are right," replied the Bishop. "As one makes one's philosophy, so one lies
on it. You are on the bed of purple, senator."
The senator was encouraged, and went on:—
"Let us be good fellows."
 "Good devils even," said the Bishop.
"I declare to you," continued the senator, "that the Marquis d'Argens, Pyrrhon,
Hobbes, and M. Naigeon are no rascals. I have all the philosophers in my library gilded
on the edges."
"Like yourself, Count," interposed the Bishop.
The senator resumed:—
"I hate Diderot; he is an ideologist, a declaimer, and a revolutionist, a believer in God
at bottom, and more bigoted than Voltaire. Voltaire made sport of Needham, and he
was wrong, for Needham's eels prove that God is useless. A drop of vinegar in a
spoonful of flour paste supplies the fiat lux. Suppose the drop to be larger and the
spoonful bigger; you have the world. Man is the eel. Then what is the good of the
Eternal Father? The Jehovah hypothesis tires me, Bishop. It is good for nothing but to
produce shallow people, whose reasoning is hollow. Down with that great All, which
torments me! Hurrah for Zero which leaves me in peace! Between you and me, and in
order to empty my sack, and make confession to my pastor, as it behooves me to do, I
will admit to you that I have good sense. I am not enthusiastic over your Jesus, who
preaches renunciation and sacrifice to the last extremity. 'Tis the counsel of an
avaricious man to beggars. Renunciation; why? Sacrifice; to what end? I do not see one
wolf immolating himself for the happiness of another wolf. Let us stick to nature, then.
We are at the top; let us have a superior philosophy. What is the advantage of being at
the top, if one sees no further than the end of other people's noses? Let us live merrily.
Life is all. That man has another future elsewhere, on high, below, anywhere, I don't
believe; not one single word of it. Ah! sacrifice and renunciation are recommended to
me; I must take heed to everything I do; I must cudgel my brains over good and evil,
over the just and the unjust, over the fas and the nefas. Why? Because I shall have to
render an account of my actions. When? After death. What a fine dream! After my death
it will be a very clever person who can catch me. Have a handful of dust seized by a
shadow-hand, if you can. Let us tell the truth, we who are initiated, and who have raised
the veil of Isis: there is no such thing as either good or evil; there is vegetation. Let us
seek the real. Let us get to the bottom of it. Let us go into it thoroughly. What the deuce!
let us go to the bottom of it! We must scent out the truth; dig in the earth for it, and seize
it. Then it gives you exquisite joys. Then you grow strong, and you laugh. I am square
on the bottom, I am. Immortality, Bishop, is a chance, a waiting for dead men's shoes.
Ah! what a charming promise! trust to it, if you like! What a fine lot Adam has! We are
souls, and we shall be angels, with blue wings on our shoulder-blades. Do come to my
assistance: is it not Tertullian who says that the blessed shall travel from star to star?
Very well. We shall be the grasshoppers of the stars. And then, besides, we shall see
God. Ta, ta, ta! What twaddle all these paradises are! God is a nonsensical monster. I
would not say that in the Moniteur, egad! but I may whisper it among friends. Inter
pocula. To sacrifice the world to paradise is to let slip the prey for the shadow. Be the
dupe of the infinite! I'm not such a fool. I am a nought. I call myself Monsieur le Comte
Nought, senator. Did I exist before my birth? No. Shall I exist after death? No. What
am I? A little dust collected in an organism. What am I to do on this earth? The choice
rests with me: suffer or enjoy. Whither will suffering lead me? To nothingness; but I
shall have suffered. Whither will enjoyment lead me? To nothingness; but I shall have
enjoyed myself. My choice is made. One must eat or be eaten. I shall eat. It is better to
be the tooth than the grass. Such is my wisdom. After which, go whither I push thee,
the grave-digger is there; the Pantheon for some of us: all falls into the great hole. End.
Finis. Total liquidation. This is the vanishing-point. Death is death, believe me. I laugh
at the idea of there being any one who has anything to tell me on that subject. Fables of
nurses; bugaboo for children; Jehovah for men. No; our to-morrow is the night. Beyond
the tomb there is nothing but equal nothingness. You have been Sardanapalus, you have
been Vincent de Paul—it makes no difference. That is the truth. Then live your life,
above all things. Make use of your I while you have it. In truth, Bishop, I tell you that I
have a philosophy of my own, and I have my philosophers. I don't let myself be taken
in with that nonsense. Of course, there must be something for those who are down,—
for the barefooted beggars, knife-grinders, and miserable wretches. Legends, chimeras,
the soul, immortality, paradise, the stars, are provided for them to swallow. They gobble
it down. They spread it on their dry bread. He who has nothing else has the good. God.
That is the least he can have. I oppose no objection to that; but I reserve Monsieur
Naigeon for myself. The good God is good for the populace."
The Bishop clapped his hands.
"That's talking!" he exclaimed. "What an excellent and really marvellous thing is this
materialism! Not every one who wants it can have it. Ah! when one does have it, one is
no longer a dupe, one does not stupidly allow one's self to be exiled like Cato, nor stoned
like Stephen, nor burned alive like Jeanne d'Arc. Those who have succeeded in
procuring this admirable materialism have the joy of feeling themselves irresponsible,
and of thinking that they can devour everything without uneasiness,—places, sinecures,
dignities, power, whether well or ill acquired, lucrative recantations, useful treacheries,
savory capitulations of conscience,—and that they shall enter the tomb with their
digestion accomplished. How agreeable that is! I do not say that with reference to you,
senator. Nevertheless, it is impossible for me to refrain from congratulating you. You
great lords have, so you say, a philosophy of your own, and for yourselves, which is
exquisite, refined, accessible to the rich alone, good for all sauces, and which seasons
the voluptuousness of life admirably. This philosophy has been extracted from the
depths, and unearthed by special seekers. But you are good-natured princes, and you do
not think it a bad thing that belief in the good God should constitute the philosophy of
the people, very much as the goose stuffed with chestnuts is the truffled turkey of the
poor."
 CHAPTER IX—
THE BROTHER AS
DEPICTED BY
THE SISTER
In order to furnish an idea of the private establishment of the Bishop of D——, and
of the manner in which those two sainted women subordinated their actions, their
thoughts, their feminine instincts even, which are easily alarmed, to the habits and
purposes of the Bishop, without his even taking the trouble of speaking in order to
explain them, we cannot do better than transcribe in this place a letter from
Mademoiselle Baptistine to Madame the Vicomtess de Boischevron, the friend of her
childhood. This letter is in our possession.
D——, Dec. 16, 18—.
MY GOOD MADAM: Not a day passes without our speaking of you. It is
our
established custom; but there is another reason besides. Just
imagine,
while washing and dusting the ceilings and walls, Madam Magloire has
made some discoveries; now our two chambers hung with antique paper
whitewashed over, would not discredit a chateau in the style of yours.
Madam Magloire has pulled off all the paper. There were things
beneath.
My drawing-room, which contains no furniture, and which we use for
spreading out the linen after washing, is fifteen feet in height,
eighteen square, with a ceiling which was formerly painted and gilded,
and with beams, as in yours. This was covered with a cloth while this
was the hospital. And the woodwork was of the era of our grandmothers.
But my room is the one you ought to see. Madam Magloire has
discovered,
under at least ten thicknesses of paper pasted on top, some paintings,
which without being good are very tolerable. The subject is Telemachus
being knighted by Minerva in some gardens, the name of which escapes
me. In short, where the Roman ladies repaired on one single night.
What
shall I say to you? I have Romans, and Roman ladies [here occurs an
illegible word], and the whole train. Madam Magloire has cleaned it
all
off; this summer she is going to have some small injuries repaired,
and
the whole revarnished, and my chamber will be a regular museum. She
has
also found in a corner of the attic two wooden pier-tables of ancient
fashion. They asked us two crowns of six francs each to regild them,
but
it is much better to give the money to the poor; and they are very
ugly
besides, and I should much prefer a round table of mahogany.
I am always very happy. My brother is so good. He gives all he has
to
the poor and sick. We are very much cramped. The country is trying
in
the winter, and we really must do something for those who are in
need.
We are almost comfortably lighted and warmed. You see that these are
great treats.

My brother has ways of his own. When he talks, he says that a bishop
ought to be so. Just imagine! the door of our house is never fastened.
Whoever chooses to enter finds himself at once in my brother's room.
He
fears nothing, even at night. That is his sort of bravery, he says.

He does not wish me or Madame Magloire feel any fear for him. He
exposes
himself to all sorts of dangers, and he does not like to have us even
seem to notice it. One must know how to understand him.

He goes out in the rain, he walks in the water, he travels in winter.

He
fears neither suspicious roads nor dangerous encounters, nor night.

Last year he went quite alone into a country of robbers. He would

not take us. He was absent for a fortnight. On his return nothing had
happened to him; he was thought to be dead, but was perfectly well,
and
said, "This is the way I have been robbed!" And then he opened a
trunk
full of jewels, all the jewels of the cathedral of Embrun, which the
thieves had given him.

When he returned on that occasion, I could not refrain from scolding

him
a little, taking care, however, not to speak except when the carriage
was making a noise, so that no one might hear me.

At first I used to say to myself, "There are no dangers which will

stop
him; he is terrible." Now I have ended by getting used to it. I make
a
sign to Madam Magloire that she is not to oppose him. He risks himself
as he sees fit. I carry off Madam Magloire, I enter my chamber, I
pray
for him and fall asleep. I am at ease, because I know that if anything
were to happen to him, it would be the end of me. I should go to the
good God with my brother and my bishop. It has cost Madam Magloire
more trouble than it did me to accustom herself to what she terms his
imprudences. But now the habit has been acquired. We pray together,
we
tremble together, and we fall asleep. If the devil were to enter this
house, he would be allowed to do so. After all, what is there for us
to fear in this house? There is always some one with us who is
stronger
than we. The devil may pass through it, but the good God dwells here.

This suffices me. My brother has no longer any need of saying a word
to
me. I understand him without his speaking, and we abandon ourselves
to
the care of Providence. That is the way one has to do with a man who
possesses grandeur of soul.
 I have interrogated my brother with regard to the information which
you
desire on the subject of the Faux family. You are aware that he knows
everything, and that he has memories, because he is still a very
good royalist. They really are a very ancient Norman family of the
generalship of Caen. Five hundred years ago there was a Raoul de
Faux, a
Jean de Faux, and a Thomas de Faux, who were gentlemen, and one of
whom
was a seigneur de Rochefort. The last was Guy-Etienne-Alexandre, and
was
commander of a regiment, and something in the light horse of Bretagne.
His daughter, Marie-Louise, married Adrien-Charles de Gramont, son
of
the Duke Louis de Gramont, peer of France, colonel of the French
guards,
and lieutenant-general of the army. It is written Faux, Fauq, and
Faoucq.

Good Madame, recommend us to the prayers of your sainted relative,

Monsieur the Cardinal. As for your dear Sylvanie, she has done well
in
not wasting the few moments which she passes with you in writing to
me.
She is well, works as you would wish, and loves me.

That is all that I desire. The souvenir which she sent through you
reached me safely, and it makes me very happy. My health is not so
very
bad, and yet I grow thinner every day. Farewell; my paper is at an
end,
and this forces me to leave you. A thousand good wishes.

BAPTISTINE.

P.S. Your grand nephew is charming. Do you know that he will soon be
five years old? Yesterday he saw some one riding by on horseback who
had on knee-caps, and he said, "What has he got on his knees?" He is
a
charming child! His little brother is dragging an old broom about the
room, like a carriage, and saying, "Hu!"
As will be perceived from this letter, these two women understood how to mould
themselves to the Bishop's ways with that special feminine genius which comprehends
the man better than he comprehends himself. The Bishop of D——, in spite of the gentle
and candid air which never deserted him, sometimes did things that were grand, bold,
and magnificent, without seeming to have even a suspicion of the fact. They trembled,
but they let him alone. Sometimes Madame Magloire essayed a remonstrance in
advance, but never at the time, nor afterwards. They never interfered with him by so
much as a word or sign, in any action once entered upon. At certain moments, without
his having occasion to mention it, when he was not even conscious of it himself in all
probability, so perfect was his simplicity, they vaguely felt that he was acting as a
bishop; then they were nothing more than two shadows in the house. They served him
passively; and if obedience consisted in disappearing, they disappeared. They
understood, with an admirable delicacy of instinct, that certain cares may be put under
constraint. Thus, even when believing him to be in peril, they understood, I will not say
his thought, but his nature, to such a degree that they no longer watched over him. They
confided him to God.
Moreover, Baptistine said, as we have just read, that her brother's end would prove
her own. Madame Magloire did not say this, but she knew it.

CHAPTER X—
THE BISHOP IN
THE PRESENCE
OF AN UNKNOWN
LIGHT
At an epoch a little later than the date of the letter cited in the preceding pages, he did
a thing which, if the whole town was to be believed, was even more hazardous than his
trip across the mountains infested with bandits.
In the country near D—— a man lived quite alone. This man, we will state at once,
was a former member of the Convention. His name was G——
Member of the Convention, G—— was mentioned with a sort of horror in the little
world of D—— A member of the Convention—can you imagine such a thing? That
existed from the time when people called each other thou, and when they said "citizen."
This man was almost a monster. He had not voted for the death of the king, but almost.
He was a quasi-regicide. He had been a terrible man. How did it happen that such a man
had not been brought before a provost's court, on the return of the legitimate princes?
They need not have cut off his head, if you please; clemency must be exercised, agreed;
but a good banishment for life. An example, in short, etc. Besides, he was an atheist,
like all the rest of those people. Gossip of the geese about the vulture.
Was G—— a vulture after all? Yes; if he were to be judged by the element of ferocity
in this solitude of his. As he had not voted for the death of the king, he had not been
included in the decrees of exile, and had been able to remain in France.
He dwelt at a distance of three-quarters of an hour from the city, far from any hamlet,
far from any road, in some hidden turn of a very wild valley, no one knew exactly
where. He had there, it was said, a sort of field, a hole, a lair. There were no neighbors,
not even passers-by. Since he had dwelt in that valley, the path which led thither had
disappeared under a growth of grass. The locality was spoken of as though it had been
the dwelling of a hangman.
 Nevertheless, the Bishop meditated on the subject, and from time to time he gazed at
the horizon at a point where a clump of trees marked the valley of the former member
of the Convention, and he said, "There is a soul yonder which is lonely."
And he added, deep in his own mind, "I owe him a visit."
But, let us avow it, this idea, which seemed natural at the first blush, appeared to him
after a moment's reflection, as strange, impossible, and almost repulsive. For, at bottom,
he shared the general impression, and the old member of the Convention inspired him,
without his being clearly conscious of the fact himself, with that sentiment which
borders on hate, and which is so well expressed by the word estrangement.
Still, should the scab of the sheep cause the shepherd to recoil? No. But what a sheep!
The good Bishop was perplexed. Sometimes he set out in that direction; then he
returned.
Finally, the rumor one day spread through the town that a sort of young shepherd,
who served the member of the Convention in his hovel, had come in quest of a doctor;
that the old wretch was dying, that paralysis was gaining on him, and that he would not
live over night.—"Thank God!" some added.
The Bishop took his staff, put on his cloak, on account of his too threadbare cassock,
as we have mentioned, and because of the evening breeze which was sure to rise soon,
and set out.
The sun was setting, and had almost touched the horizon when the Bishop arrived at
the excommunicated spot. With a certain beating of the heart, he recognized the fact
that he was near the lair. He strode over a ditch, leaped a hedge, made his way through
a fence of dead boughs, entered a neglected paddock, took a few steps with a good deal
of boldness, and suddenly, at the extremity of the waste land, and behind lofty brambles,
he caught sight of the cavern.
It was a very low hut, poor, small, and clean, with a vine nailed against the outside.
Near the door, in an old wheel-chair, the arm-chair of the peasants, there was a white-
haired man, smiling at the sun.
Near the seated man stood a young boy, the shepherd lad. He was offering the old
man a jar of milk.
While the Bishop was watching him, the old man spoke: "Thank you," he said, "I
need nothing." And his smile quitted the sun to rest upon the child.
The Bishop stepped forward. At the sound which he made in walking, the old man
turned his head, and his face expressed the sum total of the surprise which a man can
still feel after a long life.
"This is the first time since I have been here," said he, "that any one has entered here.
Who are you, sir?"
The Bishop answered:—
 "My name is Bienvenu Myriel."
"Bienvenu Myriel? I have heard that name. Are you the man whom the people call
Monseigneur Welcome?"
"I am."
The old man resumed with a half-smile
"In that case, you are my bishop?"
"Something of that sort."
"Enter, sir."
The member of the Convention extended his hand to the Bishop, but the Bishop did
not take it. The Bishop confined himself to the remark:—
"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 Greve, 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.
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-Baville? Maillard is terrible; but Saulx-
Tavannes, if you please? Duchene senior is ferocious; but what epithet will you allow
me for the elder Letellier? Jourdan-Coupe-Tete 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 Abbéy 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 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.

CHAPTER XII—
THE SOLITUDE
OF
MONSEIGNEUR
WELCOME
 A bishop is almost always surrounded by a full squadron of little abbes, just as a
general is by a covey of young officers. This is what that charming Saint Francois de
Sales calls somewhere "les pretres blancs-becs," callow priests. Every career has its
aspirants, who form a train for those who have attained eminence in it. There is no
power which has not its dependents. There is no fortune which has not its court. The
seekers of the future eddy around the splendid present. Every metropolis has its staff of
officials. Every bishop who possesses the least influence has about him his patrol of
cherubim from the seminary, which goes the round, and maintains good order in the
episcopal palace, and mounts guard over monseigneur's smile. To please a bishop is
equivalent to getting one's foot in the stirrup for a sub-diaconate. It is necessary to walk
one's path discreetly; the apostleship does not disdain the canonship.
Just as there are bigwigs elsewhere, there are big mitres in the Church. These are the
bishops who stand well at Court, who are rich, well endowed, skilful, accepted by the
world, who know how to pray, no doubt, but who know also how to beg, who feel little
scruple at making a whole diocese dance attendance in their person, who are connecting
links between the sacristy and diplomacy, who are abbes rather than priests, prelates
rather than bishops. Happy those who approach them! Being persons of influence, they
create a shower about them, upon the assiduous and the favored, and upon all the young
men who understand the art of pleasing, of large parishes, prebends, archidiaconates,
chaplaincies, and cathedral posts, while awaiting episcopal honors. As they advance
themselves, they cause their satellites to progress also; it is a whole solar system on the
march. Their radiance casts a gleam of purple over their suite. Their prosperity is
crumbled up behind the scenes, into nice little promotions. The larger the diocese of the
patron, the fatter the curacy for the favorite. And then, there is Rome. A bishop who
understands how to become an archbishop, an archbishop who knows how to become
a cardinal, carries you with him as conclavist; you enter a court of papal jurisdiction,
you receive the pallium, and behold! you are an auditor, then a papal chamberlain, then
monsignor, and from a Grace to an Eminence is only a step, and between the Eminence
and the Holiness there is but the smoke of a ballot. Every skull-cap may dream of the
tiara. The priest is nowadays the only man who can become a king in a regular manner;
and what a king! the supreme king. Then what a nursery of aspirations is a seminary!
How many blushing choristers, how many youthful abbes bear on their heads Perrette's
pot of milk! Who knows how easy it is for ambition to call itself vocation? in good
faith, perchance, and deceiving itself, devotee that it is.
Monseigneur Bienvenu, poor, humble, retiring, was not accounted among the big
mitres. This was plain from the complete absence of young priests about him. We have
seen that he "did not take" in Paris. Not a single future dreamed of engrafting itself on
this solitary old man. Not a single sprouting ambition committed the folly of putting
forth its foliage in his shadow. His canons and grand-vicars were good old men, rather
vulgar like himself, walled up like him in this diocese, without exit to a cardinalship,
and who resembled their bishop, with this difference, that they were finished and he
was completed. The impossibility of growing great under Monseigneur Bienvenu was
so well understood, that no sooner had the young men whom he ordained left the
seminary than they got themselves recommended to the archbishops of Aix or of Auch,
and went off in a great hurry. For, in short, we repeat it, men wish to be pushed. A saint
who dwells in a paroxysm of abnegation is a dangerous neighbor; he might
communicate to you, by contagion, an incurable poverty, an anchylosis of the joints,
which are useful in advancement, and in short, more renunciation than you desire; and
this infectious virtue is avoided. Hence the isolation of Monseigneur Bienvenu. We live
in the midst of a gloomy society. Success; that is the lesson which falls drop by drop
from the slope of corruption.
Be it said in passing, that success is a very hideous thing. Its false resemblance to
merit deceives men. For the masses, success has almost the same profile as supremacy.
Success, that Menaechmus of talent, has one dupe,—history. Juvenal and Tacitus alone
grumble at it. In our day, a philosophy which is almost official has entered into its
service, wears the livery of success, and performs the service of its antechamber.
Succeed: theory. Prosperity argues capacity. Win in the lottery, and behold! you are a
clever man. He who triumphs is venerated. Be born with a silver spoon in your mouth!
everything lies in that. Be lucky, and you will have all the rest; be happy, and people
will think you great. Outside of five or six immense exceptions, which compose the
splendor of a century, contemporary admiration is nothing but short-sightedness.
Gilding is gold. It does no harm to be the first arrival by pure chance, so long as you do
arrive. The common herd is an old Narcissus who adores himself, and who applauds
the vulgar herd. That enormous ability by virtue of which one is Moses, Aeschylus,
Dante, Michael Angelo, or Napoleon, the multitude awards on the spot, and by
acclamation, to whomsoever attains his object, in whatsoever it may consist. Let a
notary transfigure himself into a deputy: let a false Corneille compose Tiridate; let a
eunuch come to possess a harem; let a military Prudhomme accidentally win the
decisive battle of an epoch; let an apothecary invent cardboard shoe-soles for the army
of the Sambre-and-Meuse, and construct for himself, out of this cardboard, sold as
leather, four hundred thousand francs of income; let a pork-packer espouse usury, and
cause it to bring forth seven or eight millions, of which he is the father and of which it
is the mother; let a preacher become a bishop by force of his nasal drawl; let the steward
of a fine family be so rich on retiring from service that he is made minister of
finances,—and men call that Genius, just as they call the face of Mousqueton Beauty,
and the mien of Claude Majesty. With the constellations of space they confound the
stars of the abyss which are made in the soft mire of the puddle by the feet of ducks.
 CHAPTER XIII—
WHAT HE
BELIEVED
We are not obliged to sound the Bishop of D—— on the score of orthodoxy. In the
presence of such a soul we feel ourselves in no mood but respect. The conscience of the
just man should be accepted on his word. Moreover, certain natures being given, we
admit the possible development of all beauties of human virtue in a belief that differs
from our own.
What did he think of this dogma, or of that mystery? These secrets of the inner
tribunal of the conscience are known only to the tomb, where souls enter naked. The
point on which we are certain is, that the difficulties of faith never resolved themselves
into hypocrisy in his case. No decay is possible to the diamond. He believed to the
extent of his powers. "Credo in Patrem," he often exclaimed. Moreover, he drew from
good works that amount of satisfaction which suffices to the conscience, and which
whispers to a man, "Thou art with God!"
The point which we consider it our duty to note is, that outside of and beyond his
faith, as it were, the Bishop possessed an excess of love. In was in that quarter, quia
multum amavit,—because he loved much—that he was regarded as vulnerable by
"serious men," "grave persons" and "reasonable people"; favorite locutions of our sad
world where egotism takes its word of command from pedantry. What was this excess
of love? It was a serene benevolence which overflowed men, as we have already pointed
out, and which, on occasion, extended even to things. He lived without disdain. He was
indulgent towards God's creation. Every man, even the best, has within him a
thoughtless harshness which he reserves for animals. The Bishop of D—— had none
of that harshness, which is peculiar to many priests, nevertheless. He did not go as far
as the Brahmin, but he seemed to have weighed this saying of Ecclesiastes: "Who
knoweth whither the soul of the animal goeth?" Hideousness of aspect, deformity of
instinct, troubled him not, and did not arouse his indignation. He was touched, almost
softened by them. It seemed as though he went thoughtfully away to seek beyond the
bounds of life which is apparent, the cause, the explanation, or the excuse for them. He
seemed at times to be asking God to commute these penalties. He examined without
wrath, and with the eye of a linguist who is deciphering a palimpsest, that portion of
chaos which still exists in nature. This revery sometimes caused him to utter odd
sayings. One morning he was in his garden, and thought himself alone, but his sister
was walking behind him, unseen by him: suddenly he paused and gazed at something
on the ground; it was a large, black, hairy, frightful spider. His sister heard him say:—
"Poor beast! It is not its fault!"
Why not mention these almost divinely childish sayings of kindness? Puerile they
may be; but these sublime puerilities were peculiar to Saint Francis d'Assisi and of
Marcus Aurelius. One day he sprained his ankle in his effort to avoid stepping on an
ant. Thus lived this just man. Sometimes he fell asleep in his garden, and then there was
nothing more venerable possible.
Monseigneur Bienvenu had formerly been, if the stories anent his youth, and even in
regard to his manhood, were to be believed, a passionate, and, possibly, a violent man.
His universal suavity was less an instinct of nature than the result of a grand conviction
which had filtered into his heart through the medium of life, and had trickled there
slowly, thought by thought; for, in a character, as in a rock, there may exist apertures
made by drops of water. These hollows are uneffaceable; these formations are
indestructible.
In 1815, as we think we have already said, he reached his seventy-fifth birthday, but
he did not appear to be more than sixty. He was not tall; he was rather plump; and, in
order to combat this tendency, he was fond of taking long strolls on foot; his step was
firm, and his form was but slightly bent, a detail from which we do not pretend to draw
any conclusion. Gregory XVI., at the age of eighty, held himself erect and smiling,
which did not prevent him from being a bad bishop. Monseigneur Welcome had what
the people term a "fine head," but so amiable was he that they forgot that it was fine.
When he conversed with that infantile gayety which was one of his charms, and of
which we have already spoken, people felt at their ease with him, and joy seemed to
radiate from his whole person. His fresh and ruddy complexion, his very white teeth,
all of which he had preserved, and which were displayed by his smile, gave him that
open and easy air which cause the remark to be made of a man, "He's a good fellow";
and of an old man, "He is a fine man." That, it will be recalled, was the effect which he
produced upon Napoleon. On the first encounter, and to one who saw him for the first
time, he was nothing, in fact, but a fine man. But if one remained near him for a few
hours, and beheld him in the least degree pensive, the fine man became gradually
transfigured, and took on some imposing quality, I know not what; his broad and serious
brow, rendered august by his white locks, became august also by virtue of meditation;
majesty radiated from his goodness, though his goodness ceased not to be radiant; one
experienced something of the emotion which one would feel on beholding a smiling
angel slowly unfold his wings, without ceasing to smile. Respect, an unutterable
respect, penetrated you by degrees and mounted to your heart, and one felt that one had
before him one of those strong, thoroughly tried, and indulgent souls where thought is
so grand that it can no longer be anything but gentle.
As we have seen, prayer, the celebration of the offices of religion, alms-giving, the
consolation of the afflicted, the cultivation of a bit of land, fraternity, frugality,
hospitality, renunciation, confidence, study, work, filled every day of his life. Filled is
exactly the word; certainly the Bishop's day was quite full to the brim, of good words
and good deeds. Nevertheless, it was not complete if cold or rainy weather prevented
his passing an hour or two in his garden before going to bed, and after the two women
had retired. It seemed to be a sort of rite with him, to prepare himself for slumber by
meditation in the presence of the grand spectacles of the nocturnal heavens. Sometimes,
if the two old women were not asleep, they heard him pacing slowly along the walks at
a very advanced hour of the night. He was there alone, communing with himself,
peaceful, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart with the serenity of the ether,
moved amid the darkness by the visible splendor of the constellations and the invisible
splendor of God, opening his heart to the thoughts which fall from the Unknown. At
such moments, while he offered his heart at the hour when nocturnal flowers offer their
perfume, illuminated like a lamp amid the starry night, as he poured himself out in
ecstasy in the midst of the universal radiance of creation, he could not have told himself,
probably, what was passing in his spirit; he felt something take its flight from him, and
something descend into him. Mysterious exchange of the abysses of the soul with the
abysses of the universe!
He thought of the grandeur and presence of God; of the future eternity, that strange
mystery; of the eternity past, a mystery still more strange; of all the infinities, which
pierced their way into all his senses, beneath his eyes; and, without seeking to
comprehend the incomprehensible, he gazed upon it. He did not study God; he was
dazzled by him. He considered those magnificent conjunctions of atoms, which
communicate aspects to matter, reveal forces by verifying them, create individualities
in unity, proportions in extent, the innumerable in the infinite, and, through light,
produce beauty. These conjunctions are formed and dissolved incessantly; hence life
and death.
He seated himself on a wooden bench, with his back against a decrepit vine; he gazed
at the stars, past the puny and stunted silhouettes of his fruit-trees. This quarter of an
acre, so poorly planted, so encumbered with mean buildings and sheds, was dear to him,
and satisfied his wants.
What more was needed by this old man, who divided the leisure of his life, where
there was so little leisure, between gardening in the daytime and contemplation at night?
Was not this narrow enclosure, with the heavens for a ceiling, sufficient to enable him
to adore God in his most divine works, in turn? Does not this comprehend all, in fact?
and what is there left to desire beyond it? A little garden in which to walk, and
immensity in which to dream. At one's feet that which can be cultivated and plucked;
over head that which one can study and meditate upon: some flowers on earth, and all
the stars in the sky.
 CHAPTER XIV—
WHAT HE
THOUGHT
One last word.
Since this sort of details might, particularly at the present moment, and to use an
expression now in fashion, give to the Bishop of D—— a certain "pantheistical"
physiognomy, and induce the belief, either to his credit or discredit, that he entertained
one of those personal philosophies which are peculiar to our century, which sometimes
spring up in solitary spirits, and there take on a form and grow until they usurp the place
of religion, we insist upon it, that not one of those persons who knew Monseigneur
Welcome would have thought himself authorized to think anything of the sort. That
which enlightened this man was his heart. His wisdom was made of the light which
comes from there.
No systems; many works. Abstruse speculations contain vertigo; no, there is nothing
to indicate that he risked his mind in apocalypses. The apostle may be daring, but the
bishop must be timid. He would probably have felt a scruple at sounding too far in
advance certain problems which are, in a manner, reserved for terrible great minds.
There is a sacred horror beneath the porches of the enigma; those gloomy openings
stand yawning there, but something tells you, you, a passer-by in life, that you must not
enter. Woe to him who penetrates thither!
Geniuses in the impenetrable depths of abstraction and pure speculation, situated, so
to speak, above all dogmas, propose their ideas to God. Their prayer audaciously offers
discussion. Their adoration interrogates. This is direct religion, which is full of anxiety
and responsibility for him who attempts its steep cliffs.
Human meditation has no limits. At his own risk and peril, it analyzes and digs deep
into its own bedazzlement. One might almost say, that by a sort of splendid reaction, it
with it dazzles nature; the mysterious world which surrounds us renders back what it
has received; it is probable that the contemplators are contemplated. However that may
be, there are on earth men who—are they men?—perceive distinctly at the verge of the
horizons of revery the heights of the absolute, and who have the terrible vision of the
infinite mountain. Monseigneur Welcome was one of these men; Monseigneur
Welcome was not a genius. He would have feared those sublimities whence some very
great men even, like Swedenborg and Pascal, have slipped into insanity. Certainly, these
powerful reveries have their moral utility, and by these arduous paths one approaches
to ideal perfection. As for him, he took the path which shortens,—the Gospel's.
He did not attempt to impart to his chasuble the folds of Elijah's mantle; he projected
no ray of future upon the dark groundswell of events; he did not see to condense in
flame the light of things; he had nothing of the prophet and nothing of the magician
about him. This humble soul loved, and that was all.
That he carried prayer to the pitch of a superhuman aspiration is probable: but one
can no more pray too much than one can love too much; and if it is a heresy to pray
beyond the texts, Saint Theresa and Saint Jerome would be heretics.
He inclined towards all that groans and all that expiates. The universe appeared to
him like an immense malady; everywhere he felt fever, everywhere he heard the sound
of suffering, and, without seeking to solve the enigma, he strove to dress the wound.
The terrible spectacle of created things developed tenderness in him; he was occupied
only in finding for himself, and in inspiring others with the best way to compassionate
and relieve. That which exists was for this good and rare priest a permanent subject of
sadness which sought consolation.
There are men who toil at extracting gold; he toiled at the extraction of pity. Universal
misery was his mine. The sadness which reigned everywhere was but an excuse for
unfailing kindness. Love each other; he declared this to be complete, desired nothing
further, and that was the whole of his doctrine. One day, that man who believed himself
to be a "philosopher," the senator who has already been alluded to, said to the Bishop:
"Just survey the spectacle of the world: all war against all; the strongest has the most
wit. Your love each other is nonsense."—"Well," replied Monseigneur Welcome,
without contesting the point, "if it is nonsense, the soul should shut itself up in it, as the
pearl in the oyster." Thus he shut himself up, he lived there, he was absolutely satisfied
with it, leaving on one side the prodigious questions which attract and terrify, the
fathomless perspectives of abstraction, the precipices of metaphysics—all those
profundities which converge, for the apostle in God, for the atheist in nothingness;
destiny, good and evil, the way of being against being, the conscience of man, the
thoughtful somnambulism of the animal, the transformation in death, the recapitulation
of existences which the tomb contains, the incomprehensible grafting of successive
loves on the persistent I, the essence, the substance, the Nile, and the Ens, the soul,
nature, liberty, necessity; perpendicular problems, sinister obscurities, where lean the
gigantic archangels of the human mind; formidable abysses, which Lucretius, Manou,
Saint Paul, Dante, contemplate with eyes flashing lightning, which seems by its steady
gaze on the infinite to cause stars to blaze forth there.
Monseigneur Bienvenu was simply a man who took note of the exterior of mysterious
questions without scrutinizing them, and without troubling his own mind with them,
and who cherished in his own soul a grave respect for darkness.
 BOOK SECOND—
THE FALL

CHAPTER I—THE
EVENING OF A
DAY OF
WALKING
Early in the month of October, 1815, about an hour before sunset, a man who was
travelling on foot entered the little town of D——The few inhabitants who were at their
windows or on their thresholds at the moment stared at this traveller with a sort of
uneasiness. It was difficult to encounter a wayfarer of more wretched appearance. He
was a man of medium stature, thickset and robust, in the prime of life. He might have
been forty-six or forty-eight years old. A cap with a drooping leather visor partly
concealed his face, burned and tanned by sun and wind, and dripping with perspiration.
His shirt of coarse yellow linen, fastened at the neck by a small silver anchor, permitted
a view of his hairy breast: he had a cravat twisted into a string; trousers of blue drilling,
worn and threadbare, white on one knee and torn on the other; an old gray, tattered
blouse, patched on one of the elbows with a bit of green cloth sewed on with twine; a
tightly packed soldier knapsack, well buckled and perfectly new, on his back; an
enormous, knotty stick in his hand; iron-shod shoes on his stockingless feet; a shaved
head and a long beard.
The sweat, the heat, the journey on foot, the dust, added I know not what sordid
quality to this dilapidated whole. His hair was closely cut, yet bristling, for it had begun
to grow a little, and did not seem to have been cut for some time.
No one knew him. He was evidently only a chance passer-by. Whence came he? From
the south; from the seashore, perhaps, for he made his entrance into D—— by the same
street which, seven months previously, had witnessed the passage of the Emperor
Napoleon on his way from Cannes to Paris. This man must have been walking all day.
He seemed very much fatigued. Some women of the ancient market town which is
situated below the city had seen him pause beneath the trees of the boulevard Gassendi,
and drink at the fountain which stands at the end of the promenade. He must have been
very thirsty: for the children who followed him saw him stop again for a drink, two
hundred paces further on, at the fountain in the market-place.
 On arriving at the corner of the Rue Poichevert, he turned to the left, and directed his
steps toward the town-hall. He entered, then came out a quarter of an hour later. A
gendarme was seated near the door, on the stone bench which General Drouot had
mounted on the 4th of March to read to the frightened throng of the inhabitants of D—
—the proclamation of the Gulf Juan. The man pulled off his cap and humbly saluted
the gendarme.
The gendarme, without replying to his salute, stared attentively at him, followed him
for a while with his eyes, and then entered the town-hall.
There then existed at D—— a fine inn at the sign of the Cross of Colbas. This inn
had for a landlord a certain Jacquin Labarre, a man of consideration in the town on
account of his relationship to another Labarre, who kept the inn of the Three Dauphins
in Grenoble, and had served in the Guides. At the time of the Emperor's landing, many
rumors had circulated throughout the country with regard to this inn of the Three
Dauphins. It was said that General Bertrand, disguised as a carter, had made frequent
trips thither in the month of January, and that he had distributed crosses of honor to the
soldiers and handfuls of gold to the citizens. The truth is, that when the Emperor entered
Grenoble he had refused to install himself at the hotel of the prefecture; he had thanked
the mayor, saying, "I am going to the house of a brave man of my acquaintance"; and
he had betaken himself to the Three Dauphins. This glory of the Labarre of the Three
Dauphins was reflected upon the Labarre of the Cross of Colbas, at a distance of five
and twenty leagues. It was said of him in the town, "That is the cousin of the man of
Grenoble."
The man bent his steps towards this inn, which was the best in the country-side. He
entered the kitchen, which opened on a level with the street. All the stoves were lighted;
a huge fire blazed gayly in the fireplace. The host, who was also the chief cook, was
going from one stew-pan to another, very busily superintending an excellent dinner
designed for the wagoners, whose loud talking, conversation, and laughter were audible
from an adjoining apartment. Any one who has travelled knows that there is no one who
indulges in better cheer than wagoners. A fat marmot, flanked by white partridges and
heather-cocks, was turning on a long spit before the fire; on the stove, two huge carps
from Lake Lauzet and a trout from Lake Alloz were cooking.
The host, hearing the door open and seeing a newcomer enter, said, without raising
his eyes from his stoves:—
"What do you wish, sir?"
"Food and lodging," said the man.
"Nothing easier," replied the host. At that moment he turned his head, took in the
traveller's appearance with a single glance, and added, "By paying for it."
The man drew a large leather purse from the pocket of his blouse, and answered, "I
have money."
"In that case, we are at your service," said the host.
 The man put his purse back in his pocket, removed his knapsack from his back, put
it on the ground near the door, retained his stick in his hand, and seated himself on a
low stool close to the fire. D—— is in the mountains. The evenings are cold there in
October.
But as the host went back and forth, he scrutinized the traveller.
"Will dinner be ready soon?" said the man.
"Immediately," replied the landlord.
While the newcomer was warming himself before the fire, with his back turned, the
worthy host, Jacquin Labarre, drew a pencil from his pocket, then tore off the corner of
an old newspaper which was lying on a small table near the window. On the white
margin he wrote a line or two, folded it without sealing, and then intrusted this scrap of
paper to a child who seemed to serve him in the capacity both of scullion and lackey.
The landlord whispèred a word in the scullion's ear, and the child set off on a run in the
direction of the town-hall.
The traveller saw nothing of all this.
Once more he inquired, "Will dinner be ready soon?"
"Immediately," responded the host.
The child returned. He brought back the paper. The host unfolded it eagerly, like a
person who is expecting a reply. He seemed to read it attentively, then tossed his head,
and remained thoughtful for a moment. Then he took a step in the direction of the
traveller, who appeared to be immersed in reflections which were not very serene.
"I cannot receive you, sir," said he.
The man half rose.
"What! Are you afraid that I will not pay you? Do you want me to pay you in advance?
I have money, I tell you."
"It is not that."
"What then?"
"You have money—"
"Yes," said the man.
"And I," said the host, "have no room."
The man resumed tranquilly, "Put me in the stable."
"I cannot."
"Why?"
"The horses take up all the space."
"Very well!" retorted the man; "a corner of the loft then, a truss of straw. We will see
about that after dinner."
"I cannot give you any dinner."
 This declaration, made in a measured but firm tone, struck the stranger as grave. He
rose.
"Ah! bah! But I am dying of hunger. I have been walking since sunrise. I have
travelled twelve leagues. I pay. I wish to eat."
"I have nothing," said the landlord.
The man burst out laughing, and turned towards the fireplace and the stoves:
"Nothing! and all that?"
"All that is engaged."
"By whom?"
"By messieurs the wagoners."
"How many are there of them?"
"Twelve."
"There is enough food there for twenty."
"They have engaged the whole of it and paid for it in advance."
The man seated himself again, and said, without raising his voice, "I am at an inn; I
am hungry, and I shall remain."
Then the host bent down to his ear, and said in a tone which made him start, "Go
away!"
At that moment the traveller was bending forward and thrusting some brands into the
fire with the iron-shod tip of his staff; he turned quickly round, and as he opened his
mouth to reply, the host gazed steadily at him and added, still in a low voice: "Stop!
there's enough of that sort of talk. Do you want me to tell you your name? Your name
is Jean Valjean. Now do you want me to tell you who you are? When I saw you come
in I suspected something; I sent to the town-hall, and this was the reply that was sent to
me. Can you read?"
So saying, he held out to the stranger, fully unfolded, the paper which had just
travelled from the inn to the town-hall, and from the town-hall to the inn. The man cast
a glance upon it. The landlord resumed after a pause.
"I am in the habit of being polite to every one. Go away!"
The man dropped his head, picked up the knapsack which he had deposited on the
ground, and took his departure.
He chose the principal street. He walked straight on at a venture, keeping close to the
houses like a sad and humiliated man. He did not turn round a single time. Had he done
so, he would have seen the host of the Cross of Colbas standing on his threshold,
surrounded by all the guests of his inn, and all the passers-by in the street, talking
vivaciously, and pointing him out with his finger; and, from the glances of terror and
distrust cast by the group, he might have divined that his arrival would speedily become
an event for the whole town.
 He saw nothing of all this. People who are crushed do not look behind them. They
know but too well the evil fate which follows them.
Thus he proceeded for some time, walking on without ceasing, traversing at random
streets of which he knew nothing, forgetful of his fatigue, as is often the case when a
man is sad. All at once he felt the pangs of hunger sharply. Night was drawing near. He
glanced about him, to see whether he could not discover some shelter.
The fine hostelry was closed to him; he was seeking some very humble public house,
some hovel, however lowly.
Just then a light flashed up at the end of the streets; a pine branch suspended from a
cross-beam of iron was outlined against the white sky of the twilight. He proceeded
thither.
It proved to be, in fact, a public house. The public house which is in the Rue de
Chaffaut.
The wayfarer halted for a moment, and peeped through the window into the interior
of the low-studded room of the public house, illuminated by a small lamp on a table and
by a large fire on the hearth. Some men were engaged in drinking there. The landlord
was warming himself. An iron pot, suspended from a crane, bubbled over the flame.
The entrance to this public house, which is also a sort of an inn, is by two doors. One
opens on the street, the other upon a small yard filled with manure. The traveller dare
not enter by the street door. He slipped into the yard, halted again, then raised the latch
timidly and opened the door.
"Who goes there?" said the master.
"Some one who wants supper and bed."
"Good. We furnish supper and bed here."
He entered. All the men who were drinking turned round. The lamp illuminated him
on one side, the firelight on the other. They examined him for some time while he was
taking off his knapsack.
The host said to him, "There is the fire. The supper is cooking in the pot. Come and
warm yourself, comrade."
He approached and seated himself near the hearth. He stretched out his feet, which
were exhausted with fatigue, to the fire; a fine odor was emitted by the pot. All that
could be distinguished of his face, beneath his cap, which was well pulled down,
assumed a vague appearance of comfort, mingled with that other poignant aspect which
habitual suffering bestows.
It was, moreover, a firm, energetic, and melancholy profile. This physiognomy was
strangely composed; it began by seeming humble, and ended by seeming severe. The
eye shone beneath its lashes like a fire beneath brushwood.
One of the men seated at the table, however, was a fishmonger who, before entering
the public house of the Rue de Chaffaut, had been to stable his horse at Labarre's. It
chanced that he had that very morning encountered this unprepossessing stranger on the
road between Bras d'Asse and—I have forgotten the name. I think it was Escoublon.
Now, when he met him, the man, who then seemed already extremely weary, had
requested him to take him on his crupper; to which the fishmonger had made no reply
except by redoubling his gait. This fishmonger had been a member half an hour
previously of the group which surrounded Jacquin Labarre, and had himself related his
disagreeable encounter of the morning to the people at the Cross of Colbas. From where
he sat he made an imperceptible sign to the tavern-keeper. The tavern-keeper went to
him. They exchanged a few words in a low tone. The man had again become absorbed
in his reflections.
The tavern-keeper returned to the fireplace, laid his hand abruptly on the shoulder of
the man, and said to him:—
"You are going to get out of here."
The stranger turned round and replied gently, "Ah! You know?—"
"Yes."
"I was sent away from the other inn."
"And you are to be turned out of this one."
"Where would you have me go?"
"Elsewhere."
The man took his stick and his knapsack and departed.
As he went out, some children who had followed him from the Cross of Colbas, and
who seemed to be lying in wait for him, threw stones at him. He retraced his steps in
anger, and threatened them with his stick: the children dispersed like a flock of birds.
He passed before the prison. At the door hung an iron chain attached to a bell. He
rang.
The wicket opened.
"Turnkey," said he, removing his cap politely, "will you have the kindness to admit
me, and give me a lodging for the night?"
A voice replied:—
"The prison is not an inn. Get yourself arrested, and you will be admitted."
The wicket closed again.
He entered a little street in which there were many gardens. Some of them are
enclosed only by hedges, which lends a cheerful aspect to the street. In the midst of
these gardens and hedges he caught sight of a small house of a single story, the window
of which was lighted up. He peered through the pane as he had done at the public house.
Within was a large whitewashed room, with a bed draped in printed cotton stuff, and a
cradle in one corner, a few wooden chairs, and a double-barrelled gun hanging on the
wall. A table was spread in the centre of the room. A copper lamp illuminated the
tablecloth of coarse white linen, the pewter jug shining like silver, and filled with wine,
and the brown, smoking soup-tureen. At this table sat a man of about forty, with a merry
and open countenance, who was dandling a little child on his knees. Close by a very
young woman was nursing another child. The father was laughing, the child was
laughing, the mother was smiling.
The stranger paused a moment in revery before this tender and calming spectacle.
What was taking place within him? He alone could have told. It is probable that he
thought that this joyous house would be hospitable, and that, in a place where he beheld
so much happiness, he would find perhaps a little pity.
He tapped on the pane with a very small and feeble knock.
They did not hear him.
He tapped again.
He heard the woman say, "It seems to me, husband, that some one is knocking."
"No," replied the husband.
He tapped a third time.
The husband rose, took the lamp, and went to the door, which he opened.
He was a man of lofty stature, half peasant, half artisan. He wore a huge leather apron,
which reached to his left shoulder, and which a hammer, a red handkerchief, a powder-
horn, and all sorts of objects which were upheld by the girdle, as in a pocket, caused to
bulge out. He carried his head thrown backwards; his shirt, widely opened and turned
back, displayed his bull neck, white and bare. He had thick eyelashes, enormous black
whiskers, prominent eyes, the lower part of his face like a snout; and besides all this,
that air of being on his own ground, which is indescribable.
"Pardon me, sir," said the wayfarer, "Could you, in consideration of payment, give
me a plate of soup and a corner of that shed yonder in the garden, in which to sleep?
Tell me; can you? For money?"
"Who are you?" demanded the master of the house.
The man replied: "I have just come from Puy-Moisson. I have walked all day long. I
have travelled twelve leagues. Can you?—if I pay?"
"I would not refuse," said the peasant, "to lodge any respectable man who would pay
me. But why do you not go to the inn?"
"There is no room."
"Bah! Impossible. This is neither a fair nor a market day. Have you been to Labarre?"
"Yes."
"Well?"
The traveller replied with embarrassment: "I do not know. He did not receive me."
"Have you been to What's-his-name's, in the Rue Chaffaut?"
 The stranger's embarrassment increased; he stammered, "He did not receive me
either."
The peasant's countenance assumed an expression of distrust; he surveyed the
newcomer from head to feet, and suddenly exclaimed, with a sort of shudder:—
"Are you the man?—"
He cast a fresh glance upon the stranger, took three steps backwards, placed the lamp
on the table, and took his gun down from the wall.
Meanwhile, at the words, Are you the man? the woman had risen, had clasped her
two children in her arms, and had taken refuge precipitately behind her husband, staring
in terror at the stranger, with her bosom uncovered, and with frightened eyes, as she
murmured in a low tone, "Tso-maraude."1
All this took place in less time than it requires to picture it to one's self. After having
scrutinized the man for several moments, as one scrutinizes a viper, the master of the
house returned to the door and said:—
"Clear out!"
"For pity's sake, a glass of water," said the man.
"A shot from my gun!" said the peasant.
Then he closed the door violently, and the man heard him shoot two large bolts. A
moment later, the window-shutter was closed, and the sound of a bar of iron which was
placed against it was audible outside.
Night continued to fall. A cold wind from the Alps was blowing. By the light of the
expiring day the stranger perceived, in one of the gardens which bordered the street, a
sort of hut, which seemed to him to be built of sods. He climbed over the wooden fence
resolutely, and found himself in the garden. He approached the hut; its door consisted
of a very low and narrow aperture, and it resembled those buildings which road-laborers
construct for themselves along the roads. He thought without doubt, that it was, in fact,
the dwelling of a road-laborer; he was suffering from cold and hunger, but this was, at
least, a shelter from the cold. This sort of dwelling is not usually occupied at night. He
threw himself flat on his face, and crawled into the hut. It was warm there, and he found
a tolerably good bed of straw. He lay, for a moment, stretched out on this bed, without
the power to make a movement, so fatigued was he. Then, as the knapsack on his back
was in his way, and as it furnished, moreover, a pillow ready to his hand, he set about
unbuckling one of the straps. At that moment, a ferocious growl became audible. He
raised his eyes. The head of an enormous dog was outlined in the darkness at the
entrance of the hut.
It was a dog's kennel.
He was himself vigorous and formidable; he armed himself with his staff, made a
shield of his knapsack, and made his way out of the kennel in the best way he could,
not without enlarging the rents in his rags.
 He left the garden in the same manner, but backwards, being obliged, in order to keep
the dog respectful, to have recourse to that manoeuvre with his stick which masters in
that sort of fencing designate as la rose couverte.
When he had, not without difficulty, repassed the fence, and found himself once more
in the street, alone, without refuge, without shelter, without a roof over his head, chased
even from that bed of straw and from that miserable kennel, he dropped rather than
seated himself on a stone, and it appears that a passer-by heard him exclaim, "I am not
even a dog!"
He soon rose again and resumed his march. He went out of the town, hoping to find
some tree or haystack in the fields which would afford him shelter.
He walked thus for some time, with his head still drooping. When he felt himself far
from every human habitation, he raised his eyes and gazed searchingly about him. He
was in a field. Before him was one of those low hills covered with close-cut stubble,
which, after the harvest, resemble shaved heads.
The horizon was perfectly black. This was not alone the obscurity of night; it was
caused by very low-hanging clouds which seemed to rest upon the hill itself, and which
were mounting and filling the whole sky. Meanwhile, as the moon was about to rise,
and as there was still floating in the zenith a remnant of the brightness of twilight, these
clouds formed at the summit of the sky a sort of whitish arch, whence a gleam of light
fell upon the earth.
The earth was thus better lighted than the sky, which produces a particularly sinister
effect, and the hill, whose contour was poor and mean, was outlined vague and wan
against the gloomy horizon. The whole effect was hideous, petty, lugubrious, and
narrow.
There was nothing in the field or on the hill except a deformed tree, which writhed
and shivered a few paces distant from the wayfarer.
This man was evidently very far from having those delicate habits of intelligence and
spirit which render one sensible to the mysterious aspects of things; nevertheless, there
was something in that sky, in that hill, in that plain, in that tree, which was so profoundly
desolate, that after a moment of immobility and revery he turned back abruptly. There
are instants when nature seems hostile.
He retraced his steps; the gates of D—— were closed. D——, which had sustained
sieges during the wars of religion, was still surrounded in 1815 by ancient walls flanked
by square towers which have been demolished since. He passed through a breach and
entered the town again.
It might have been eight o'clock in the evening. As he was not acquainted with the
streets, he recommenced his walk at random.
In this way he came to the prefecture, then to the seminary. As he passed through the
Cathedral Square, he shook his fist at the church.
 At the corner of this square there is a printing establishment. It is there that the
proclamations of the Emperor and of the Imperial Guard to the army, brought from the
Island of Elba and dictated by Napoleon himself, were printed for the first time.
Worn out with fatigue, and no longer entertaining any hope, he lay down on a stone
bench which stands at the doorway of this printing office.
At that moment an old woman came out of the church. She saw the man stretched out
in the shadow. "What are you doing there, my friend?" said she.
He answered harshly and angrily: "As you see, my good woman, I am sleeping." The
good woman, who was well worthy the name, in fact, was the Marquise de R——
"On this bench?" she went on.
"I have had a mattress of wood for nineteen years," said the man; "to-day I have a
mattress of stone."
"You have been a soldier?"
"Yes, my good woman, a soldier."
"Why do you not go to the inn?"
"Because I have no money."
"Alas!" said Madame de R——, "I have only four sous in my purse."
"Give it to me all the same."
The man took the four sous. Madame de R—— continued: "You cannot obtain
lodgings in an inn for so small a sum. But have you tried? It is impossible for you to
pass the night thus. You are cold and hungry, no doubt. Some one might have given
you a lodging out of charity."
"I have knocked at all doors."
"Well?"
"I have been driven away everywhere."
The "good woman" touched the man's arm, and pointed out to him on the other side
of the street a small, low house, which stood beside the Bishop's palace.
"You have knocked at all doors?"
"Yes."
"Have you knocked at that one?"
"No."
"Knock there."
 CHAPTER II—
PRUDENCE
COUNSELLED TO
WISDOM.
That evening, the Bishop of D——, after his promenade through the town, remained
shut up rather late in his room. He was busy over a great work on Duties, which was
never completed, unfortunately. He was carefully compiling everything that the Fathers
and the doctors have said on this important subject. His book was divided into two parts:
firstly, the duties of all; secondly, the duties of each individual, according to the class
to which he belongs. The duties of all are the great duties. There are four of these. Saint
Matthew points them out: duties towards God (Matt. vi.); duties towards one's self
(Matt. v. 29, 30); duties towards one's neighbor (Matt. vii. 12); duties towards animals
(Matt. vi. 20, 25). As for the other duties the Bishop found them pointed out and
prescribed elsewhere: to sovereigns and subjects, in the Epistle to the Romans; to
magistrates, to wives, to mothers, to young men, by Saint Peter; to husbands, fathers,
children and servants, in the Epistle to the Ephesians; to the faithful, in the Epistle to
the Hebrews; to virgins, in the Epistle to the Corinthians. Out of these precepts he was
laboriously constructing a harmonious whole, which he desired to present to souls.
At eight o'clock he was still at work, writing with a good deal of inconvenience upon
little squares of paper, with a big book open on his knees, when Madame Magloire
entered, according to her wont, to get the silver-ware from the cupboard near his bed.
A moment later, the Bishop, knowing that the table was set, and that his sister was
probably waiting for him, shut his book, rose from his table, and entered the dining-
room.
The dining-room was an oblong apartment, with a fireplace, which had a door
opening on the street (as we have said), and a window opening on the garden.
Madame Magloire was, in fact, just putting the last touches to the table.
As she performed this service, she was conversing with Mademoiselle Baptistine.
A lamp stood on the table; the table was near the fireplace. A wood fire was burning
there.
One can easily picture to one's self these two women, both of whom were over sixty
years of age. Madame Magloire small, plump, vivacious; Mademoiselle Baptistine
gentle, slender, frail, somewhat taller than her brother, dressed in a gown of puce-
colored silk, of the fashion of 1806, which she had purchased at that date in Paris, and
which had lasted ever since. To borrow vulgar phrases, which possess the merit of
giving utterance in a single word to an idea which a whole page would hardly suffice
to express, Madame Magloire had the air of a peasant, and Mademoiselle Baptistine
that of a lady. Madame Magloire wore a white quilted cap, a gold Jeannette cross on a
velvet ribbon upon her neck, the only bit of feminine jewelry that there was in the house,
a very white fichu puffing out from a gown of coarse black woollen stuff, with large,
short sleeves, an apron of cotton cloth in red and green checks, knotted round the waist
with a green ribbon, with a stomacher of the same attached by two pins at the upper
corners, coarse shoes on her feet, and yellow stockings, like the women of Marseilles.
Mademoiselle Baptistine's gown was cut on the patterns of 1806, with a short waist, a
narrow, sheath-like skirt, puffed sleeves, with flaps and buttons. She concealed her gray
hair under a frizzed wig known as the baby wig. Madame Magloire had an intelligent,
vivacious, and kindly air; the two corners of her mouth unequally raised, and her upper
lip, which was larger than the lower, imparted to her a rather crabbed and imperious
look. So long as Monseigneur held his peace, she talked to him resolutely with a mixture
of respect and freedom; but as soon as Monseigneur began to speak, as we have seen,
she obeyed passively like her mistress. Mademoiselle Baptistine did not even speak.
She confined herself to obeying and pleasing him. She had never been pretty, even when
she was young; she had large, blue, prominent eyes, and a long arched nose; but her
whole visage, her whole person, breathed forth an ineffable goodness, as we stated in
the beginning. She had always been predestined to gentleness; but faith, charity, hope,
those three virtues which mildly warm the soul, had gradually elevated that gentleness
to sanctity. Nature had made her a lamb, religion had made her an angel. Poor sainted
virgin! Sweet memory which has vanished!
Mademoiselle Baptistine has so often narrated what passed at the episcopal residence
that evening, that there are many people now living who still recall the most minute
details.
At the moment when the Bishop entered, Madame Magloire was talking with
considerable vivacity. She was haranguing Mademoiselle Baptistine on a subject which
was familiar to her and to which the Bishop was also accustomed. The question
concerned the lock upon the entrance door.
It appears that while procuring some provisions for supper, Madame Magloire had
heard things in divers places. People had spoken of a prowler of evil appearance; a
suspicious vagabond had arrived who must be somewhere about the town, and those
who should take it into their heads to return home late that night might be subjected to
unpleasant encounters. The police was very badly organized, moreover, because there
was no love lost between the Prefect and the Mayor, who sought to injure each other by
making things happen. It behooved wise people to play the part of their own police, and
to guard themselves well, and care must be taken to duly close, bar and barricade their
houses, and to fasten the doors well.
Madame Magloire emphasized these last words; but the Bishop had just come from
his room, where it was rather cold. He seated himself in front of the fire, and warmed
himself, and then fell to thinking of other things. He did not take up the remark dropped
with design by Madame Magloire. She repeated it. Then Mademoiselle Baptistine,
desirous of satisfying Madame Magloire without displeasing her brother, ventured to
say timidly:—
"Did you hear what Madame Magloire is saying, brother?"
"I have heard something of it in a vague way," replied the Bishop. Then half-turning
in his chair, placing his hands on his knees, and raising towards the old servant woman
his cordial face, which so easily grew joyous, and which was illuminated from below
by the firelight,—"Come, what is the matter? What is the matter? Are we in any great
danger?"
Then Madame Magloire began the whole story afresh, exaggerating it a little without
being aware of the fact. It appeared that a Bohemian, a bare-footed vagabond, a sort of
dangerous mendicant, was at that moment in the town. He had presented himself at
Jacquin Labarre's to obtain lodgings, but the latter had not been willing to take him in.
He had been seen to arrive by the way of the boulevard Gassendi and roam about the
streets in the gloaming. A gallows-bird with a terrible face.
"Really!" said the Bishop.
This willingness to interrogate encouraged Madame Magloire; it seemed to her to
indicate that the Bishop was on the point of becoming alarmed; she pursued
triumphantly:—
"Yes, Monseigneur. That is how it is. There will be some sort of catastrophe in this
town to-night. Every one says so. And withal, the police is so badly regulated" (a useful
repetition). "The idea of living in a mountainous country, and not even having lights in
the streets at night! One goes out. Black as ovens, indeed! And I say, Monseigneur, and
Mademoiselle there says with me—"
"I," interrupted his sister, "say nothing. What my brother does is well done."
Madame Magloire continued as though there had been no protest:—
"We say that this house is not safe at all; that if Monseigneur will permit, I will go
and tell Paulin Musebois, the locksmith, to come and replace the ancient locks on the
doors; we have them, and it is only the work of a moment; for I say that nothing is more
terrible than a door which can be opened from the outside with a latch by the first passer-
by; and I say that we need bolts, Monseigneur, if only for this night; moreover,
Monseigneur has the habit of always saying 'come in'; and besides, even in the middle
of the night, O mon Dieu! there is no need to ask permission."
At that moment there came a tolerably violent knock on the door.
"Come in," said the Bishop.
 CHAPTER III—
THE HEROISM OF
PASSIVE
OBEDIENCE.
The door opened.

It opened wide with a rapid movement, as though some one had given it an energetic
and resolute push.
A man entered.
We already know the man. It was the wayfarer whom we have seen wandering about
in search of shelter.
He entered, advanced a step, and halted, leaving the door open behind him. He had
his knapsack on his shoulders, his cudgel in his hand, a rough, audacious, weary, and
violent expression in his eyes. The fire on the hearth lighted him up. He was hideous. It
was a sinister apparition.
Madame Magloire had not even the strength to utter a cry. She trembled, and stood
with her mouth wide open.
Mademoiselle Baptistine turned round, beheld the man entering, and half started up
in terror; then, turning her head by degrees towards the fireplace again, she began to
observe her brother, and her face became once more profoundly calm and serene.
The Bishop fixed a tranquil eye on the man.
As he opened his mouth, doubtless to ask the new-comer what he desired, the man
rested both hands on his staff, directed his gaze at the old man and the two women, and
without waiting for the Bishop to speak, he said, in a loud voice:—
"See here. My name is Jean Valjean. I am a convict from the galleys. I have passed
nineteen years in the galleys. I was liberated four days ago, and am on my way to
Pontarlier, which is my destination. I have been walking for four days since I left
Toulon. I have travelled a dozen leagues to-day on foot. This evening, when I arrived
in these parts, I went to an inn, and they turned me out, because of my yellow passport,
which I had shown at the town-hall. I had to do it. I went to an inn. They said to me,
'Be off,' at both places. No one would take me. I went to the prison; the jailer would not
admit me. I went into a dog's kennel; the dog bit me and chased me off, as though he
had been a man. One would have said that he knew who I was. I went into the fields,
intending to sleep in the open air, beneath the stars. There were no stars. I thought it
was going to rain, and I re-entered the town, to seek the recess of a doorway. Yonder,
in the square, I meant to sleep on a stone bench. A good woman pointed out your house
to me, and said to me, 'Knock there!' I have knocked. What is this place? Do you keep
an inn? I have money—savings. One hundred and nine francs fifteen sous, which I
earned in the galleys by my labor, in the course of nineteen years. I will pay. What is
that to me? I have money. I am very weary; twelve leagues on foot; I am very hungry.
Are you willing that I should remain?"
"Madame Magloire," said the Bishop, "you will set another place."
The man advanced three paces, and approached the lamp which was on the table.
"Stop," he resumed, as though he had not quite understood; "that's not it. Did you hear?
I am a galley-slave; a convict. I come from the galleys." He drew from his pocket a
large sheet of yellow paper, which he unfolded. "Here's my passport. Yellow, as you
see. This serves to expel me from every place where I go. Will you read it? I know how
to read. I learned in the galleys. There is a school there for those who choose to learn.
Hold, this is what they put on this passport: 'Jean Valjean, discharged convict, native
of'—that is nothing to you—'has been nineteen years in the galleys: five years for house-
breaking and burglary; fourteen years for having attempted to escape on four occasions.
He is a very dangerous man.' There! Every one has cast me out. Are you willing to
receive me? Is this an inn? Will you give me something to eat and a bed? Have you a
stable?"
"Madame Magloire," said the Bishop, "you will put white sheets on the bed in the
alcove." We have already explained the character of the two women's obedience.
Madame Magloire retired to execute these orders.
The Bishop turned to the man.
"Sit down, sir, and warm yourself. We are going to sup in a few moments, and your
bed will be prepared while you are supping."
At this point the man suddenly comprehended. The expression of his face, up to that
time sombre and harsh, bore the imprint of stupefaction, of doubt, of joy, and became
extraordinary. He began stammering like a crazy man:—
"Really? What! You will keep me? You do not drive me forth? A convict! You call
me sir! You do not address me as thou? 'Get out of here, you dog!' is what people always
say to me. I felt sure that you would expel me, so I told you at once who I am. Oh, what
a good woman that was who directed me hither! I am going to sup! A bed with a
mattress and sheets, like the rest of the world! a bed! It is nineteen years since I have
slept in a bed! You actually do not want me to go! You are good people. Besides, I have
money. I will pay well. Pardon me, monsieur the inn-keeper, but what is your name? I
will pay anything you ask. You are a fine man. You are an inn-keeper, are you not?"
"I am," replied the Bishop, "a priest who lives here."
"A priest!" said the man. "Oh, what a fine priest! Then you are not going to demand
any money of me? You are the cure, are you not? the cure of this big church? Well! I
am a fool, truly! I had not perceived your skull-cap."
 As he spoke, he deposited his knapsack and his cudgel in a corner, replaced his
passport in his pocket, and seated himself. Mademoiselle Baptistine gazed mildly at
him. He continued:
"You are humane, Monsieur le Curé; you have not scorned me. A good priest is a
very good thing. Then you do not require me to pay?"
"No," said the Bishop; "keep your money. How much have you? Did you not tell me
one hundred and nine francs?"
"And fifteen sous," added the man.
"One hundred and nine francs fifteen sous. And how long did it take you to earn that?"
"Nineteen years."
"Nineteen years!"
The Bishop sighed deeply.
The man continued: "I have still the whole of my money. In four days I have spent
only twenty-five sous, which I earned by helping unload some wagons at Grasse. Since
you are an abbe, I will tell you that we had a chaplain in the galleys. And one day I saw
a bishop there. Monseigneur is what they call him. He was the Bishop of Majore at
Marseilles. He is the cure who rules over the other cures, you understand. Pardon me, I
say that very badly; but it is such a far-off thing to me! You understand what we are!
He said mass in the middle of the galleys, on an altar. He had a pointed thing, made of
gold, on his head; it glittered in the bright light of midday. We were all ranged in lines
on the three sides, with cannons with lighted matches facing us. We could not see very
well. He spoke; but he was too far off, and we did not hear. That is what a bishop is
like."
While he was speaking, the Bishop had gone and shut the door, which had remained
wide open.
Madame Magloire returned. She brought a silver fork and spoon, which she placed
on the table.
"Madame Magloire," said the Bishop, "place those things as near the fire as possible."
And turning to his guest: "The night wind is harsh on the Alps. You must be cold, sir."
Each time that he uttered the word sir, in his voice which was so gently grave and
polished, the man's face lighted up. Monsieur to a convict is like a glass of water to one
of the shipwrecked of the Medusa. Ignominy thirsts for consideration.
"This lamp gives a very bad light," said the Bishop.
Madame Magloire understood him, and went to get the two silver candlesticks from
the chimney-piece in Monseigneur's bed-chamber, and placed them, lighted, on the
table.
 "Monsieur le Curé," said the man, "you are good; you do not despise me. You receive
me into your house. You light your candles for me. Yet I have not concealed from you
whence I come and that I am an unfortunate man."
The Bishop, who was sitting close to him, gently touched his hand. "You could not
help telling me who you were. This is not my house; it is the house of Jesus Christ. This
door does not demand of him who enters whether he has a name, but whether he has a
grief. You suffer, you are hungry and thirsty; you are welcome. And do not thank me;
do not say that I receive you in my house. No one is at home here, except the man who
needs a refuge. I say to you, who are passing by, that you are much more at home here
than I am myself. Everything here is yours. What need have I to know your name?
Besides, before you told me you had one which I knew."
The man opened his eyes in astonishment.
"Really? You knew what I was called?"
"Yes," replied the Bishop, "you are called my brother."
"Stop, Monsieur le Curé," exclaimed the man. "I was very hungry when I entered
here; but you are so good, that I no longer know what has happened to me."
The Bishop looked at him, and said,—
"You have suffered much?"
"Oh, the red coat, the ball on the ankle, a plank to sleep on, heat, cold, toil, the
convicts, the thrashings, the double chain for nothing, the cell for one word; even sick
and in bed, still the chain! Dogs, dogs are happier! Nineteen years! I am forty-six. Now
there is the yellow passport. That is what it is like."
"Yes," resumed the Bishop, "you have come from a very sad place. Listen. There will
be more joy in heaven over the tear-bathed face of a repentant sinner than over the white
robes of a hundred just men. If you emerge from that sad place with thoughts of hatred
and of wrath against mankind, you are deserving of pity; if you emerge with thoughts
of good-will and of peace, you are more worthy than any one of us."
In the meantime, Madame Magloire had served supper: soup, made with water, oil,
bread, and salt; a little bacon, a bit of mutton, figs, a fresh cheese, and a large loaf of
rye bread. She had, of her own accord, added to the Bishop's ordinary fare a bottle of
his old Mauves wine.
The Bishop's face at once assumed that expression of gayety which is peculiar to
hospitable natures. "To table!" he cried vivaciously. As was his custom when a stranger
supped with him, he made the man sit on his right. Mademoiselle Baptistine, perfectly
peaceable and natural, took her seat at his left.
The Bishop asked a blessing; then helped the soup himself, according to his custom.
The man began to eat with avidity.
All at once the Bishop said: "It strikes me there is something missing on this table."
 Madame Magloire had, in fact, only placed the three sets of forks and spoons which
were absolutely necessary. Now, it was the usage of the house, when the Bishop had
any one to supper, to lay out the whole six sets of silver on the table-cloth—an innocent
ostentation. This graceful semblance of luxury was a kind of child's play, which was
full of charm in that gentle and severe household, which raised poverty into dignity.
Madame Magloire understood the remark, went out without saying a word, and a
moment later the three sets of silver forks and spoons demanded by the Bishop were
glittering upon the cloth, symmetrically arranged before the three persons seated at the
table.

CHAPTER IV—
DETAILS
CONCERNING
THE CHEESE-
DAIRIES OF
PONTARLIER.
Now, in order to convey an idea of what passed at that table, we cannot do better than
to transcribe here a passage from one of Mademoiselle Baptistine's letters to Madame
Boischevron, wherein the conversation between the convict and the Bishop is described
with ingenious minuteness.
". . . This man paid no attention to any one. He ate with the voracity of a starving
man. However, after supper he said:
"'Monsieur le Curé of the good God, all this is far too good for me; but I must say
that the carters who would not allow me to eat with them keep a better table than you
do.'
"Between ourselves, the remark rather shocked me. My brother replied:—
"'They are more fatigued than I.'
"'No,' returned the man, 'they have more money. You are poor; I see that plainly. You
cannot be even a curate. Are you really a cure? Ah, if the good God were but just, you
certainly ought to be a cure!'
"'The good God is more than just,' said my brother.
"A moment later he added:—
"'Monsieur Jean Valjean, is it to Pontarlier that you are going?'
 "'With my road marked out for me.'
"I think that is what the man said. Then he went on:—
"'I must be on my way by daybreak to-morrow. Travelling is hard. If the nights are
cold, the days are hot.'
"'You are going to a good country,' said my brother. 'During the Revolution my family
was ruined. I took refuge in Franche-Comte at first, and there I lived for some time by
the toil of my hands. My will was good. I found plenty to occupy me. One has only to
choose. There are paper mills, tanneries, distilleries, oil factories, watch factories on a
large scale, steel mills, copper works, twenty iron foundries at least, four of which,
situated at Lods, at Chatillon, at Audincourt, and at Beure, are tolerably large.'
"I think I am not mistaken in saying that those are the names which my brother
mentioned. Then he interrupted himself and addressed me:—
"'Have we not some relatives in those parts, my dear sister?'
"I replied,—
"'We did have some; among others, M. de Lucenet, who was captain of the gates at
Pontarlier under the old regime.'
"'Yes,' resumed my brother; 'but in '93, one had no longer any relatives, one had only
one's arms. I worked. They have, in the country of Pontarlier, whither you are going,
Monsieur Valjean, a truly patriarchal and truly charming industry, my sister. It is their
cheese-dairies, which they call fruitieres.'
"Then my brother, while urging the man to eat, explained to him, with great
minuteness, what these fruitieres of Pontarlier were; that they were divided into two
classes: the big barns which belong to the rich, and where there are forty or fifty cows
which produce from seven to eight thousand cheeses each summer, and the associated
fruitieres, which belong to the poor; these are the peasants of mid-mountain, who hold
their cows in common, and share the proceeds. 'They engage the services of a cheese-
maker, whom they call the grurin; the grurin receives the milk of the associates three
times a day, and marks the quantity on a double tally. It is towards the end of April that
the work of the cheese-dairies begins; it is towards the middle of June that the cheese-
makers drive their cows to the mountains.'
"The man recovered his animation as he ate. My brother made him drink that good
Mauves wine, which he does not drink himself, because he says that wine is expensive.
My brother imparted all these details with that easy gayety of his with which you are
acquainted, interspersing his words with graceful attentions to me. He recurred
frequently to that comfortable trade of grurin, as though he wished the man to
understand, without advising him directly and harshly, that this would afford him a
refuge. One thing struck me. This man was what I have told you. Well, neither during
supper, nor during the entire evening, did my brother utter a single word, with the
exception of a few words about Jesus when he entered, which could remind the man of
what he was, nor of what my brother was. To all appearances, it was an occasion for
preaching him a little sermon, and of impressing the Bishop on the convict, so that a
mark of the passage might remain behind. This might have appeared to any one else
who had this, unfortunate man in his hands to afford a chance to nourish his soul as well
as his body, and to bestow upon him some reproach, seasoned with moralizing and
advice, or a little commiseration, with an exhortation to conduct himself better in the
future. My brother did not even ask him from what country he came, nor what was his
history. For in his history there is a fault, and my brother seemed to avoid everything
which could remind him of it. To such a point did he carry it, that at one time, when my
brother was speaking of the mountaineers of Pontarlier, who exercise a gentle labor
near heaven, and who, he added, are happy because they are innocent, he stopped short,
fearing lest in this remark there might have escaped him something which might wound
the man. By dint of reflection, I think I have comprehended what was passing in my
brother's heart. He was thinking, no doubt, that this man, whose name is Jean Valjean,
had his misfortune only too vividly present in his mind; that the best thing was to divert
him from it, and to make him believe, if only momentarily, that he was a person like
any other, by treating him just in his ordinary way. Is not this indeed, to understand
charity well? Is there not, dear Madame, something truly evangelical in this delicacy
which abstains from sermon, from moralizing, from allusions? and is not the truest pity,
when a man has a sore point, not to touch it at all? It has seemed to me that this might
have been my brother's private thought. In any case, what I can say is that, if he
entertained all these ideas, he gave no sign of them; from beginning to end, even to me
he was the same as he is every evening, and he supped with this Jean Valjean with the
same air and in the same manner in which he would have supped with M. Gedeon le
Provost, or with the curate of the parish.
"Towards the end, when he had reached the figs, there came a knock at the door. It
was Mother Gerbaud, with her little one in her arms. My brother kissed the child on the
brow, and borrowed fifteen sous which I had about me to give to Mother Gerbaud. The
man was not paying much heed to anything then. He was no longer talking, and he
seemed very much fatigued. After poor old Gerbaud had taken her departure, my
brother said grace; then he turned to the man and said to him, 'You must be in great
need of your bed.' Madame Magloire cleared the table very promptly. I understood that
we must retire, in order to allow this traveller to go to sleep, and we both went up stairs.
Nevertheless, I sent Madame Magloire down a moment later, to carry to the man's bed
a goat skin from the Black Forest, which was in my room. The nights are frigid, and
that keeps one warm. It is a pity that this skin is old; all the hair is falling out. My brother
bought it while he was in Germany, at Tottlingen, near the sources of the Danube, as
well as the little ivory-handled knife which I use at table.
"Madame Magloire returned immediately. We said our prayers in the drawing-room,
where we hang up the linen, and then we each retired to our own chambers, without
saying a word to each other."
 CHAPTER V—
TRANQUILLITY
After bidding his sister good night, Monseigneur Bienvenu took one of the two silver
candlesticks from the table, handed the other to his guest, and said to him,—
"Monsieur, I will conduct you to your room."
The man followed him.
As might have been observed from what has been said above, the house was so
arranged that in order to pass into the oratory where the alcove was situated, or to get
out of it, it was necessary to traverse the Bishop's bedroom.
At the moment when he was crossing this apartment, Madame Magloire was putting
away the silverware in the cupboard near the head of the bed. This was her last care
every evening before she went to bed.
The Bishop installed his guest in the alcove. A fresh white bed had been prepared
there. The man set the candle down on a small table.
"Well," said the Bishop, "may you pass a good night. To-morrow morning, before
you set out, you shall drink a cup of warm milk from our cows."
"Thanks, Monsieur l' Abbé," said the man.
Hardly had he pronounced these words full of peace, when all of a sudden, and
without transition, he made a strange movement, which would have frozen the two
sainted women with horror, had they witnessed it. Even at this day it is difficult for us
to explain what inspired him at that moment. Did he intend to convey a warning or to
throw out a menace? Was he simply obeying a sort of instinctive impulse which was
obscure even to himself? He turned abruptly to the old man, folded his arms, and
bending upon his host a savage gaze, he exclaimed in a hoarse voice:—
"Ah! really! You lodge me in your house, close to yourself like this?"
He broke off, and added with a laugh in which there lurked something monstrous:—
"Have you really reflected well? How do you know that I have not been an assassin?"
The Bishop replied:—
"That is the concern of the good God."
Then gravely, and moving his lips like one who is praying or talking to himself, he
raised two fingers of his right hand and bestowed his benediction on the man, who did
not bow, and without turning his head or looking behind him, he returned to his
bedroom.
 When the alcove was in use, a large serge curtain drawn from wall to wall concealed
the altar. The Bishop knelt before this curtain as he passed and said a brief prayer. A
moment later he was in his garden, walking, meditating, contemplating, his heart and
soul wholly absorbed in those grand and mysterious things which God shows at night
to the eyes which remain open.
As for the man, he was actually so fatigued that he did not even profit by the nice
white sheets. Snuffing out his candle with his nostrils after the manner of convicts, he
dropped, all dressed as he was, upon the bed, where he immediately fell into a profound
sleep.
Midnight struck as the Bishop returned from his garden to his apartment.
A few minutes later all were asleep in the little house.

CHAPTER VI—
JEAN VALJEAN
Towards the middle of the
night Jean Valjean woke.

Jean Valjean came from a poor peasant family of Brie. He had not learned to read in
his childhood. When he reached man's estate, he became a tree-pruner at Faverolles.
His mother was named Jeanne Mathieu; his father was called Jean Valjean or Vlajean,
probably a sobriquet, and a contraction of viola Jean, "here's Jean."
Jean Valjean was of that thoughtful but not gloomy disposition which constitutes the
peculiarity of affectionate natures. On the whole, however, there was something
decidedly sluggish and insignificant about Jean Valjean in appearance, at least. He had
lost his father and mother at a very early age. His mother had died of a milk fever, which
had not been properly attended to. His father, a tree-pruner, like himself, had been killed
by a fall from a tree. All that remained to Jean Valjean was a sister older than himself,—
a widow with seven children, boys and girls. This sister had brought up Jean Valjean,
and so long as she had a husband she lodged and fed her young brother.
The husband died. The eldest of the seven children was eight years old. The youngest,
one.
Jean Valjean had just attained his twenty-fifth year. He took the father's place, and,
in his turn, supported the sister who had brought him up. This was done simply as a
duty and even a little churlishly on the part of Jean Valjean. Thus his youth had been
spent in rude and ill-paid toil. He had never known a "kind woman friend" in his native
parts. He had not had the time to fall in love.
 He returned at night weary, and ate his broth without uttering a word. His sister,
mother Jeanne, often took the best part of his repast from his bowl while he was
eating,—a bit of meat, a slice of bacon, the heart of the cabbage,—to give to one of her
children. As he went on eating, with his head bent over the table and almost into his
soup, his long hair falling about his bowl and concealing his eyes, he had the air of
perceiving nothing and allowing it. There was at Faverolles, not far from the Valjean
thatched cottage, on the other side of the lane, a farmer's wife named Marie-Claude; the
Valjean children, habitually famished, sometimes went to borrow from Marie-Claude a
pint of milk, in their mother's name, which they drank behind a hedge or in some alley
corner, snatching the jug from each other so hastily that the little girls spilled it on their
aprons and down their necks. If their mother had known of this marauding, she would
have punished the delinquents severely. Jean Valjean gruffly and grumblingly paid
Marie-Claude for the pint of milk behind their mother's back, and the children were not
punished.
In pruning season he earned eighteen sous a day; then he hired out as a hay-maker,
as laborer, as neat-herd on a farm, as a drudge. He did whatever he could. His sister
worked also but what could she do with seven little children? It was a sad group
enveloped in misery, which was being gradually annihilated. A very hard winter came.
Jean had no work. The family had no bread. No bread literally. Seven children!
One Sunday evening, Maubert Isabeau, the baker on the Church Square at Faverolles,
was preparing to go to bed, when he heard a violent blow on the grated front of his shop.
He arrived in time to see an arm passed through a hole made by a blow from a fist,
through the grating and the glass. The arm seized a loaf of bread and carried it off.
Isabeau ran out in haste; the robber fled at the full speed of his legs. Isabeau ran after
him and stopped him. The thief had flung away the loaf, but his arm was still bleeding.
It was Jean Valjean.
This took place in 1795. Jean Valjean was taken before the tribunals of the time for
theft and breaking and entering an inhabited house at night. He had a gun which he used
better than any one else in the world, he was a bit of a poacher, and this injured his case.
There exists a legitimate prejudice against poachers. The poacher, like the smuggler,
smacks too strongly of the brigand. Nevertheless, we will remark cursorily, there is still
an abyss between these races of men and the hideous assassin of the towns. The poacher
lives in the forest, the smuggler lives in the mountains or on the sea. The cities make
ferocious men because they make corrupt men. The mountain, the sea, the forest, make
savage men; they develop the fierce side, but often without destroying the humane side.
Jean Valjean was pronounced guilty. The terms of the Code were explicit. There
occur formidable hours in our civilization; there are moments when the penal laws
decree a shipwreck. What an ominous minute is that in which society draws back and
consummates the irreparable abandonment of a sentient being! Jean Valjean was
condemned to five years in the galleys.
 On the 22d of April, 1796, the victory of Montenotte, won by the general-in-chief of
the army of Italy, whom the message of the Directory to the Five Hundred, of the 2d of
Floreal, year IV., calls Buona-Parte, was announced in Paris; on that same day a great
gang of galley-slaves was put in chains at Bicêtre. Jean Valjean formed a part of that
gang. An old turnkey of the prison, who is now nearly eighty years old, still recalls
perfectly that unfortunate wretch who was chained to the end of the fourth line, in the
north angle of the courtyard. He was seated on the ground like the others. He did not
seem to comprehend his position, except that it was horrible. It is probable that he, also,
was disentangling from amid the vague ideas of a poor man, ignorant of everything,
something excessive. While the bolt of his iron collar was being riveted behind his head
with heavy blows from the hammer, he wept, his tears stifled him, they impeded his
speech; he only managed to say from time to time, "I was a tree-pruner at Faverolles."
Then still sobbing, he raised his right hand and lowered it gradually seven times, as
though he were touching in succession seven heads of unequal heights, and from this
gesture it was divined that the thing which he had done, whatever it was, he had done
for the sake of clothing and nourishing seven little children.
He set out for Toulon. He arrived there, after a journey of twenty-seven days, on a
cart, with a chain on his neck. At Toulon he was clothed in the red cassock. All that had
constituted his life, even to his name, was effaced; he was no longer even Jean Valjean;
he was number 24,601. What became of his sister? What became of the seven children?
Who troubled himself about that? What becomes of the handful of leaves from the
young tree which is sawed off at the root?
It is always the same story. These poor living beings, these creatures of God,
henceforth without support, without guide, without refuge, wandered away at
random,—who even knows?—each in his own direction perhaps, and little by little
buried themselves in that cold mist which engulfs solitary destinies; gloomy shades,
into which disappear in succession so many unlucky heads, in the sombre march of the
human race. They quitted the country. The clock-tower of what had been their village
forgot them; the boundary line of what had been their field forgot them; after a few
years' residence in the galleys, Jean Valjean himself forgot them. In that heart, where
there had been a wound, there was a scar. That is all. Only once, during all the time
which he spent at Toulon, did he hear his sister mentioned. This happened, I think,
towards the end of the fourth year of his captivity. I know not through what channels
the news reached him. Some one who had known them in their own country had seen
his sister. She was in Paris. She lived in a poor street Rear Saint-Sulpice, in the Rue du
Gindre. She had with her only one child, a little boy, the youngest. Where were the
other six? Perhaps she did not know herself. Every morning she went to a printing
office, No. 3 Rue du Sabot, where she was a folder and stitcher. She was obliged to be
there at six o'clock in the morning—long before daylight in winter. In the same building
with the printing office there was a school, and to this school she took her little boy,
who was seven years old. But as she entered the printing office at six, and the school
only opened at seven, the child had to wait in the courtyard, for the school to open, for
an hour—one hour of a winter night in the open air! They would not allow the child to
come into the printing office, because he was in the way, they said. When the workmen
passed in the morning, they beheld this poor little being seated on the pavement,
overcome with drowsiness, and often fast asleep in the shadow, crouched down and
doubled up over his basket. When it rained, an old woman, the portress, took pity on
him; she took him into her den, where there was a pallet, a spinning-wheel, and two
wooden chairs, and the little one slumbered in a corner, pressing himself close to the
cat that he might suffer less from cold. At seven o'clock the school opened, and he
entered. That is what was told to Jean Valjean.
They talked to him about it for one day; it was a moment, a flash, as though a window
had suddenly been opened upon the destiny of those things whom he had loved; then
all closed again. He heard nothing more forever. Nothing from them ever reached him
again; he never beheld them; he never met them again; and in the continuation of this
mournful history they will not be met with any more.
Towards the end of this fourth year Jean Valjean's turn to escape arrived. His
comrades assisted him, as is the custom in that sad place. He escaped. He wandered for
two days in the fields at liberty, if being at liberty is to be hunted, to turn the head every
instant, to quake at the slightest noise, to be afraid of everything,—of a smoking roof,
of a passing man, of a barking dog, of a galloping horse, of a striking clock, of the day
because one can see, of the night because one cannot see, of the highway, of the path,
of a bush, of sleep. On the evening of the second day he was captured. He had neither
eaten nor slept for thirty-six hours. The maritime tribunal condemned him, for this
crime, to a prolongation of his term for three years, which made eight years. In the sixth
year his turn to escape occurred again; he availed himself of it, but could not accomplish
his flight fully. He was missing at roll-call. The cannon were fired, and at night the
patrol found him hidden under the keel of a vessel in process of construction; he resisted
the galley guards who seized him. Escape and rebellion. This case, provided for by a
special code, was punished by an addition of five years, two of them in the double chain.
Thirteen years. In the tenth year his turn came round again; he again profited by it; he
succeeded no better. Three years for this fresh attempt. Sixteen years. Finally, I think it
was during his thirteenth year, he made a last attempt, and only succeeded in getting
retaken at the end of four hours of absence. Three years for those four hours. Nineteen
years. In October, 1815, he was released; he had entered there in 1796, for having
broken a pane of glass and taken a loaf of bread.
Room for a brief parenthesis. This is the second time, during his studies on the penal
question and damnation by law, that the author of this book has come across the theft
of a loaf of bread as the point of departure for the disaster of a destiny. Claude Gaux
had stolen a loaf; Jean Valjean had stolen a loaf. English statistics prove the fact that
four thefts out of five in London have hunger for their immediate cause.
 Jean Valjean had entered the galleys sobbing and shuddering; he emerged impassive.
He had entered in despair; he emerged gloomy.
What had taken place in that soul?

CHAPTER VII—
THE INTERIOR
OF DESPAIR
Let us try to say it.
It is necessary that society should look at these things, because it is itself which
creates them.
He was, as we have said, an ignorant man, but he was not a fool. The light of nature
was ignited in him. Unhappiness, which also possesses a clearness of vision of its own,
augmented the small amount of daylight which existed in this mind. Beneath the cudgel,
beneath the chain, in the cell, in hardship, beneath the burning sun of the galleys, upon
the plank bed of the convict, he withdrew into his own consciousness and meditated.
He constituted himself the tribunal.
He began by putting himself on trial.
He recognized the fact that he was not an innocent man unjustly punished. He
admitted that he had committed an extreme and blameworthy act; that that loaf of bread
would probably not have been refused to him had he asked for it; that, in any case, it
would have been better to wait until he could get it through compassion or through
work; that it is not an unanswerable argument to say, "Can one wait when one is
hungry?" That, in the first place, it is very rare for any one to die of hunger, literally;
and next, that, fortunately or unfortunately, man is so constituted that he can suffer long
and much, both morally and physically, without dying; that it is therefore necessary to
have patience; that that would even have been better for those poor little children; that
it had been an act of madness for him, a miserable, unfortunate wretch, to take society
at large violently by the collar, and to imagine that one can escape from misery through
theft; that that is in any case a poor door through which to escape from misery through
which infamy enters; in short, that he was in the wrong.
Then he asked himself—
Whether he had been the only one in fault in his fatal history. Whether it was not a
serious thing, that he, a laborer, out of work, that he, an industrious man, should have
lacked bread. And whether, the fault once committed and confessed, the chastisement
had not been ferocious and disproportioned. Whether there had not been more abuse on
the part of the law, in respect to the penalty, than there had been on the part of the culprit
in respect to his fault. Whether there had not been an excess of weights in one balance
of the scale, in the one which contains expiation. Whether the over-weight of the penalty
was not equivalent to the annihilation of the crime, and did not result in reversing the
situation, of replacing the fault of the delinquent by the fault of the repression, of
converting the guilty man into the victim, and the debtor into the creditor, and of ranging
the law definitely on the side of the man who had violated it.
Whether this penalty, complicated by successive aggravations for attempts at escape,
had not ended in becoming a sort of outrage perpetrated by the stronger upon the feebler,
a crime of society against the individual, a crime which was being committed afresh
every day, a crime which had lasted nineteen years.
He asked himself whether human society could have the right to force its members
to suffer equally in one case for its own unreasonable lack of foresight, and in the other
case for its pitiless foresight; and to seize a poor man forever between a defect and an
excess, a default of work and an excess of punishment.
Whether it was not outrageous for society to treat thus precisely those of its members
who were the least well endowed in the division of goods made by chance, and
consequently the most deserving of consideration.
These questions put and answered, he judged society and condemned it.
He condemned it to his hatred.
He made it responsible for the fate which he was suffering, and he said to himself
that it might be that one day he should not hesitate to call it to account. He declared to
himself that there was no equilibrium between the harm which he had caused and the
harm which was being done to him; he finally arrived at the conclusion that his
punishment was not, in truth, unjust, but that it most assuredly was iniquitous.
Anger may be both foolish and absurd; one can be irritated wrongfully; one is
exasperated only when there is some show of right on one's side at bottom. Jean Valjean
felt himself exasperated.
And besides, human society had done him nothing but harm; he had never seen
anything of it save that angry face which it calls Justice, and which it shows to those
whom it strikes. Men had only touched him to bruise him. Every contact with them had
been a blow. Never, since his infancy, since the days of his mother, of his sister, had he
ever encountered a friendly word and a kindly glance. From suffering to suffering, he
had gradually arrived at the conviction that life is a war; and that in this war he was the
conquered. He had no other weapon than his hate. He resolved to whet it in the galleys
and to bear it away with him when he departed.
There was at Toulon a school for the convicts, kept by the Ignorantin friars, where
the most necessary branches were taught to those of the unfortunate men who had a
mind for them. He was of the number who had a mind. He went to school at the age of
forty, and learned to read, to write, to cipher. He felt that to fortify his intelligence was
to fortify his hate. In certain cases, education and enlightenment can serve to eke out
evil.
This is a sad thing to say; after having judged society, which had caused his
unhappiness, he judged Providence, which had made society, and he condemned it also.
Thus during nineteen years of torture and slavery, this soul mounted and at the same
time fell. Light entered it on one side, and darkness on the other.
Jean Valjean had not, as we have seen, an evil nature. He was still good when he
arrived at the galleys. He there condemned society, and felt that he was becoming
wicked; he there condemned Providence, and was conscious that he was becoming
impious.
It is difficult not to indulge in meditation at this point.
Does human nature thus change utterly and from top to bottom? Can the man created
good by God be rendered wicked by man? Can the soul be completely made over by
fate, and become evil, fate being evil? Can the heart become misshapen and contract
incurable deformities and infirmities under the oppression of a disproportionate
unhappiness, as the vertebral column beneath too low a vault? Is there not in every
human soul, was there not in the soul of Jean Valjean in particular, a first spark, a divine
element, incorruptible in this world, immortal in the other, which good can develop,
fan, ignite, and make to glow with splendor, and which evil can never wholly
extinguish?
Grave and obscure questions, to the last of which every physiologist would probably
have responded no, and that without hesitation, had he beheld at Toulon, during the
hours of repose, which were for Jean Valjean hours of revery, this gloomy galley-slave,
seated with folded arms upon the bar of some capstan, with the end of his chain thrust
into his pocket to prevent its dragging, serious, silent, and thoughtful, a pariah of the
laws which regarded the man with wrath, condemned by civilization, and regarding
heaven with severity.
Certainly,—and we make no attempt to dissimulate the fact,—the observing
physiologist would have beheld an irremediable misery; he would, perchance, have
pitied this sick man, of the law's making; but he would not have even essayed any
treatment; he would have turned aside his gaze from the caverns of which he would
have caught a glimpse within this soul, and, like Dante at the portals of hell, he would
have effaced from this existence the word which the finger of God has, nevertheless,
inscribed upon the brow of every man,—hope.
Was this state of his soul, which we have attempted to analyze, as perfectly clear to
Jean Valjean as we have tried to render it for those who read us? Did Jean Valjean
distinctly perceive, after their formation, and had he seen distinctly during the process
of their formation, all the elements of which his moral misery was composed? Had this
rough and unlettered man gathered a perfectly clear perception of the succession of
ideas through which he had, by degrees, mounted and descended to the lugubrious
aspects which had, for so many years, formed the inner horizon of his spirit? Was he
conscious of all that passed within him, and of all that was working there? That is
something which we do not presume to state; it is something which we do not even
believe. There was too much ignorance in Jean Valjean, even after his misfortune, to
prevent much vagueness from still lingering there. At times he did not rightly know
himself what he felt. Jean Valjean was in the shadows; he suffered in the shadows; he
hated in the shadows; one might have said that he hated in advance of himself. He dwelt
habitually in this shadow, feeling his way like a blind man and a dreamer. Only, at
intervals, there suddenly came to him, from without and from within, an access of
wrath, a surcharge of suffering, a livid and rapid flash which illuminated his whole soul,
and caused to appear abruptly all around him, in front, behind, amid the gleams of a
frightful light, the hideous precipices and the sombre perspective of his destiny.
The flash passed, the night closed in again; and where was he? He no longer knew.
The peculiarity of pains of this nature, in which that which is pitiless—that is to say,
that which is brutalizing—predominates, is to transform a man, little by little, by a sort
of stupid transfiguration, into a wild beast; sometimes into a ferocious beast.
Jean Valjean's successive and obstinate attempts at escape would alone suffice to
prove this strange working of the law upon the human soul. Jean Valjean would have
renewed these attempts, utterly useless and foolish as they were, as often as the
opportunity had presented itself, without reflecting for an instant on the result, nor on
the experiences which he had already gone through. He escaped impetuously, like the
wolf who finds his cage open. Instinct said to him, "Flee!" Reason would have said,
"Remain!" But in the presence of so violent a temptation, reason vanished; nothing
remained but instinct. The beast alone acted. When he was recaptured, the fresh
severities inflicted on him only served to render him still more wild.
One detail, which we must not omit, is that he possessed a physical strength which
was not approached by a single one of the denizens of the galleys. At work, at paying
out a cable or winding up a capstan, Jean Valjean was worth four men. He sometimes
lifted and sustained enormous weights on his back; and when the occasion demanded
it, he replaced that implement which is called a jack-screw, and was formerly called
orgueil [pride], whence, we may remark in passing, is derived the name of the Rue
Montorgueil, near the Halles [Fishmarket] in Paris. His comrades had nicknamed him
Jean the Jack-screw. Once, when they were repairing the balcony of the town-hall at
Toulon, one of those admirable caryatids of Puget, which support the balcony, became
loosened, and was on the point of falling. Jean Valjean, who was present, supported the
caryatid with his shoulder, and gave the workmen time to arrive.
His suppleness even exceeded his strength. Certain convicts who were forever
dreaming of escape, ended by making a veritable science of force and skill combined.
It is the science of muscles. An entire system of mysterious statics is daily practised by
prisoners, men who are forever envious of the flies and birds. To climb a vertical
surface, and to find points of support where hardly a projection was visible, was play to
Jean Valjean. An angle of the wall being given, with the tension of his back and legs,
with his elbows and his heels fitted into the unevenness of the stone, he raised himself
as if by magic to the third story. He sometimes mounted thus even to the roof of the
galley prison.
He spoke but little. He laughed not at all. An excessive emotion was required to wring
from him, once or twice a year, that lugubrious laugh of the convict, which is like the
echo of the laugh of a demon. To all appearance, he seemed to be occupied in the
constant contemplation of something terrible.
He was absorbed, in fact.
Athwart the unhealthy perceptions of an incomplete nature and a crushed intelligence,
he was confusedly conscious that some monstrous thing was resting on him. In that
obscure and wan shadow within which he crawled, each time that he turned his neck
and essayed to raise his glance, he perceived with terror, mingled with rage, a sort of
frightful accumulation of things, collecting and mounting above him, beyond the range
of his vision,—laws, prejudices, men, and deeds,—whose outlines escaped him, whose
mass terrified him, and which was nothing else than that prodigious pyramid which we
call civilization. He distinguished, here and there in that swarming and formless mass,
now near him, now afar off and on inaccessible table-lands, some group, some detail,
vividly illuminated; here the galley-sergeant and his cudgel; there the gendarme and his
sword; yonder the mitred archbishop; away at the top, like a sort of sun, the Emperor,
crowned and dazzling. It seemed to him that these distant splendors, far from dissipating
his night, rendered it more funereal and more black. All this—laws, prejudices, deeds,
men, things—went and came above him, over his head, in accordance with the
complicated and mysterious movement which God imparts to civilization, walking over
him and crushing him with I know not what peacefulness in its cruelty and inexorability
in its indifference. Souls which have fallen to the bottom of all possible misfortune,
unhappy men lost in the lowest of those limbos at which no one any longer looks, the
reproved of the law, feel the whole weight of this human society, so formidable for him
who is without, so frightful for him who is beneath, resting upon their heads.
In this situation Jean Valjean meditated; and what could be the nature of his
meditation?
If the grain of millet beneath the millstone had thoughts, it would, doubtless, think
that same thing which Jean Valjean thought.
All these things, realities full of spectres, phantasmagories full of realities, had
eventually created for him a sort of interior state which is almost indescribable.
At times, amid his convict toil, he paused. He fell to thinking. His reason, at one and
the same time riper and more troubled than of yore, rose in revolt. Everything which
had happened to him seemed to him absurd; everything that surrounded him seemed to
him impossible. He said to himself, "It is a dream." He gazed at the galley-sergeant
standing a few paces from him; the galley-sergeant seemed a phantom to him. All of a
sudden the phantom dealt him a blow with his cudgel.
Visible nature hardly existed for him. It would almost be true to say that there existed
for Jean Valjean neither sun, nor fine summer days, nor radiant sky, nor fresh April
dawns. I know not what vent-hole daylight habitually illumined his soul.
To sum up, in conclusion, that which can be summed up and translated into positive
results in all that we have just pointed out, we will confine ourselves to the statement
that, in the course of nineteen years, Jean Valjean, the inoffensive tree-pruner of
Faverolles, the formidable convict of Toulon, had become capable, thanks to the manner
in which the galleys had moulded him, of two sorts of evil action: firstly, of evil action
which was rapid, unpremeditated, dashing, entirely instinctive, in the nature of reprisals
for the evil which he had undergone; secondly, of evil action which was serious, grave,
consciously argued out and premeditated, with the false ideas which such a misfortune
can furnish. His deliberate deeds passed through three successive phases, which natures
of a certain stamp can alone traverse,—reasoning, will, perseverance. He had for
moving causes his habitual wrath, bitterness of soul, a profound sense of indignities
suffered, the reaction even against the good, the innocent, and the just, if there are any
such. The point of departure, like the point of arrival, for all his thoughts, was hatred of
human law; that hatred which, if it be not arrested in its development by some
providential incident, becomes, within a given time, the hatred of society, then the
hatred of the human race, then the hatred of creation, and which manifests itself by a
vague, incessant, and brutal desire to do harm to some living being, no matter whom. It
will be perceived that it was not without reason that Jean Valjean's passport described
him as a very dangerous man.
From year to year this soul had dried away slowly, but with fatal sureness. When the
heart is dry, the eye is dry. On his departure from the galleys it had been nineteen years
since he had shed a tear.

CHAPTER VIII—
BILLOWS AND
SHADOWS
A man overboard!
What matters it? The vessel does not halt. The wind blows. That sombre ship has a
path which it is forced to pursue. It passes on.
 The man disappears, then reappears; he plunges, he rises again to the surface; he calls,
he stretches out his arms; he is not heard. The vessel, trembling under the hurricane, is
wholly absorbed in its own workings; the passengers and sailors do not even see the
drowning man; his miserable head is but a speck amid the immensity of the waves. He
gives vent to desperate cries from out of the depths. What a spectre is that retreating
sail! He gazes and gazes at it frantically. It retreats, it grows dim, it diminishes in size.
He was there but just now, he was one of the crew, he went and came along the deck
with the rest, he had his part of breath and of sunlight, he was a living man. Now, what
has taken place? He has slipped, he has fallen; all is at an end.
He is in the tremendous sea. Under foot he has nothing but what flees and crumbles.
The billows, torn and lashed by the wind, encompass him hideously; the tossings of the
abyss bear him away; all the tongues of water dash over his head; a populace of waves
spits upon him; confused openings half devour him; every time that he sinks, he catches
glimpses of precipices filled with night; frightful and unknown vegetations seize him,
knot about his feet, draw him to them; he is conscious that he is becoming an abyss,
that he forms part of the foam; the waves toss him from one to another; he drinks in the
bitterness; the cowardly ocean attacks him furiously, to drown him; the enormity plays
with his agony. It seems as though all that water were hate.
Nevertheless, he struggles.
He tries to defend himself; he tries to sustain himself; he makes an effort; he swims.
He, his petty strength all exhausted instantly, combats the inexhaustible.
Where, then, is the ship? Yonder. Barely visible in the pale shadows of the horizon.
The wind blows in gusts; all the foam overwhelms him. He raises his eyes and
beholds only the lividness of the clouds. He witnesses, amid his death-pangs, the
immense madness of the sea. He is tortured by this madness; he hears noises strange to
man, which seem to come from beyond the limits of the earth, and from one knows not
what frightful region beyond.
There are birds in the clouds, just as there are angels above human distresses; but
what can they do for him? They sing and fly and float, and he, he rattles in the death
agony.
He feels himself buried in those two infinities, the ocean and the sky, at one and the
same time: the one is a tomb; the other is a shroud.
Night descends; he has been swimming for hours; his strength is exhausted; that ship,
that distant thing in which there were men, has vanished; he is alone in the formidable
twilight gulf; he sinks, he stiffens himself, he twists himself; he feels under him the
monstrous billows of the invisible; he shouts.
There are no more men. Where is God?
He shouts. Help! Help! He still shouts on.
Nothing on the horizon; nothing in heaven.
 He implores the expanse, the waves, the seaweed, the reef; they are deaf. He
beseeches the tempest; the imperturbable tempest obeys only the infinite.
Around him darkness, fog, solitude, the stormy and nonsentient tumult, the undefined
curling of those wild waters. In him horror and fatigue. Beneath him the depths. Not a
point of support. He thinks of the gloomy adventures of the corpse in the limitless
shadow. The bottomless cold paralyzes him. His hands contract convulsively; they
close, and grasp nothingness. Winds, clouds, whirlwinds, gusts, useless stars! What is
to be done? The desperate man gives up; he is weary, he chooses the alternative of
death; he resists not; he lets himself go; he abandons his grip; and then he tosses
forevermore in the lugubrious dreary depths of engulfment.
Oh, implacable march of human societies! Oh, losses of men and of souls on the way!
Ocean into which falls all that the law lets slip! Disastrous absence of help! Oh, moral
death!
The sea is the inexorable social night into which the penal laws fling their condemned.
The sea is the immensity of wretchedness.
The soul, going down stream in this gulf, may become a corpse. Who shall resuscitate
it?

CHAPTER IX—
NEW TROUBLES
When the hour came for him to take his departure from the galleys, when Jean Valjean
heard in his ear the strange words, Thou art free! the moment seemed improbable and
unprecedented; a ray of vivid light, a ray of the true light of the living, suddenly
penetrated within him. But it was not long before this ray paled. Jean Valjean had been
dazzled by the idea of liberty. He had believed in a new life. He very speedily perceived
what sort of liberty it is to which a yellow passport is provided.
And this was encompassed with much bitterness. He had calculated that his earnings,
during his sojourn in the galleys, ought to amount to a hundred and seventy-one francs.
It is but just to add that he had forgotten to include in his calculations the forced repose
of Sundays and festival days during nineteen years, which entailed a diminution of
about eighty francs. At all events, his hoard had been reduced by various local levies to
the sum of one hundred and nine francs fifteen sous, which had been counted out to him
on his departure. He had understood nothing of this, and had thought himself wronged.
Let us say the word—robbed.
 On the day following his liberation, he saw, at Grasse, in front of an orange-flower
distillery, some men engaged in unloading bales. He offered his services. Business was
pressing; they were accepted. He set to work. He was intelligent, robust, adroit; he did
his best; the master seemed pleased. While he was at work, a gendarme passed,
observed him, and demanded his papers. It was necessary to show him the yellow
passport. That done, Jean Valjean resumed his labor. A little while before he had
questioned one of the workmen as to the amount which they earned each day at this
occupation; he had been told thirty sous. When evening arrived, as he was forced to set
out again on the following day, he presented himself to the owner of the distillery and
requested to be paid. The owner did not utter a word, but handed him fifteen sous. He
objected. He was told, "That is enough for thee." He persisted. The master looked him
straight between the eyes, and said to him "Beware of the prison."
There, again, he considered that he had been robbed.
Society, the State, by diminishing his hoard, had robbed him wholesale. Now it was
the individual who was robbing him at retail.
Liberation is not deliverance. One gets free from the galleys, but not from the
sentence.
That is what happened to him at Grasse. We have seen in what manner he was
received at D——

CHAPTER X—
THE MAN
AROUSED
As the Cathedral clock
struck two in the morning,
Jean Valjean awoke.

What woke him was that his bed was too good. It was nearly twenty years since he
had slept in a bed, and, although he had not undressed, the sensation was too novel not
to disturb his slumbers.
He had slept more than four hours. His fatigue had passed away. He was accustomed
not to devote many hours to repose.
He opened his eyes and stared into the gloom which surrounded him; then he closed
them again, with the intention of going to sleep once more.
 When many varied sensations have agitated the day, when various matters preoccupy
the mind, one falls asleep once, but not a second time. Sleep comes more easily than it
returns. This is what happened to Jean Valjean. He could not get to sleep again, and he
fell to thinking.
He was at one of those moments when the thoughts which one has in one's mind are
troubled. There was a sort of dark confusion in his brain. His memories of the olden
time and of the immediate present floated there pell-mell and mingled confusedly,
losing their proper forms, becoming disproportionately large, then suddenly
disappearing, as in a muddy and perturbed pool. Many thoughts occurred to him; but
there was one which kept constantly presenting itself afresh, and which drove away all
others. We will mention this thought at once: he had observed the six sets of silver forks
and spoons and the ladle which Madame Magloire had placed on the table.
Those six sets of silver haunted him.—They were there.—A few paces distant.—Just
as he was traversing the adjoining room to reach the one in which he then was, the old
servant-woman had been in the act of placing them in a little cupboard near the head of
the bed.—He had taken careful note of this cupboard.—On the right, as you entered
from the dining-room.—They were solid.—And old silver.—From the ladle one could
get at least two hundred francs.—Double what he had earned in nineteen years.—It is
true that he would have earned more if "the administration had not robbed him."
His mind wavered for a whole hour in fluctuations with which there was certainly
mingled some struggle. Three o'clock struck. He opened his eyes again, drew himself
up abruptly into a sitting posture, stretched out his arm and felt of his knapsack, which
he had thrown down on a corner of the alcove; then he hung his legs over the edge of
the bed, and placed his feet on the floor, and thus found himself, almost without
knowing it, seated on his bed.
He remained for a time thoughtfully in this attitude, which would have been
suggestive of something sinister for any one who had seen him thus in the dark, the only
person awake in that house where all were sleeping. All of a sudden he stooped down,
removed his shoes and placed them softly on the mat beside the bed; then he resumed
his thoughtful attitude, and became motionless once more.
Throughout this hideous meditation, the thoughts which we have above indicated
moved incessantly through his brain; entered, withdrew, re-entered, and in a manner
oppressed him; and then he thought, also, without knowing why, and with the
mechanical persistence of revery, of a convict named Brevet, whom he had known in
the galleys, and whose trousers had been upheld by a single suspender of knitted cotton.
The checkered pattern of that suspender recurred incessantly to his mind.
He remained in this situation, and would have so remained indefinitely, even until
daybreak, had not the clock struck one—the half or quarter hour. It seemed to him that
that stroke said to him, "Come on!"
 He rose to his feet, hesitated still another moment, and listened; all was quiet in the
house; then he walked straight ahead, with short steps, to the window, of which he
caught a glimpse. The night was not very dark; there was a full moon, across which
coursed large clouds driven by the wind. This created, outdoors, alternate shadow and
gleams of light, eclipses, then bright openings of the clouds; and indoors a sort of
twilight. This twilight, sufficient to enable a person to see his way, intermittent on
account of the clouds, resembled the sort of livid light which falls through an air-hole
in a cellar, before which the passersby come and go. On arriving at the window, Jean
Valjean examined it. It had no grating; it opened in the garden and was fastened,
according to the fashion of the country, only by a small pin. He opened it; but as a rush
of cold and piercing air penetrated the room abruptly, he closed it again immediately.
He scrutinized the garden with that attentive gaze which studies rather than looks. The
garden was enclosed by a tolerably low white wall, easy to climb. Far away, at the
extremity, he perceived tops of trees, spaced at regular intervals, which indicated that
the wall separated the garden from an avenue or lane planted with trees.
Having taken this survey, he executed a movement like that of a man who has made
up his mind, strode to his alcove, grasped his knapsack, opened it, fumbled in it, pulled
out of it something which he placed on the bed, put his shoes into one of his pockets,
shut the whole thing up again, threw the knapsack on his shoulders, put on his cap, drew
the visor down over his eyes, felt for his cudgel, went and placed it in the angle of the
window; then returned to the bed, and resolutely seized the object which he had
deposited there. It resembled a short bar of iron, pointed like a pike at one end. It would
have been difficult to distinguish in that darkness for what employment that bit of iron
could have been designed. Perhaps it was a lever; possibly it was a club.
In the daytime it would have been possible to recognize it as nothing more than a
miner's candlestick. Convicts were, at that period, sometimes employed in quarrying
stone from the lofty hills which environ Toulon, and it was not rare for them to have
miners' tools at their command. These miners' candlesticks are of massive iron,
terminated at the lower extremity by a point, by means of which they are stuck into the
rock.
He took the candlestick in his right hand; holding his breath and trying to deaden the
sound of his tread, he directed his steps to the door of the adjoining room, occupied by
the Bishop, as we already know.
On arriving at this door, he found it ajar. The Bishop had not closed it.

CHAPTER XI—
WHAT HE DOES
 Jean Valjean listened. Not
a sound.

He gave the door a push.

He pushed it gently with the tip of his finger, lightly, with the furtive and uneasy
gentleness of a cat which is desirous of entering.
The door yielded to this pressure, and made an imperceptible and silent movement,
which enlarged the opening a little.
He waited a moment; then gave the door a second and a bolder push.
It continued to yield in silence. The opening was now large enough to allow him to
pass. But near the door there stood a little table, which formed an embarrassing angle
with it, and barred the entrance.
Jean Valjean recognized the difficulty. It was necessary, at any cost, to enlarge the
aperture still further.
He decided on his course of action, and gave the door a third push, more energetic
than the two preceding. This time a badly oiled hinge suddenly emitted amid the silence
a hoarse and prolonged cry.
Jean Valjean shuddered. The noise of the hinge rang in his ears with something of the
piercing and formidable sound of the trump of the Day of Judgment.
In the fantastic exaggerations of the first moment he almost imagined that that hinge
had just become animated, and had suddenly assumed a terrible life, and that it was
barking like a dog to arouse every one, and warn and to wake those who were asleep.
He halted, shuddering, bewildered, and fell back from the tips of his toes upon his heels.
He heard the arteries in his temples beating like two forge hammers, and it seemed to
him that his breath issued from his breast with the roar of the wind issuing from a
cavern. It seemed impossible to him that the horrible clamor of that irritated hinge
should not have disturbed the entire household, like the shock of an earthquake; the
door, pushed by him, had taken the alarm, and had shouted; the old man would rise at
once; the two old women would shriek out; people would come to their assistance; in
less than a quarter of an hour the town would be in an uproar, and the gendarmerie on
hand. For a moment he thought himself lost.
He remained where he was, petrified like the statue of salt, not daring to make a
movement. Several minutes elapsed. The door had fallen wide open. He ventured to
peep into the next room. Nothing had stirred there. He lent an ear. Nothing was moving
in the house. The noise made by the rusty hinge had not awakened any one.
This first danger was past; but there still reigned a frightful tumult within him.
Nevertheless, he did not retreat. Even when he had thought himself lost, he had not
drawn back. His only thought now was to finish as soon as possible. He took a step and
entered the room.
 This room was in a state of perfect calm. Here and there vague and confused forms
were distinguishable, which in the daylight were papers scattered on a table, open folios,
volumes piled upon a stool, an arm-chair heaped with clothing, a prie-Dieu, and which
at that hour were only shadowy corners and whitish spots. Jean Valjean advanced with
precaution, taking care not to knock against the furniture. He could hear, at the
extremity of the room, the even and tranquil breathing of the sleeping Bishop.
He suddenly came to a halt. He was near the bed. He had arrived there sooner than
he had thought for.
Nature sometimes mingles her effects and her spectacles with our actions with
sombre and intelligent appropriateness, as though she desired to make us reflect. For
the last half-hour a large cloud had covered the heavens. At the moment when Jean
Valjean paused in front of the bed, this cloud parted, as though on purpose, and a ray
of light, traversing the long window, suddenly illuminated the Bishop's pale face. He
was sleeping peacefully. He lay in his bed almost completely dressed, on account of the
cold of the Basses-Alps, in a garment of brown wool, which covered his arms to the
wrists. His head was thrown back on the pillow, in the careless attitude of repose; his
hand, adorned with the pastoral ring, and whence had fallen so many good deeds and
so many holy actions, was hanging over the edge of the bed. His whole face was
illumined with a vague expression of satisfaction, of hope, and of felicity. It was more
than a smile, and almost a radiance. He bore upon his brow the indescribable reflection
of a light which was invisible. The soul of the just contemplates in sleep a mysterious
heaven.
A reflection of that heaven rested on the Bishop.
It was, at the same time, a luminous transparency, for that heaven was within him.
That heaven was his conscience.
Enlarge
 At the moment when the ray of moonlight superposed itself, so to speak, upon that
inward radiance, the sleeping Bishop seemed as in a glory. It remained, however, gentle
and veiled in an ineffable half-light. That moon in the sky, that slumbering nature, that
garden without a quiver, that house which was so calm, the hour, the moment, the
silence, added some solemn and unspeakable quality to the venerable repose of this
man, and enveloped in a sort of serene and majestic aureole that white hair, those closed
eyes, that face in which all was hope and all was confidence, that head of an old man,
and that slumber of an infant.
There was something almost divine in this man, who was thus august, without being
himself aware of it.
Jean Valjean was in the shadow, and stood motionless, with his iron candlestick in
his hand, frightened by this luminous old man. Never had he beheld anything like this.
This confidence terrified him. The moral world has no grander spectacle than this: a
troubled and uneasy conscience, which has arrived on the brink of an evil action,
contemplating the slumber of the just.
That slumber in that isolation, and with a neighbor like himself, had about it
something sublime, of which he was vaguely but imperiously conscious.
No one could have told what was passing within him, not even himself. In order to
attempt to form an idea of it, it is necessary to think of the most violent of things in the
presence of the most gentle. Even on his visage it would have been impossible to
distinguish anything with certainty. It was a sort of haggard astonishment. He gazed at
it, and that was all. But what was his thought? It would have been impossible to divine
it. What was evident was, that he was touched and astounded. But what was the nature
of this emotion?
His eye never quitted the old man. The only thing which was clearly to be inferred
from his attitude and his physiognomy was a strange indecision. One would have said
that he was hesitating between the two abysses,—the one in which one loses one's self
and that in which one saves one's self. He seemed prepared to crush that skull or to kiss
that hand.
At the expiration of a few minutes his left arm rose slowly towards his brow, and he
took off his cap; then his arm fell back with the same deliberation, and Jean Valjean fell
to meditating once more, his cap in his left hand, his club in his right hand, his hair
bristling all over his savage head.
The Bishop continued to sleep in profound peace beneath that terrifying gaze.
The gleam of the moon rendered confusedly visible the crucifix over the chimney-
piece, which seemed to be extending its arms to both of them, with a benediction for
one and pardon for the other.
Suddenly Jean Valjean replaced his cap on his brow; then stepped rapidly past the
bed, without glancing at the Bishop, straight to the cupboard, which he saw near the
head; he raised his iron candlestick as though to force the lock; the key was there; he
opened it; the first thing which presented itself to him was the basket of silverware; he
seized it, traversed the chamber with long strides, without taking any precautions and
without troubling himself about the noise, gained the door, re-entered the oratory,
opened the window, seized his cudgel, bestrode the window-sill of the ground-floor,
put the silver into his knapsack, threw away the basket, crossed the garden, leaped over
the wall like a tiger, and fled.

CHAPTER XII—
THE BISHOP
WORKS
The next morning at sunrise Monseigneur Bienvenu was strolling in his garden.
Madame Magloire ran up to him in utter consternation.
"Monseigneur, Monseigneur!" she exclaimed, "does your Grace know where the
basket of silver is?"
"Yes," replied the Bishop.
"Jesus the Lord be blessed!" she resumed; "I did not know what had become of it."
The Bishop had just picked up the basket in a flower-bed. He presented it to Madame
Magloire.
"Here it is."
"Well!" said she. "Nothing in it! And the silver?"
"Ah," returned the Bishop, "so it is the silver which troubles you? I don't know where
it is."
"Great, good God! It is stolen! That man who was here last night has stolen it."
In a twinkling, with all the vivacity of an alert old woman, Madame Magloire had
rushed to the oratory, entered the alcove, and returned to the Bishop. The Bishop had
just bent down, and was sighing as he examined a plant of cochlearia des Guillons,
which the basket had broken as it fell across the bed. He rose up at Madame Magloire's
cry.
"Monseigneur, the man is gone! The silver has been stolen!"
As she uttered this exclamation, her eyes fell upon a corner of the garden, where
traces of the wall having been scaled were visible. The coping of the wall had been torn
away.
"Stay! yonder is the way he went. He jumped over into Cochefilet Lane. Ah, the
abomination! He has stolen our silver!"
 The Bishop remained silent for a moment; then he raised his grave eyes, and said
gently to Madame Magloire:—
"And, in the first place, was that silver ours?"
Madame Magloire was speechless. Another silence ensued; then the Bishop went
on:—
"Madame Magloire, I have for a long time detained that silver wrongfully. It belonged
to the poor. Who was that man? A poor man, evidently."
"Alas! Jesus!" returned Madame Magloire. "It is not for my sake, nor for
Mademoiselle's. It makes no difference to us. But it is for the sake of Monseigneur.
What is Monseigneur to eat with now?"
The Bishop gazed at her with an air of amazement.
"Ah, come! Are there no such things as pewter forks and spoons?"
Madame Magloire shrugged her shoulders.
"Pewter has an odor."
"Iron forks and spoons, then."
Madame Magloire made an expressive grimace.
"Iron has a taste."
"Very well," said the Bishop; "wooden ones then."
A few moments later he was breakfasting at the very table at which Jean Valjean had
sat on the previous evening. As he ate his breakfast, Monseigneur Welcome remarked
gayly to his sister, who said nothing, and to Madame Magloire, who was grumbling
under her breath, that one really does not need either fork or spoon, even of wood, in
order to dip a bit of bread in a cup of milk.
"A pretty idea, truly," said Madame Magloire to herself, as she went and came, "to
take in a man like that! and to lodge him close to one's self! And how fortunate that he
did nothing but steal! Ah, mon Dieu! it makes one shudder to think of it!"
As the brother and sister were about to rise from the table, there came a knock at the
door.
"Come in," said the Bishop.
The door opened. A singular and violent group made its appearance on the threshold.
Three men were holding a fourth man by the collar. The three men were gendarmes;
the other was Jean Valjean.
A brigadier of gendarmes, who seemed to be in command of the group, was standing
near the door. He entered and advanced to the Bishop, making a military salute.
"Monseigneur—" said he.
At this word, Jean Valjean, who was dejected and seemed overwhelmed, raised his
head with an air of stupefaction.
 "Monseigneur!" he murmured. "So he is not the cure?"
"Silence!" said the gendarme. "He is Monseigneur the Bishop."
In the meantime, Monseigneur Bienvenu had advanced as quickly as his great age
permitted.
"Ah! here you are!" he exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. "I am glad to see you.
Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too, which are of silver like the rest,
and for which you can certainly get two hundred francs. Why did you not carry them
away with your forks and spoons?"
Jean Valjean opened his eyes wide, and stared at the venerable Bishop with an
expression which no human tongue can render any account of.
"Monseigneur," said the brigadier of gendarmes, "so what this man said is true, then?
We came across him. He was walking like a man who is running away. We stopped
him to look into the matter. He had this silver—"
"And he told you," interposed the Bishop with a smile, "that it had been given to him
by a kind old fellow of a priest with whom he had passed the night? I see how the matter
stands. And you have brought him back here? It is a mistake."
"In that case," replied the brigadier, "we can let him go?"
"Certainly," replied the Bishop.
The gendarmes released Jean Valjean, who recoiled.
"Is it true that I am to be released?" he said, in an almost inarticulate voice, and as
though he were talking in his sleep.
"Yes, thou art released; dost thou not understand?" said one of the gendarmes.
"My friend," resumed the Bishop, "before you go, here are your candlesticks. Take
them."
He stepped to the chimney-piece, took the two silver candlesticks, and brought them
to Jean Valjean. The two women looked on without uttering a word, without a gesture,
without a look which could disconcert the Bishop.
Jean Valjean was trembling in every limb. He took the two candlesticks
mechanically, and with a bewildered air.
"Now," said the Bishop, "go in peace. By the way, when you return, my friend, it is
not necessary to pass through the garden. You can always enter and depart through the
street door. It is never fastened with anything but a latch, either by day or by night."
Then, turning to the gendarmes:—
"You may retire, gentlemen."
The gendarmes retired.
Jean Valjean was like a man on the point of fainting.
The Bishop drew near to him, and said in a low voice:—
 "Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money in becoming
an honest man."
Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of ever having promised anything, remained
speechless. The Bishop had emphasized the words when he uttered them. He resumed
with solemnity:—
"Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul
that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I
give it to God."

CHAPTER XIII—
LITTLE GERVAIS
Jean Valjean left the town as though he were fleeing from it. He set out at a very hasty
pace through the fields, taking whatever roads and paths presented themselves to him,
without perceiving that he was incessantly retracing his steps. He wandered thus the
whole morning, without having eaten anything and without feeling hungry. He was the
prey of a throng of novel sensations. He was conscious of a sort of rage; he did not
know against whom it was directed. He could not have told whether he was touched or
humiliated. There came over him at moments a strange emotion which he resisted and
to which he opposed the hardness acquired during the last twenty years of his life. This
state of mind fatigued him. He perceived with dismay that the sort of frightful calm
which the injustice of his misfortune had conferred upon him was giving way within
him. He asked himself what would replace this. At times he would have actually
preferred to be in prison with the gendarmes, and that things should not have happened
in this way; it would have agitated him less. Although the season was tolerably far
advanced, there were still a few late flowers in the hedge-rows here and there, whose
odor as he passed through them in his march recalled to him memories of his childhood.
These memories were almost intolerable to him, it was so long since they had recurred
to him.
Unutterable thoughts assembled within him in this manner all day long.
As the sun declined to its setting, casting long shadows athwart the soil from every
pebble, Jean Valjean sat down behind a bush upon a large ruddy plain, which was
absolutely deserted. There was nothing on the horizon except the Alps. Not even the
spire of a distant village. Jean Valjean might have been three leagues distant from D—
— A path which intersected the plain passed a few paces from the bush.
 In the middle of this meditation, which would have contributed not a little to render
his rags terrifying to any one who might have encountered him, a joyous sound became
audible.
He turned his head and saw a little Savoyard, about ten years of age, coming up the
path and singing, his hurdy-gurdy on his hip, and his marmot-box on his back.
One of those gay and gentle children, who go from land to land affording a view of
their knees through the holes in their trousers.
Without stopping his song, the lad halted in his march from time to time, and played
at knuckle-bones with some coins which he had in his hand—his whole fortune,
probably.
Among this money there was one forty-sou piece.
The child halted beside the bush, without perceiving Jean Valjean, and tossed up his
handful of sous, which, up to that time, he had caught with a good deal of adroitness on
the back of his hand.
This time the forty-sou piece escaped him, and went rolling towards the brushwood
until it reached Jean Valjean.
Jean Valjean set his foot upon it.
In the meantime, the child had looked after his coin and had caught sight of him.
He showed no astonishment, but walked straight up to the man.
The spot was absolutely solitary. As far as the eye could see there was not a person
on the plain or on the path. The only sound was the tiny, feeble cries of a flock of birds
of passage, which was traversing the heavens at an immense height. The child was
standing with his back to the sun, which cast threads of gold in his hair and empurpled
with its blood-red gleam the savage face of Jean Valjean.
"Sir," said the little Savoyard, with that childish confidence which is composed of
ignorance and innocence, "my money."
"What is your name?" said Jean Valjean.
"Little Gervais, sir."
"Go away," said Jean Valjean.
"Sir," resumed the child, "give me back my money."
Jean Valjean dropped his head, and made no reply.
The child began again, "My money, sir."
Jean Valjean's eyes remained fixed on the earth.
"My piece of money!" cried the child, "my white piece! my silver!"
It seemed as though Jean Valjean did not hear him. The child grasped him by the
collar of his blouse and shook him. At the same time he made an effort to displace the
big iron-shod shoe which rested on his treasure.
 "I want my piece of money! my piece of forty sous!"
The child wept. Jean Valjean raised his head. He still remained seated. His eyes were
troubled. He gazed at the child, in a sort of amazement, then he stretched out his hand
towards his cudgel and cried in a terrible voice, "Who's there?"
"I, sir," replied the child. "Little Gervais! I! Give me back my forty sous, if you
please! Take your foot away, sir, if you please!"
Then irritated, though he was so small, and becoming almost menacing:—
"Come now, will you take your foot away? Take your foot away, or we'll see!"
"Ah! It's still you!" said Jean Valjean, and rising abruptly to his feet, his foot still
resting on the silver piece, he added:—
"Will you take yourself off!"
The frightened child looked at him, then began to tremble from head to foot, and after
a few moments of stupor he set out, running at the top of his speed, without daring to
turn his neck or to utter a cry.
Nevertheless, lack of breath forced him to halt after a certain distance, and Jean
Valjean heard him sobbing, in the midst of his own revery.
At the end of a few moments the child had disappeared.
The sun had set.
The shadows were descending around Jean Valjean. He had eaten nothing all day; it
is probable that he was feverish.
He had remained standing and had not changed his attitude after the child's flight.
The breath heaved his chest at long and irregular intervals. His gaze, fixed ten or twelve
paces in front of him, seemed to be scrutinizing with profound attention the shape of an
ancient fragment of blue earthenware which had fallen in the grass. All at once he
shivered; he had just begun to feel the chill of evening.
He settled his cap more firmly on his brow, sought mechanically to cross and button
his blouse, advanced a step and stopped to pick up his cudgel.
At that moment he caught sight of the forty-sou piece, which his foot had half ground
into the earth, and which was shining among the pebbles. It was as though he had
received a galvanic shock. "What is this?" he muttered between his teeth. He recoiled
three paces, then halted, without being able to detach his gaze from the spot which his
foot had trodden but an instant before, as though the thing which lay glittering there in
the gloom had been an open eye riveted upon him.
At the expiration of a few moments he darted convulsively towards the silver coin,
seized it, and straightened himself up again and began to gaze afar off over the plain, at
the same time casting his eyes towards all points of the horizon, as he stood there erect
and shivering, like a terrified wild animal which is seeking refuge.
 He saw nothing. Night was falling, the plain was cold and vague, great banks of violet
haze were rising in the gleam of the twilight.
He said, "Ah!" and set out rapidly in the direction in which the child had disappeared.
After about thirty paces he paused, looked about him and saw nothing.
Then he shouted with all his might:—
"Little Gervais! Little Gervais!"
He paused and waited.
There was no reply.
The landscape was gloomy and deserted. He was encompassed by space. There was
nothing around him but an obscurity in which his gaze was lost, and a silence which
engulfed his voice.
An icy north wind was blowing, and imparted to things around him a sort of
lugubrious life. The bushes shook their thin little arms with incredible fury. One would
have said that they were threatening and pursuing some one.
He set out on his march again, then he began to run; and from time to time he halted
and shouted into that solitude, with a voice which was the most formidable and the most
disconsolate that it was possible to hear, "Little Gervais! Little Gervais!"
Assuredly, if the child had heard him, he would have been alarmed and would have
taken good care not to show himself. But the child was no doubt already far away.
He encountered a priest on horseback. He stepped up to him and said:—
"Monsieur le Curé, have you seen a child pass?"
"No," said the priest.
"One named Little Gervais?"
"I have seen no one."
He drew two five-franc pieces from his money-bag and handed them to the priest.
"Monsieur le Curé, this is for your poor people. Monsieur le Curé, he was a little lad,
about ten years old, with a marmot, I think, and a hurdy-gurdy. One of those Savoyards,
you know?"
"I have not seen him."
"Little Gervais? There are no villages here? Can you tell me?"
"If he is like what you say, my friend, he is a little stranger. Such persons pass through
these parts. We know nothing of them."
Jean Valjean seized two more coins of five francs each with violence, and gave them
to the priest.
"For your poor," he said.
Then he added, wildly:—
"Monsieur l' Abbé, have me arrested. I am a thief."
 The priest put spurs to his horse and fled in haste, much alarmed.
Jean Valjean set out on a run, in the direction which he had first taken.
In this way he traversed a tolerably long distance, gazing, calling, shouting, but he
met no one. Two or three times he ran across the plain towards something which
conveyed to him the effect of a human being reclining or crouching down; it turned out
to be nothing but brushwood or rocks nearly on a level with the earth. At length, at a
spot where three paths intersected each other, he stopped. The moon had risen. He sent
his gaze into the distance and shouted for the last time, "Little Gervais! Little Gervais!
Little Gervais!" His shout died away in the mist, without even awakening an echo. He
murmured yet once more, "Little Gervais!" but in a feeble and almost inarticulate voice.
It was his last effort; his legs gave way abruptly under him, as though an invisible power
had suddenly overwhelmed him with the weight of his evil conscience; he fell
exhausted, on a large stone, his fists clenched in his hair and his face on his knees, and
he cried, "I am a wretch!"
Then his heart burst, and he began to cry. It was the first time that he had wept in
nineteen years.
When Jean Valjean left the Bishop's house, he was, as we have seen, quite thrown
out of everything that had been his thought hitherto. He could not yield to the evidence
of what was going on within him. He hardened himself against the angelic action and
the gentle words of the old man. "You have promised me to become an honest man. I
buy your soul. I take it away from the spirit of perversity; I give it to the good God."
This recurred to his mind unceasingly. To this celestial kindness he opposed pride,
which is the fortress of evil within us. He was indistinctly conscious that the pardon of
this priest was the greatest assault and the most formidable attack which had moved
him yet; that his obduracy was finally settled if he resisted this clemency; that if he
yielded, he should be obliged to renounce that hatred with which the actions of other
men had filled his soul through so many years, and which pleased him; that this time it
was necessary to conquer or to be conquered; and that a struggle, a colossal and final
struggle, had been begun between his viciousness and the goodness of that man.
In the presence of these lights, he proceeded like a man who is intoxicated. As he
walked thus with haggard eyes, did he have a distinct perception of what might result
to him from his adventure at D——? Did he understand all those mysterious murmurs
which warn or importune the spirit at certain moments of life? Did a voice whisper in
his ear that he had just passed the solemn hour of his destiny; that there no longer
remained a middle course for him; that if he were not henceforth the best of men, he
would be the worst; that it behooved him now, so to speak, to mount higher than the
Bishop, or fall lower than the convict; that if he wished to become good be must become
an angel; that if he wished to remain evil, he must become a monster?
Here, again, some questions must be put, which we have already put to ourselves
elsewhere: did he catch some shadow of all this in his thought, in a confused way?
Misfortune certainly, as we have said, does form the education of the intelligence;
nevertheless, it is doubtful whether Jean Valjean was in a condition to disentangle all
that we have here indicated. If these ideas occurred to him, he but caught glimpses of,
rather than saw them, and they only succeeded in throwing him into an unutterable and
almost painful state of emotion. On emerging from that black and deformed thing which
is called the galleys, the Bishop had hurt his soul, as too vivid a light would have hurt
his eyes on emerging from the dark. The future life, the possible life which offered itself
to him henceforth, all pure and radiant, filled him with tremors and anxiety. He no
longer knew where he really was. Like an owl, who should suddenly see the sun rise,
the convict had been dazzled and blinded, as it were, by virtue.
That which was certain, that which he did not doubt, was that he was no longer the
same man, that everything about him was changed, that it was no longer in his power
to make it as though the Bishop had not spoken to him and had not touched him.
In this state of mind he had encountered little Gervais, and had robbed him of his
forty sous. Why? He certainly could not have explained it; was this the last effect and
the supreme effort, as it were, of the evil thoughts which he had brought away from the
galleys,—a remnant of impulse, a result of what is called in statics, acquired force? It
was that, and it was also, perhaps, even less than that. Let us say it simply, it was not
he who stole; it was not the man; it was the beast, who, by habit and instinct, had simply
placed his foot upon that money, while the intelligence was struggling amid so many
novel and hitherto unheard-of thoughts besetting it.
When intelligence re-awakened and beheld that action of the brute, Jean Valjean
recoiled with anguish and uttered a cry of terror. Enlarge
It was because,—strange phenomenon, and one which was possible only in the
situation in which he found himself,—in stealing the money from that child, he had
done a thing of which he was no longer capable.
However that may be, this last evil action had a decisive effect on him; it abruptly
traversed that chaos which he bore in his mind, and dispersed it, placed on one side the
thick obscurity, and on the other the light, and acted on his soul, in the state in which it
then was, as certain chemical reagents act upon a troubled mixture by precipitating one
element and clarifying the other.
First of all, even before examining himself and reflecting, all bewildered, like one
who seeks to save himself, he tried to find the child in order to return his money to him;
then, when he recognized the fact that this was impossible, he halted in despair. At the
moment when he exclaimed "I am a wretch!" he had just perceived what he was, and
he was already separated from himself to such a degree, that he seemed to himself to be
no longer anything more than a phantom, and as if he had, there before him, in flesh
and blood, the hideous galley-convict, Jean Valjean, cudgel in hand, his blouse on his
hips, his knapsack filled with stolen objects on his back, with his resolute and gloomy
visage, with his thoughts filled with abominable projects.
 Excess of unhappiness had, as we have remarked, made him in some sort a visionary.
This, then, was in the nature of a vision. He actually saw that Jean Valjean, that sinister
face, before him. He had almost reached the point of asking himself who that man was,
and he was horrified by him.
His brain was going through one of those violent and yet perfectly calm moments in
which revery is so profound that it absorbs reality. One no longer beholds the object
which one has before one, and one sees, as though apart from one's self, the figures
which one has in one's own mind.
Thus he contemplated himself, so to speak, face to face, and at the same time, athwart
this hallucination, he perceived in a mysterious depth a sort of light which he at first
took for a torch. On scrutinizing this light which appeared to his conscience with more
attention, he recognized the fact that it possessed a human form and that this torch was
the Bishop.
His conscience weighed in turn these two men thus placed before it,—the Bishop and
Jean Valjean. Nothing less than the first was required to soften the second. By one of
those singular effects, which are peculiar to this sort of ecstasies, in proportion as his
revery continued, as the Bishop grew great and resplendent in his eyes, so did Jean
Valjean grow less and vanish. After a certain time he was no longer anything more than
a shade. All at once he disappeared. The Bishop alone remained; he filled the whole
soul of this wretched man with a magnificent radiance.
Jean Valjean wept for a long time. He wept burning tears, he sobbed with more
weakness than a woman, with more fright than a child.
As he wept, daylight penetrated more and more clearly into his soul; an extraordinary
light; a light at once ravishing and terrible. His past life, his first fault, his long expiation,
his external brutishness, his internal hardness, his dismissal to liberty, rejoicing in
manifold plans of vengeance, what had happened to him at the Bishop's, the last thing
that he had done, that theft of forty sous from a child, a crime all the more cowardly,
and all the more monstrous since it had come after the Bishop's pardon,—all this
recurred to his mind and appeared clearly to him, but with a clearness which he had
never hitherto witnessed. He examined his life, and it seemed horrible to him; his soul,
and it seemed frightful to him. In the meantime a gentle light rested over this life and
this soul. It seemed to him that he beheld Satan by the light of Paradise.
How many hours did he weep thus? What did he do after he had wept? Whither did
he go! No one ever knew. The only thing which seems to be authenticated is that that
same night the carrier who served Grenoble at that epoch, and who arrived at D——
about three o'clock in the morning, saw, as he traversed the street in which the Bishop's
residence was situated, a man in the attitude of prayer, kneeling on the pavement in the
shadow, in front of the door of Monseigneur Welcome.