Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  At half past eight in the evening he had supper with his sister while Mme Magloire stood over them waiting at table. No meal could be more frugal. But if one of his curés had been invited to supper Mme Magloire took advantage of the circumstance to prepare something more lavish, fish from the lakes or game from the hills. Any curé served as a pretext for a solid meal, and the bishop acquiesced in this. Otherwise the meal consisted of boiled vegetables and fried bread. They said in the town, ‘When the bishop is not eating like a curé he eats like a Trappist monk.’

  After supper he talked for half an hour with his sister and Mme Magloire and then withdrew to his own room to resume his writing, either on loose sheets of paper or in the margins of some folio volume. He was a man of letters and something of a scholar, and he has left behind him half a dozen manuscripts which are not without interest, including an essay on a line of Genesis – ‘And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’ He contrasts this with three other versions: the Arabic, ‘The winds of God blew’; that of Flavius Josephus, ‘A wind from on high descended upon earth’; and finally the Chaldean version of the Rabbi Onkelos, ‘A wind from God blew upon the face of the waters.’ In another essay he examines the theological writings of Charles-Louis Hugo, Bishop of Ptolémaïs, a great-great-uncle of the present writer, in which he proves that a number of pamphlets published in the last century under the pseudonym of Barleycorn are to be attributed to this prelate.*

  Sometimes while reading he would sink into a profound reverie from which he would emerge to scribble a few lines on the pages of whatever book he had in his hand. These jottings often had nothing to do with the book itself. We have before us a note written in the margin of a volume entitled, Correspondance du lord Germain avec les généraux Clinton, Cornwallis et les amiraux de la station de l’ Amérique. A Versailles, chez Poinçot, libraire, et à Paris, chez Pissot, libraire, quai des Augustins.

  The note is as follows:

  O Thou which art.

  Ecclesiastes names thee Almighty, the Maccabees name thee Creator, the Epistle to the Ephesians names thee Liberty, Baruch names thee Immensity, the Psalms name thee Wisdom and Truth, John names thee Light, the Book of Kings names thee Lord, Exodus names thee Providence, Leviticus Sanctity, Esdras Justice, creation names thee God, man names thee Father; but Solomon names thee Compassion, which is the most beautiful of all thy names.

  At about nine o’clock the two women went upstairs to their rooms, leaving him alone on the ground floor until morning.

  And here it is necessary that we should give an exact account of the dwelling of Monseigneur the Bishop of Digne.

  VI

  The guardian of his house

  The house, as we have said, consisted of two floors with three rooms on each and an attic above them. Behind it was a quarter-acre of garden. The two women occupied the top floor and the bishop’s quarters were below. The first of his three rooms, giving directly on to the street, served as the dining-room; the second was his bedroom and study, and the third his oratory. One could leave the oratory only by way of the bedroom, and the only way out of the bedroom was through the dining-room. At the far end of the oratory there was a screened alcove with a bed for the occasional guest. The bishop was accustomed to offer it to country curés whose personal or parish affairs brought them to Digne.

  The former hospital dispensary, a small building which had been added to the house, extending into the garden, had been converted into a kitchen and store-room. The garden also contained a shed, formerly the hospital kitchen, where the bishop kept two cows. Half of whatever milk they gave was sent every morning to the hospital. ‘I pay my tithe,’ he said.

  His bedroom was large and difficult to heat in winter, and since logs were very dear in Digne he had had the notion of sealing off a part of the cowshed with a blank partition. It was here that he passed the very cold evenings. He called it his winter salon.

  Like the dining-room, the winter salon was sparsely furnished, containing only a square whitewood table and four straw-seated chairs. The dining-room contained in addition an old sideboard painted with pink distemper. A similar sideboard, suitably draped with white cloths and imitation lace, served in the oratory as an altar.

  Wealthy penitents and the devout ladies of Digne had more than once subscribed funds for providing the oratory with a handsome new altar. The bishop took the money and gave it to the poor. ‘The soul of an unfortunate who thanks God for consolation,’ he said, ‘is the best of altars.’

  There were two wicker prayer-stools in the oratory, and an armchair in the bedroom, also of wicker. When the bishop received half a dozen or more persons at a time – the prefect, officers from the garrison or students from the little seminary – chairs had to be fetched from the winter salon, and if necessary the armchair from the bedroom and the prayer-stools from the oratory. In this way seating for eleven visitors could be provided. Sometimes there were twelve, and on these occasions the bishop solved the problem by standing in front of the fire in winter, or in summer proposing that they should walk in the garden.

  There was a chair in the screened alcove, but it had lost part of its straw seat and one of its legs, so that it had to be propped against the wall. Mlle Baptistine had in her bedroom a capacious wooden easy chair which had once been gilt and upholstered in flowered silk; but since this had had to be brought in through the window, on account of the narrowness of the stairs, it could not be used for general purposes. It had long been Mlle Baptistine’s ambition to acquire a drawing-room armchair with tapered mahogany legs and yellow velvet upholstery with rosettes; but this would have cost at least five hundred francs, and in five years she had been able to save only forty-two francs ten sous, so in the end she had finally given up the idea. Do we ever realize our fondest dreams?

  Nothing could have been more simple than the bishop’s bedroom. A french window opposite the bed giving on to the garden; a narrow iron bedstead with a canopy of green serge, and beyond it, behind a curtain, an array of toilet articles betraying the fastidious habits of the one-time man of fashion. Two doors, one by the fireplace, leading to the oratory, and the other by the bookcase, leading to the dining-room. The shelves of the big, glass-fronted bookcase were filled. The fireplace, its wooden surround painted to resemble marble, was normally without a fire; it contained instead two ornamental fire-dogs, a form of episcopal luxury, embellished with flower-vases and foliations that had once been silver-gilt; and above the mantelpiece, where ordinarily a mirror is placed, there hung a once-silvered copper crucifix against a square of threadbare black velvet in a wooden frame that had lost its gilding. By the french window was a large table with an inkstand and a confusion of papers and thick tomes, and beside the table was the wicker armchair. A prayer-stool stood at the foot of the bed, borrowed from the oratory.

  Two portraits in oval frames hung on the walls on either side of the bed. Small gilt inscriptions on the bare canvas surrounding the portraits indicated that they represented respectively the Abbé de Chaliot, Bishop of Saint-Claude, and the Abbé Tourteau, Vicar-General of Agde and Abbot of Grand-Champ, of the Cistercian order. The bishop had inherited these when he took over the room from the hospital patients, and had left them where they were. They were priests and presumably benefactors, two things entitling them to his regard. Otherwise all he knew about them was that they had received their appointments on the same day in April 1785, the one to his bishopric and the other to his living. He had made the discovery when Mme Magloire had taken down the portraits to dust them, the details being inscribed in faded ink on a small square of paper, yellowed with time and attached with sealing wafers to the back of the portrait of the Abbé de Grand-Champ.

  The french window was covered by an aged curtain of some coarse material which had finally become so worn that Mme Magloire had been obliged to put a large patch in it to save the cost of buying a new one. The patch was in the form of a cross, a fact upon which the bishop often remarked with pleasure.

&nbs
p; All the rooms in the house, those on the ground floor as well as the upstairs rooms, were whitewashed like a barracks or hospital.

  However, during the latter years, as we shall presently see, Mme Magloire discovered wall-paintings under the dismembered paper in Mlle Baptistine’s room. This was accounted for by the fact that before becoming a hospital the house had been a place of assembly. The bedrooms had red-tiled floors, scrubbed every week, with straw mats beside the beds. For the rest, the house was maintained by the two women in a state of scrupulous cleanliness. This was the one luxury the bishop allowed. ‘It is taking nothing from the poor,’ he said.

  But we may confess that of his former possessions he still retained a set of six silver knives and forks and a large silver soup-ladle which rejoiced the heart of Mme Magloire when they lay splendidly gleaming on the white tablecloth. And since we are depicting the Bishop of Digne as he was, we must add that he more than once remarked, ‘I should find it hard to give up eating with silver.’

  To this treasure must be added two massive silver candlesticks which he had inherited from a great-aunt. They held wax candles and stood as a rule on the bishop’s mantelpiece; but when there was a guest, Mme Magloire lit the candles and placed them on the diningtable. In the bishop’s room, at the head of the bed, was a small cupboard in which she locked the silver cutlery and ladle every night; but it must be added that the key was never removed.

  The garden, somewhat the worse for the rather ugly buildings we have mentioned, was laid out in four intersecting paths round a drainage trap, and a fifth path ran round it flanking the white boundary wall. The paths enclosed four square plots bordered with box. Mme Magloire grew vegetables in three of these, and the bishop had planted flowers in the fourth. There were a few fruit trees. Mme Magloire once said teasingly to him: ‘Monseigneur, you believe in making use of everything, but this fourth plot is wasted. Salads are more useful than flowers.’ ‘You are wrong,’ replied the bishop. ‘The beautiful is as useful as the useful.’ Then, after a pause, he added: ‘More so, perhaps.’

  The fourth plot, divided into three or four beds, occupied nearly as much of the bishop’s time as did his books. He would spend an hour or two there whenever he could, weeding, hoeing, and planting. He was not as hard on insect pests as a good gardener would have liked him to be. But then, he claimed no knowledge of botany, knew nothing of strains and genera and took no sides in the disputes between learned botanists. He did not study plants, he merely loved flowers. He had great respect for men of learning but even more respect for the ignorant, and without forfeiting either loyalty he watered his beds every summer evening with a green watering-can.

  No door in the house could be locked. The dining-room door, which gave directly on to the cathedral close, had originally been as heavily equipped with locks and bolts as the door of a prison. The bishop had had all these removed so that by day or night the door was only latched and anyone could enter at any time. This had at first caused the two women great concern. ‘Put bolts on your bedroom doors if you like,’ he said to them. They came in the end to share his simple faith, or at least to behave as though they did, although Mme Magloire had moments of misgiving. As for the bishop, his view of the matter is conveyed by three lines which he wrote in the margin of a bible: ‘This is the distinction: the doctor’s door must never be shut; the priest’s door must always be open.’

  There is another note which he wrote in the margin of a work entitled, A Philosophy of Medical Science: ‘Am I not as much a doctor as they? I too have my patients; in the first place, theirs, whom they call sick; and then my own, whom I call unfortunate.’

  And he wrote elsewhere: ‘Do not ask the name of the person who seeks a bed for the night. He who is reluctant to give his name is the one who most needs shelter.’

  It happened one day that an estimable curé – I do not recall whether he was curé of Couloubroux or of Pompierry – having probably been prompted by Mme Magloire, asked Monseigneur whether it was not perhaps a little injudicious on his part to leave his door unlocked at all hours; and, in short, did he not fear lest some calamity might befall a house so unprotected? The bishop touched him gently on the shoulder and said, quoting the Psalms: ‘Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’ Then he changed the subject.

  It pleased him to say: ‘There is priest’s courage just as there is the courage of a colonel of dragoons … But,’ he added, ‘ours must be quiet.’

  VII

  Cravatte

  Here an event falls naturally into place which cannot be omitted because of the especial light it throws on the character of the Bishop of Digne.

  After the breaking-up of the robber band of Gaspard Bès, which had infested the gorges of Ollioules, one of Bès’s lieutenants, Cravatte, escaped to the mountains. He hid for a time in the county of Nice with the few surviving members of the band, then moved to Piedmont and suddenly reappeared in France, in the region of Barcelonette. He and his companions were seen first in Jauziers and then in Tuiles. He hid in the caves of the Joug-de-l’Aigle and from there preyed upon hamlets and villages, moving down through the ravines of Ubaye and Ubayette. He even ventured as far as Embrun, where he broke into the cathedral one night and looted the sacristy. His maraudings alarmed the countryside. The gendarmerie pursued him, but he always escaped, sometimes by the use of force. He was an intrepid rogue.

  It was during this reign of terror that the bishop arrived in the district on a tour of the diocese. He was met at Chastelar by the mayor, who urged him to turn back. Cravatte was in control of the hills as far as l’Arche and beyond. To go further would be dangerous, even with an escort, and it would mean risking the lives of three or four unfortunate gendarmes.

  ‘Just so,’ said the bishop. ‘I intend to go without an escort.’

  ‘Monseigneur,’ cried the mayor, ‘you must not even think of it!’

  ‘I think so much of it that I refuse absolutely to have any gendarmes and I shall be leaving in an hour.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Yes, alone.’

  ‘Monseigneur, you cannot!’

  ‘There is a humble commune in the mountains which I have not visited for three years,’ said the bishop. ‘The people are friends of mine, peaceable and honest shepherds who own no more than one in thirty of the goats they pasture. They spin brightly coloured woollen threads and play mountain airs on six-hole pipes. They need someone to talk to them from time to time about God. What would they think of a bishop who was afraid? What would they think of me if I did not go?’

  ‘But the brigands, Monseigneur – if you should fall foul of them –’

  ‘Just so,’ said the bishop. ‘Since you mention it, I may meet the brigands. They, too, must be in need of someone to speak to them of God.’

  ‘But they are like a pack of wolves!’

  ‘And perhaps that is why Jesus has appointed me to be their shepherd. Who can account for the ways of Providence?’

  “They’ll rob you.’

  ‘I own nothing.’

  ‘They may kill you.’

  ‘An old priest mumbling his incantations? Why should they?’

  ‘Merciful Heaven, Monseigneur – if you should meet them –’

  ‘I shall ask them for alms for my poor.’

  ‘Monseigneur, I beseech you not to go. You will be risking your life.’

  ‘Is that really all, Monsieur le Maire?’ said the bishop. ‘I was not put into this world to preserve my life but to protect souls.’

  There was nothing for it but to let him go. The tale of his obstinacy spread through the countryside, causing great alarm.

  He left, accompanied only by a small boy who volunteered to act as his guide, having refused to allow his sister and Mme Magloire to go with him. They went on mules, meeting no one, and the bishop arrived safely at the hamlet of his friends the shepherds. He stayed there a fortnight, preaching, ministering, teaching, and moralizing. Before leaving he wished to have a ceremonial Te D
eum sung, but when he discussed this with the curé he encountered a difficulty. There was no suitable church apparel. All the village could offer was its shabby sacristy and a few old chasubles trimmed with false braid.

  ‘No matter,’ said the bishop. ‘Announce the Te Deum after the sermon. Something will turn up.’

  Messengers were sent to the neighbouring churches, but the sum of all the treasures of those humble parishes was not enough to clothe a single cathedral cantor in a fitting manner.

  And in this awkward situation a large chest arrived for the bishop, brought to the presbytery by two unknown horsemen who at once rode away. It was found to contain a cope of cloth-of-gold, a mitre ornamented with diamonds, an archbishop’s cross, a magnificent crozier and the rest of the pontifical raiment stolen a month previously from the cathedral at Embrun. There was also a sheet of paper bearing the words: ‘Cravatte to Monseigneur Bienvenu’.

  ‘I said something would turn up,’ commented the bishop. And he added, smiling: ‘To him who is content with a curé’s surplice God sends an archbishop’s cope.’

  ‘God, Monseigneur,’ murmured the curé with a faint smile, ‘– or the devil?’

  The bishop looked sternly at him and answered: ‘God!’

  When he returned to Chastelar people lined the roadside to see him. Mlle Baptistine and Mme Magloire were awaiting him at the presbytery, and he said to his sister: ‘Was I not right? The poor priest went empty-handed to the poor people of the hills and comes back with his hands full. I set out with nothing but my trust in God and I have brought back the riches of a cathedral.’

  And before they went to bed that night he said:

  ‘We must never fear robbers or murderers. They are dangers from outside, small dangers. It is ourselves we have to fear. Prejudice is the real robber, and vice the real murderer. Why should we be troubled by a threat to our person or our pocket? What we have to beware of is the threat to our souls.’