In 1815 he was seventy-five years old, but he looked no more than sixty. He was not tall but inclined to stoutness, and to combat this he walked a great deal, walking with a steady stride and with his back only very slightly bowed, a detail from which we draw no conclusions. Pope Gregory XVI, at the age of eighty, bore himself erect and smiling, but this did not prevent him from being a bad pope. Monseigneur Bienvenu had what is called a handsome presence, but such was his amiability that his looks were forgotten.
The childlike gaiety of his conversation was an especial grace that put all men at their ease. His whole being seemed to radiate happiness. The freshness of his colouring, and the unbroken row of white teeth which showed when he laughed, lent him that frank and approachable air which causes people to say of a youth, ‘He’s a nice lad,’ and of the elderly, ‘He’s a sound man.’ This, it will be recalled, was the impression he had made on Napoleon. It was the impression he made at a glance on any person seeing him for the first time. But to spend a few hours in his company and see him in a reflective mood was to witness the gradual transformation of the sound man into something altogether more imposing. The wide, grave forehead, rendered noble by the white hair, acquired an added nobility from meditation; majesty emanated from the goodness while still the goodness shone. To see this was to know something of the emotion one might experience on seeing an angel, smiling, slowly spread his wings while continuing to smile. It was to be imbued with a feeling of respect beyond words, and to feel oneself in the presence of a great spirit, tested and compassionate, whose thought was so all-embracing that it could be nothing else than sweet.
The days of his life, as we have seen, were filled with prayer, with the celebration of the offices, the giving of alms, the consoling of the afflicted, the tilling of his garden-plot; with brotherliness, frugality, hospitality, renunciation, trust, study and toil. Filled, indeed, is the correct word, for the bishop’s days overflowed with goodness of thought and word and action. But the day was not complete for him if he was prevented by bad weather from spending an hour or two in his garden after the two women had retired to bed. It seemed to be a necessary ritual that he should prepare himself for sleep by meditating under the solemnity of the night sky. Sometimes, if they were awake, they would hear him at a late hour pacing up and down the paths. Peaceful in his solitude, adoring, matching the tranquillity of the heavens with the tranquillity of his own heartbeat, ravished in the shadows by the visible and invisible splendours of God, he opened his spirit to the thoughts coming from the Unknown. At those moments, when he offered up his heart in the hour when the night flowers offer up their scent, himself illumined in the bestarred night and unfolding in ecstasy amid the universal radiance of creation, he could not perhaps have said what took place in his spirit, what went out from him and what entered in: a mysterious transaction between the infinity of the soul and the infinity of the universe.
He pondered on the greatness and the living presence of God, on the mystery of eternity in the future and, even more strange, eternity in the past, on all the infinity manifest to his eyes and to his senses; and without seeking to comprehend the incomprehensible he contemplated these things. He did not scrutinize God but let his eyes be dazzled. He pondered on the sublime conjunction of atoms that gives matter its substance; that reveals forces in discovering them, creates the separate within the whole, proportion within immensity, countless numbers within infinity; and through light gives birth to beauty. This conjunction, this ceaseless joining and disjoining, is life and death.
Seated on a wooden bench with his back against a crumbling trellis he gazed at the stars through the gnarled and stunted outlines of his fruit trees. That quarter acre of land, with its poor growth and its encumbrance of buildings, was dear to him and sufficient.
What more could he need, this old man whose little leisure was divided between daytime gardening and night-time contemplation? Was not that narrow space with the sky its ceiling room enough for the worship of God in the most delicate of His works and in the most sublime? A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in –what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars.
XIV
What he thought
A last word.
Since this account of him, particularly at the present time, and to use an expression currently in vogue, may have lent the Bishop of Digne a ‘pantheistic’ complexion, making it appear, to his discredit or otherwise, that he had evolved one of those personal philosophies, peculiar to our century, which sometimes grow in solitary minds and so possess them as to replace accepted religions, we must emphasize that no one who knew Monseigneur Bienvenu would have felt justified in supposing anything of the kind. It was the heart that inspired this man, and it was from its light that his wisdom proceeded.
No philosophical system; but many works. Abstruse speculation contains an element of vertigo, and there is nothing to suggest that he hazarded his reason in any apotheosis. The prophet may be bold, but a bishop must be cautious. He probably refrained on principle from looking too closely at those problems which are in some sort the reserve of towering and inconoclastic intellects. A sacred terror haunts the threshold of Enigma; the dark portals are flung wide, but there is a voice which warns the passer-by not to enter. Woe to him who ventures too far! Men of genius from the boundless depths of abstraction and pure speculation, situated as it were above dogma, propose their theories to God. Their prayers audaciously invite discussion. Their worship poses questions. That is personal religion, loaded with anxiety and responsibility for those who dare embark upon it.
There are no bounds to human thought. At its own risk and peril it analyses and explores its own bewilderment. One may almost say that in a kind of transcendent reaction it bewilders nature; the mysterious world around us gives back what it is given, and probably the contemplators are themselves contemplated. However this may be, there are men – but are they men? – who clearly discern beyond the horizon of dreaming the heights of the Absolute, who experience the terrible vision of the infinite mountain. Monseigneur Bienvenu was not one of these; he was not a man of genius. He would have mistrusted those sublimities whence certain men, and very great men such as Swedenborg and Pascal, have lapsed into madness. Such powerful thinking has its value; it is by these arduous roads that we approach perfection. But he took the short cut, the Holy Gospel.
He did not seek to assume the mantle of Elijah, to shed a light of the future upon the misty turmoil of events or resolve the prevailing light into a single flame; there was in him nothing of the prophet or the mystic. He was a simple soul who loved, and that was all.
That he expanded prayer to make of it a superhuman aspiration, this is probable. But we can no more pray too much than we can love too much; and if to pray outside the accepted texts is heresy, then St Teresa and St Jerome were also heretics.
His heart was given to all suffering and expiation. The world to him was like an immense malady. He sensed fever everywhere, sought out affliction and without seeking to answer the riddle did what he could to heal the wound. The awesome spectacle of things as they were enhanced his tenderness; he was concerned only to find for himself and inspire in others the best means of comfort and relief. The theme of all existing things was for that good and rare priest distress in need of consolation.
There are men who dig for gold; he dug for compassion. Poverty was his goldmine; and the universality of suffering a reason for the universality of charity. ‘Love one another.’ To him everything was contained in those words, his whole doctrine, and he asked no more. The senator to whom we have referred, the gentleman who thought himself a philosopher, once said to him: ‘You see what the world is like, every man at war with every other, and victory to the strongest. Your “Love one another” is pure folly’ – ‘Well, if it is folly,’ said Monseigneur without disputing the matter, ‘then the soul must enclose itself within it like the pearl in the oyster.’ Which is what he did. He enclosed himself in that folly and was whol
ly content to do so, putting aside the huge questions that fascinate and terrify, the endless vistas of abstraction, the chasms of metaphysics, all those depths which for the believer converge in God and for the atheist in limbo: destiny, good and evil, the conflict of man with man, the consciousness of men and the sleep-walking thought of animals, transformation by death and the recapitulation of lives in the tomb, the mysterious additions made by successive loves to the continuing self, the essence and the substance, the Nihil and the Ens, the soul, nature, liberty, necessity; problems sheer as precipices, sinister densities beckoning to the giants of the human intellect; abysses which a Lucretius, a Paul, or a Dante explore with blazing eyes, steadfastly turned towards the infinite, which seem to kindle the stars.
Monseigneur Bienvenu was simply a man who observed these mysteries from outside, not looking too closely, not stirring them with his finger or letting them oppress his mind, but in a spirit deeply imbued with reference for the hereafter.
Book Two
The Outcast
I
End of a day’s journey
AT THE beginning of October 1815, and about an hour before sunset, a man travelling on foot entered the town of Digne. The few people who happened to be at their windows or doorways observed him with a vague misgiving. It would have been hard to find a traveller of more disreputable aspect. He was a man in the prime of life, of medium height, broad-shouldered and robust, who might have been in his late forties. A cap with a low leather peak half hid his face, which was tanned by sun and weather and glistened with sweat. His coarse yellow shirt, fastened at the neck with a small metal clasp, gaped to reveal a hairy chest. He wore a scarf twisted like a rope, threadbare duck trousers frayed at one knee and in holes at the other, and a tattered grey jacket patched over one elbow with a piece of green cloth sewn on with string. On his back was a new and bulging soldier’s knapsack and he carried a very large, knotted stick. His stockingless feet were in hob-nailed shoes and his beard was long. The dust and sweat of his day’s journey added a touch of squalor to his down-at-heel appearance. His head was shorn but stubbly, having evidently not been shaved for some days.
No one knew him. Presumably he was only passing through the town, having come from the south, and possibly from the coast, since he had entered by the road over which Napoleon had travelled seven months previously on his way from Cannes to Paris. He must have been walking all day, he seemed so tired. He was seen to stop and drink at the public drinking-fountain at the far end of the Boulevard Gassendi, on the outskirts of the town; but he was clearly very thirsty because some children who followed him saw him stop again, two hundred yards further on, at the fountain in the market-place.
At the corner of the Rue Poichevert he turned left towards the Town Hall, which he entered, emerging from it a quarter of an hour later. A gendarme was seated outside the door on the stone bench from which General Drouot, on 4 March, had read to the startled populace Napoleon’s famous Proclamation upon his landing in Golfe Juan. The stranger respectfully raised his cap. The gendarme did not acknowledge the salute but looked intently at him, watched him for some moments as he walked away, and then went into the building.
There was at that time a handsome inn in Digne bearing the sign of the Croix-de-Colbas. Its proprietor was a certain Jacquin Labarre, a man esteemed in the town because of his connection with another Labarre, proprietor of the inn of the Trois-Dauphins at Grenoble, who had served in the Guides. There had been many rumours concerning the Trois-Dauphins at the time of the Emperor’s landing. It was said that General Bertrand had paid the inn a number of surreptitious visits in the previous January, disguised as a carter, and had bestowed medals on soldiers and fistfuls of coin on certain citizens. The truth is that Napoleon, arriving at Grenoble, had politely refused the mayor’s offer of accommodation at the Prefecture saying that he was going to stop with a personal acquaintance, and had gone to the Trois-Dauphins. The reflected glory of the Trois-Dauphins Labarre extended over twenty-five leagues to the Labarre of the Croix-de-Colbas, who was referred to in the town as ‘the cousin of the one in Grenoble’.
The stranger made for this inn, the best in the district, and entered by way of the kitchen, which opened directly on to the street. All the cooking-stoves were lighted and a fire burned brightly in the hearth. The innkeeper, who was also the cook, was busy among his pots and pans preparing a meal for a party of waggoners who could be heard loudly talking and laughing in the next room. As every traveller knows, no one fares better than the waggoner. A plump marmot, flanked by partridges and grouse, was turning on a long spit in front of the fire, and two large carp from the Lac de Lauzet and a trout from the Lac d’Alloz were cooking on the stove.
Hearing the door open the innkeeper said without looking up:
‘What can I do for Monsieur?’
‘A meal and a bed,’ said the stranger.
‘By all means –’ but at this moment the innkeeper turned his head; after glancing at the visitor he added ‘– provided you can pay for it.’
‘I have money,’ said the stranger producing a shabby leather purse from his jacket pocket.
‘In that case you’re welcome.’
The man returned the purse to his pocket, dropped his knapsack on the floor by the door and, keeping hold of his stick, seated himself on a low stool by the fire. Digne is high in the hills and its October evenings are chilly. The innkeeper, still busy with his cooking, was none the less examining him.
‘Will dinner soon be ready?’ the man asked.
‘Quite soon.’
While the stranger warmed himself, seated with his back turned to the room, the worthy innkeeper, Jacquin Labarre, got a pencil out of his pocket and tore a strip off a newspaper lying on a table by the window. He scribbled a line or two, folded the strip and handed it to a youngster who appeared to serve him as scullery-boy and personal attendant. He murmured a few words and the boy ran off in the direction of the Town Hall.
The stranger had seen nothing of this. He asked for the second time:
‘Will dinner soon be ready?’
‘Quite soon.’
The boy returned with the scrap of paper, and the innkeeper unfolded it with the promptness of someone who has been anxious for a reply. He read the message with care, then nodded his head and stood for a moment reflecting. Finally, he went over to the stranger, who appeared to be plunged in unhappy thought.
‘I’m sorry, Monsieur. I can’t have you here.’
The man swung round, half-rising to his feet.
‘Why? Are you afraid I shan’t pay? Do you want me to pay in advance? I tell you, I’ve got the money.’
‘It isn’t that.’
‘Well, then?’
‘You have the money, but –’
‘But what?’
‘But I haven’t a room free.’
The stranger said calmly: ‘Then put me in the stable.’
‘I can’t do that.’
‘Why not?’
‘The horses take up all the room.’
‘Well then, a corner of the hay-loft. A truss of straw. We can see to that after dinner.’
‘I can’t offer you dinner.’
The words, spoken in a firm, deliberate tone, seemed to shake the stranger.
‘But I’m dropping with hunger! I’ve been walking since daybreak. I’ve covered a dozen leagues. I must have something to eat.’
‘I’ve nothing to spare,’ said the innkeeper.
The stranger uttered a short laugh and pointed to the spit and the stove.
‘What’s all that?’
‘It’s all reserved.’
‘By whom?’
‘By the waggoners.’
‘How many are there?’
‘Twelve.’
‘There’s enough there for twenty.’
‘It’s what they ordered and they paid in advance.’
The stranger sat down again and said without raising his voice:
‘I’m at an inn and
I’m hungry. I’m stopping here.’
The innkeeper then bent over him and said in a tone which caused him to start: ‘Get out.’
The stranger at the moment was bent forward in the act of thrusting a few cinders back into the fire with the metal ferrule of his stick. He swung round sharply, but as he opened his mouth to reply the innkeeper, looking hard at him, went on in a low voice:
‘That’s enough talk. Do you want me to tell you who you are? Your name is Jean Valjean. And now do you want me to tell you what you are? I had my suspicions when you came in. I sent a note to the Mairie and this is the reply. Can you read?’
He held out the scrap of paper and after the stranger had looked at it he went on:
‘I like to treat everyone politely. Kindly go away.’
The man rose, took up his knapsack and left.
He walked off seemingly at random along the main street, keeping close to the house fronts, his attitude one of dejected humiliation. He did not once look round. Had he done so he would have seen the proprietor of the Croix-de-Colbas standing in his doorway surrounded by a party of customers and passers-by, talking volubly and pointing towards him; and from the excited and hostile looks cast in his direction he would have realized that before long his arrival would be known throughout the town.
He saw nothing of this. A man crushed by misfortune does not look back, knowing only too well that ill-chance follows behind. He continued to walk blindly along streets unknown to him, for a time forgetful of his fatigue, such is the effect of despair. But he was suddenly conscious of an acute pang of hunger. It was growing dark. He looked about him, seeking some shelter for the night.
The better establishment was closed to him. What he sought now was the poorest of taverns, the humblest of lodgings for the poor. And as it happened a light shone at the end of the street; a torch of pine-twigs, hanging from a metal bracket, was visible against the pallor of the evening sky. He went towards it.
Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774) Page 8
