No one would have presumed to refer to it or even to remember it.

M. Myriel had come to Digne accompanied by his sister, Mademoiselle Baptistine, an unmarried woman ten years younger than himself. Their only servant was Madame Magloire, a woman of the same age as Mlle Baptistine, who, from having been the servant of M. le Curé, now assumed the twofold office of personal maid to Mademoiselle and housekeeper to Monseigneur.

Mlle Baptistine was tall, pale, thin and gentle, a perfect expression of all that is implied by the word ‘respectable’: for it seems that a woman must become a mother before she can be termed ‘venerable’. She had never been pretty. Her life, which had been wholly occupied with good works, had endowed her with a kind of pallor and luminosity, and as she grew older she had acquired what may be called the beauty of goodness. What had been skinniness in her youth had become, as she matured, a quality of transparency through which her saintly nature could be seen to shine. She was a spirit more than she was a virgin. Her being seemed composed of shadow, with too little substance for it to possess sex. It was a shred of matter harbouring a light, with large eyes that were always cast down; a pretext for a soul to linger on earth.

Mme Magloire was a small, plump, white-haired old woman, always busy and always breathless, partly because of her incessant activity and also because she suffered from asthma.

Upon his arrival in Digne M. Myriel was installed in the bishop’s palace with the honours prescribed by the imperial decree, which ranked a bishop immediately below a Marshal of France. The Mayor and the President of the Council were the first dignitaries to call upon him, and his own first visits were paid to the General and the prefect.

His installation over, the town waited to see their new bishop at work.

II
Monseigneur Myriel becomes Monseigneur Bienvenu

The bishop’s palace in Digne was next door to the hospital. It was a large and handsome stone mansion built at the beginning of the previous century by Henri Puget, Doctor of Theology at the University of Paris and Abbot of Simore, who became Bishop of Digne in 1712. Everything in the palace was on the grand scale, the bishop’s personal apartments, the drawing-rooms and bedrooms, the broad courtyard flanked by arcades in the old Florentine manner and the gardens planted with splendid trees. The dining-room was a long and magnificent gallery on the ground floor, giving on to the garden. It was here, on 29 July 1714, that Monseigneur Puget had entertained at a ceremonial dinner seven high dignitaries of the Church, among them Philippe de Vendôme, Grand Prior of France and the great-grandson of Henri IV and Gabrielle d’Estrées. The portraits of the seven reverend gentlemen now hung in the dining-room, together with a white marble tablet carrying the date inscribed in letters of gold.

The hospital was a narrow, two-storeyed house with a small garden.

The bishop called at the hospital on the third day after his arrival. Having concluded his visit he asked the director to accompany him to the palace.

‘Monsieur le Directeur,’ he said, ‘how many patients have you at present?’

‘Twenty-six, Monseigneur.’

‘That is a large number.’

‘The beds,’ said the director, ‘are very close together.’

‘As I noticed.’

‘The wards are no bigger than single rooms. They get very stuffy.’

‘That seems to be the case.’

‘And when we get a little sunshine there is scarcely room in the garden for the convalescents.’

‘So I imagine.’

‘And when there’s an epidemic – we had typhus this year and an outbreak of military fever two years ago, sometimes as many as a hundred patients – we don’t know where to turn.’

‘That thought also occurred to me.’

‘But it can’t be helped, Monseigneur,’ said the director. ‘We have to make the best of things.’

This conversation took place in the ground-floor banqueting-hall. The bishop was silent for some moments, and then he turned abruptly to the director.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘how many beds do you think could be put in this room?’

‘In the bishop’s dining-room?’ exclaimed the director in astonishment.

The bishop was gazing round the room, apparently making calculations of his own.

‘At least twenty beds,’ he murmured as though to himself. Then he said more loudly: ‘Monsieur le Directeur, I will tell you what has happened. There has been a mistake. You have twenty-six persons in five or six small rooms, while in this house there are three of us and room for sixty. We must change places. Let me have the house that suits me, and this one will be yours.’

On the following day the twenty-six paupers were moved into the palace and the bishop took up residence in the hospital.

M. Myriel had no private means; his family had been ruined by the revolution. His sister’s annuity of five hundred francs had sufficed for their personal needs during his curacy. As bishop he received a stipend of fifteen thousand francs. On the day of his removal to the hospital he laid down, once and for all, how this money was to be used.