Les Miserables Read Online

The note, written in his own hand, reads as follows:

During the time he occupied the see of Digne M. Myriel made almost no change in this order of things, which, as we see, he called ‘the disposal of my household expenses’. The arrangement was accepted with absolute submission by Mlle Baptistine. To that devout woman M. Myriel was both her brother and her bishop, her friend in nature and her superior in the Church. Quite simply, she loved and venerated him. When he spoke she bowed her head, when he acted she sustained him. Only Mme Magloire grumbled a little. The bishop, as we have seen, had kept only a thousand francs for himself, which, with his sister’s annuity, made a total of fifteen hundred francs a year. Upon this sum the two old women and the old man lived.

Nevertheless when a village curé came to Digne the bishop found means to entertain him, thanks to the strict economy of Mme Magloire and the shrewd management of Mile Baptistine.

One day when he had been about three months in Digne the bishop remarked:

‘And yet, with all this, I am still in difficulties.’

‘I should think so!’ cried Mme Magloire. ‘Monseigneur has not even applied to the Department for an allowance to cover the cost of his carriage in the town and on his tours of the diocese. This was always granted to bishops in the old days.’

‘Of course!’ said the bishop. ‘You are quite right, Madame Magloire.’

He made the application.

The Departmental Council, having weighed the matter, voted him an annual allowance of three thousand francs under the heading: ‘Allotted to Monseigneur the Bishop for the purpose of his carriage and postal expenses and the cost of his pastoral journeys.’

This caused considerable outcry among the local citizenry and it moved a certain senator of the Empire, a former member of the Council of Five Hundred who had supported the 18 Brumaire and was now the holder of a princely senatorial seat near Digne, to write an indignant private letter to M. Bigot de Prémeneu* of which the following authentic extract may be quoted:

‘Carriage expenses? What for, in a town of fewer than four thousand inhabitants? Postage and pastoral journeys? What is the use of these journeys? And what is the use of a vehicle for delivering letters in mountainous country with no roads? People go on horseback. The bridge over the Durance at Château-Arnoux can scarcely take an ox-cart. These priests are all the same, greedy and miserly. This one started with a show of virtue but now he’s behaving like the rest. He has to have a carriage and a post-chaise. He wants all the luxuries of the old bishops. These informal priests! Affairs won’t be properly managed, Monsieur le Comte, until the Emperor has rid us of these mountebanks. Down with the Pope!’ [There was trouble with Rome at the time.] ‘For my part, I am on the side of Caesar…’ And so on.

Mme Magloire, on the other hand, was highly delighted.

‘Good,’ she said to Mlle Baptistine. ‘Monseigneur started by thinking of others, but he has to think of himself in the end. He has attended to all his charities. Now there are three thousand francs for us – and high time!’

But that evening the bishop wrote the following note and handed it to his sister.

Such was the personal budget of Monseigneur Myriel.

As for day-to-day charities, the dispensations, baptisms, prayers, consecration of churches and chapels, marriages and so forth, the bishop exacted funds for these from the rich, doing so the more rigorously since he passed the money on to the poor. Within a short time gifts of money were flowing in. Those who had and those who had not knocked at M. Myriel’s door, the latter to seek the alms that the former had contributed. Within a year the bishop had become the treasurer of all charitable works and the cashier of all suffering. Considerable sums passed through his hands, but nothing could cause him to change his way of life or accept any trifle beyond his daily needs. Indeed, the reverse was the case.