84 Les Miserables
table 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 la-
bor? 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 espe-
cially, 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 strong-
ly 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