Les Miserables (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (13 page)

“I congratulate you,” he said, in a tone of reprimand. “At least you did not vote for the execution of the king.”

The conventionist did not seem to notice the bitter emphasis placed upon the words “at least.” The smiles vanished from his face and he replied:

“Do not congratulate me too much, monsieur; I did vote for the destruction of the tyrant.”

And the tone of austerity confronted the tone of severity.

“What do you mean?” asked the bishop.

“I mean that man has a tyrant, Ignorance. I voted for the abolition of that tyrant. That tyrant has begotten royalty, which is authority springing from the False, while science is authority springing from the True. Man should be governed by science.”

“And conscience,” added the bishop.

“The same thing: conscience is innate knowledge that we have.”

Monsieur Bienvenu listened with some amazement to this language, novel as it was to him.

The conventionist went on:

“As to Louis XVI: I said no. I do not believe that I have the right to kill a man, but I feel it a duty to exterminate evil. I voted for the downfall of the tyrant; that is to say, for the abolition of prostitution for woman, of slavery for man, of night for the child. In voting for the republic I voted for that: I voted for fraternity, for harmony, for light. I assisted in casting down prejudices and errors: their downfall brings light! We caused the old world to fall; the old world, a vase of misery, overturned, becomes an urn of joy to the human race.”

“Joy alloyed,” said the bishop.

“You might say joy troubled, and, at present, after this fatal return of the past which we call 1814, joy disappeared.
^k
Alas! the work was imperfect I admit; we demolished the ancient order of things physically, but not entirely in the idea. To destroy abuses is not enough; habits must be changed. The windmill has gone, but the Wind is there yet.”

“You have demolished. To demolish may be useful, but I distrust a demolition effected in anger!”

“Justice has its anger, Monsieur Bishop, and the wrath of justice is an element of progress. Whatever may be said matters not, the French revolution is the greatest step forward taken by mankind since the advent of Christ; incomplete it may be, but it is sublime. It loosened all the secret bonds of society, it softened all hearts, it calmed, appeased, enlightened; it made the waves of civilisation flow over the earth; it was good. The French revolution is the consecration of humanity.”

The bishop could not help murmuring: “Yes, ‘93!”
^l

The conventionist raised himself in his chair with a solemnity well nigh mournful, and as nearly as a dying person could exclaim, he exclaimed:

“Ah! you are there! ‘93! I was expecting that. A cloud had been forming for fifteen hundred years; at the end of fifteen centuries it burst. You condemn the thunderbolt.”

Without perhaps acknowledging it to himself, the bishop felt that something in him had been struck; however, he made the best of it, and replied:

“The judge speaks in the name of justice, the priest in the name of pity, which is only a more exalted justice. A thunderbolt should not be mistaken.”

And he added, looking fixedly at the conventionist; “Louis XVII?”

The conventionist stretched out his hand and seized the bishop’s arm.

“Louis XVII. Let us see! For whom do you weep?—for the innocent child? It is well; I weep with you. For the royal child? I ask time to reflect. To my view the brother of Cartouche, an innocent child, hung by a rope under his arms in the Place de Grève till he died, for the sole crime of being the brother of Cartouche, is no less sad sight than the grandson of Louis XV; an innocent child, murdered in the tower of the Temple for the sole crime of being the grandson of Louis XV.”

“Monsieur,” said the bishop, “I dislike this coupling of names.”

“Cartouche or Louis XV; for which are you concerned?”

There was a moment of silence; the bishop regretted almost that he had come, and yet he felt strangely and inexplicably moved.

The conventionist resumed: “Oh, Monsieur Priest! you do not love the harshness of the truth, but Christ loved it. He took a scourge and purged the temple; his flashing whip was a harsh speaker of truths; when he said,
‘Sinite parvulos,’
he made no distinctions among the little ones.
^m
He was not pained at coupling the dauphin of Barabbas with the dauphin of Herod. Monsieur, innocence is its own crown! Innocence has only to act to be noble! She is as august in rags as in the fleur de lys.”

“That is true,” said the bishop, in a low tone.

“I repeat,” continued the old man; “you have mentioned Louis XVII. Let us weep together for all the innocent, for all the martyrs, for all the children, for the low as well as for the high. I am one of them, but then, as I have told you, we must go further back than ‘93, and our tears must begin before Louis XVII. I will weep for the children of kings with you, if you will weep with me for the little ones of the people.”

“I weep for all,” said the bishop.

“Equally,” exclaimed G—, “and if the balance inclines, let it be on the side of the people; they have suffered longer.”

There was silence again, broken at last by the old man. He raised himself upon one elbow, took a pinch of his cheek between his thumb and his bent forefinger, as one does mechanically in questioning and forming an opinion, and addressed the bishop with a look full of all the energies of agony. It was almost an anathema.

“Yes, Monsieur, it is for a long time that the people have been suffering, and then, sir, that is not all; why do you come to question me and to speak to me of Louis XVII? I do not know you. Since I have been in this region I have lived within this plot alone, never passing beyond it, seeing none but this child who helps me. Your name, has, it is true, reached me faintly, and I must say with rather favorable reports, but that matters not. Adroit men have so many ways of imposing upon this good simple people. For instance I did not hear the sound of your carriage. You left it doubtless behind the thicket, down there at the branching of the road. You have told me that you were the bishop, but that tells me nothing about your moral personality. Now, then, I repeat my question—Who are you? You are a bishop, a prince of the church, one of those men who are covered with gold, with a coat of arms, and wealth, who have fat livings—the see of D—, fifteen thousand francs regular, ten thousand francs contingent, total twenty-five thousand francs—who have kitchens, who have retinues, who give good dinners, who eat moor-hens on Friday, who strut about in your gaudy coach, like peacocks, with lackeys before and lackeys behind, and who have palaces, and who roll in your carriages in the name of Jesus Christ who went bare-footed. You are a prelate; rents, palaces, horses, valets, a good table, all the pleasures of life, you have these like all the rest, and you enjoy them like all the rest; very well, but that says too much or not enough; that does not enlighten me as to your intrinsic worth, that which is peculiar to yourself, you who come probably with the claim of bringing me wisdom. To whom am I speaking? Who are you?”

The bishop bowed his head and replied,
“Vermis sum.”

“A worm of the earth in a carriage!” grumbled the old man.

It was the turn of the conventionist to be haughty, and of the bishop to be humble.

The bishop replied with mildness:

“Monsieur, be it so. But explain to me how my carriage, which is there a few steps behind the trees, how my good table and the moor-fowl that I eat on Friday, how my twenty-five thousand livres of income, how my palace and my lackeys prove that pity is not a virtue, that kindness is not a duty, and that ‘93 was not inexorable?”

The old man passed his hand across his forehead as if to dispel a cloud.

“Before answering you,” said he, “I beg your pardon. I have done wrong, monsieur; you are in my house, you are my guest. I owe you courtesy. You are discussing my ideas; it is fitting that I confine myself to combating your reasoning. Your riches and your enjoyments are advantages that I have over you in the debate, but it is not in good taste to avail myself of them. I promise you to use them no more.”

“I thank you,” said the bishop.

G—went on:

“Let us get back to the explanation that you asked of me. Where were we? What were you saying to me? that ‘93 was inexorable?”

“Inexorable, yes,” said the bishop. “What do you think of Marat clapping his hands at the guillotine?”

“What do you think of Bossuet chanting the Te Deum over the dragonnades?”
⁴

The answer was severe, but it reached its aim with the keenness of a dagger. The bishop was staggered, no reply presented itself; but it shocked him to hear Bossuet spoken of in that manner. The best men have their fetishes, and sometimes they feel vaguely wounded at the little respect that logic shows them.

The conventionist began to gasp; the agonising asthma, which mingles with the latest breath, made his voice broken; nevertheless, his soul yet appeared perfectly lucid in his eyes. He continued:

“Let us have a few more words here and there—I would like it. Outside of the revolution which, taken as a whole, is an immense human affirmation, ‘93, alas! is a reply. You think it inexorable, but the whole monarchy, monsieur? Carrier is a bandit; but what name do you give to Montrevel? Fouquier-Tainville is a wretch; but what is your opinion of Lamoignon Bâville? Maillard is frightful, but Saulx Tavannes, if you please? Le père Duchene is ferocious, but what epithet will you furnish me for le père Letellier? Jourdan-Coupe-Tête is a monster, but less than the Marquis of Louvois. Monsieur, monsieur, I lament Marie Antoinette, arch-duchess and queen, but I lament also that poor Huguenot woman who, in 1685, under Louis le Grand, monsieur, while nursing her child, was stripped to the waist and tied to a post, while her child was held before her; her breast swelled with milk, and her heart with anguish; the little one, weak and famished, seeing the breast, cried with agony; and the executioner said to the woman, to the nursing mother, ‘Recant!’ giving her the choice between the death of her child and the death of her conscience. What say you to this Tantalus torture adapted to a mother? Monsieur, forget not this; the French revolution had its reasons. Its wrath will be pardoned by the future; its result is a better world. From its most terrible blows comes a caress for the human race. I must be brief. I must stop. I have too good a cause; and I am dying.”

And, ceasing to look at the bishop, the old man completed his idea in these few tranquil words:

“Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, this is recognised: that the human race has been harshly treated, but that it has advanced.”

The conventionist thought that he had borne down successively one after the other all the inner defenses of the bishop. There was one left, however, and from this, the last resource of Monseigneur Bienvenu’s resistance, came forth these words, in which nearly all the rudeness of the exordium reappeared.

“Progress must believe in God. The good cannot have an impious servi tor. An atheist is an evil leader of the human race.”

The old representative of the people did not answer. He was trembling. He looked up into the sky, and a tear gathered slowly in his eye. When the lid was full, the tear rolled down his livid cheek, and he said, almost stammering, low, and talking to himself, his eye lost in the depths:

“O thou! O ideal! thou alone dost exist!”

The bishop felt a kind of inexpressible emotion.

After brief silence, the old man raised his finger towards heaven, and said:

“The infinite exists. It is there. If the infinite had no
selfhood,
the
self
would be its limit; it would not be the infinite; in other words it would not be. But it is. Therefore it has a self. This
selfhood
of the infinite is God.”

The dying man pronounced these last words in a loud voice, and with a shudder of ecstasy, as if he saw some one. When he ceased, his eyes closed. The effort had exhausted him. It was evident that he had lived through in one minute the few hours that remained to him. What he had said had brought him near to him who is in death. The last moment was at hand.

The bishop perceived it, time was pressing. He had come as a priest; from extreme coldness he had passed by degrees to extreme emotion; he looked upon those closed eyes, he took that old, wrinkled and icy hand, and drew closer to the dying man.

“This hour is the hour of God. Do you not think it would be a source of regret, if we should have met in vain?”

The conventionist re-opened his eyes. Seriousness mingled with shadow imprinted itself upon his face.

“Monsieur Bishop,” said he with a deliberation which perhaps came still more from the dignity of his soul than from the ebb of his strength, “I have passed my life in meditation, study, and contemplation. I was sixty years old when my country called me, and ordered me to take part in her affairs. I obeyed. There were abuses, I fought them; there were tyrannies, I destroyed them; there were rights and principles, I proclaimed and confessed them. The soil was invaded, I defended it; France was threatened, I offered her my breast. I was not rich; I am poor. I was one of the masters of the state, the vaults of the bank were piled with specie, so that we had to strengthen the walls or they would have fallen under the weight of gold and of silver; I dined in the Rue de l‘Arbre-Sec at twenty-two sous for the meal. I succoured the oppressed, I solaced the suffering. True, I tore the drapery from the altar; but it was to staunch the wounds of the country. I have always supported the forward march of the human race towards the light, and I have sometimes resisted a progress which was without pity. I have, on occasion, protected my own adversaries, your friends. There is at Peteghem in Flanders, at the very place where the Merovingian kings had their summer palace, a monastery of Urbanists, the Abbey of Sainte Claire in Beaulieu, which I saved in 1793, I have done my duty according to my strength, and the good that I could. After which I was hunted, hounded, pursued, persecuted, slandered, railed at, spit upon, cursed, proscribed. For many years now, with my white hairs, I have perceived that many people believed they had a right to despise me; to the poor, ignorant crowd I have the face of the damned, and I accept, hating no man myself, the isolation of hatred. Now I am eighty-six years old; I am about to die. What have you come to ask of me?”