In 1815, Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel is Bishop of D, about seventy-five, and has held the see since 1806. Hugo says the talk that met him on arrival occupies as large a place in a life as the acts. He was a councillor's son from Aix, married young according to parliamentary custom, and spent his first years on the world and on gallantry. The Revolution scattered those families. He emigrated to Italy. His wife died of a chest illness. He had no children. No one could say whether 1793, ruin, or some private blow turned him. What was known was simpler. When he came home from Italy he was a priest.
By 1804 he is the retired curé of Brignolles. A petty parish affair, never named, takes him to Paris to Cardinal Fesch. Napoleon finds the old man staring in an anteroom and asks who this good man is. Myriel answers that each of them can profit: one is looking at a good man, the other at a great one. That evening the Emperor asks the name. Some time later Myriel is astonished to learn he has been made Bishop of D. Whether the early stories were true, no one knew. Few families had known the Myriels before the Revolution.
A little town talks first and thinks later. He has to undergo that fate although he is a bishop, and because he is a bishop. After nine years the palabres fall into oblivion. He arrives with his sister, Mademoiselle Baptistine, ten years younger, a pale respectable soul, and with Madame Magloire, fat, bustling, asthmatic, maid and housekeeper. Imperial decrees install him in the palace just after a major-general. The mayor and the president call. He calls on the general and the prefect. Then the town waits to see its bishop at work.
Coming Up in Chapter 2
The episcopal palace adjoins a low hospital of twenty-six crowded beds. Three days after arriving, the Bishop walks the wards, then tells the director there has been a mistake: thirty-six patients in small rooms, three people with space for sixty. He asks for his house back.
