Do not conclude from the deathbed that Monseigneur Welcome became a philosophical bishop or a patriotic curé. The meeting with G left a sort of astonishment that made him still more gentle. That is all. Hugo then goes back a few years, supposing the Bishop ever dreamed of having an attitude. Napoleon made him a baron with other bishops. After the Pope's arrest he was summoned to the 1811 synod at Notre-Dame. He was one of ninety-five. He sat once, and at three or four private conferences, then went home. He had imported mountain air into a room of princes. Interrogated, he said he embarrassed them: the outside air came through him; he produced the effect of an open door. Those gentlemen are princes. He is only a poor peasant bishop. At a notable colleague's house he named clocks, carpets, liveries as a great trouble, because they cried that people were hungry and cold. Hugo will not call hatred of luxury intelligent, since it would hate the arts. In a priest, luxury is still wrong. The first proof of charity in a bishop is poverty. That, no doubt, is what the Bishop of D thought.
He took little part in the quarrels of the moment. Pressed, he would have been ultramontane rather than Gallican. From 1813 he was glacial toward Napoleon in decline. He refused to see him returning from Elba, and ordered no public prayers in the Hundred Days. He had two brothers: a general whom he treated harshly, because the man pursued the Emperor from Cannes as though desirous of allowing him to escape, and a retired prefect in the Rue Cassette, with whom he remained more affectionate. He had his hour of party spirit, his cloud. Hugo says it would have been well if he had not been a Royalist. A protest in prosperity against all-powerful Napoleon would have been understood. Applauding the fall, after marshals who betrayed and a senate that spat on its idol, is another matter. In 1815 a heart like the Bishop's ought perhaps to have recognized the august features of a great nation embracing a great man on the brink of the abyss.
With that exception he was just, true, humble, and kindly. Even in the views Hugo is disposed to judge, he was more tolerant than the narrator. The porter of the town-hall was an old non-commissioned officer of the Guard, a Bonapartist as much as the eagle. After the imperial profile left the Legion of Honor he would not wear three frogs on his heart. He scoffed at Louis XVIII until he lost his place, and stood in the street with wife and children and no bread. The Bishop sent for him, reproved him gently, and appointed him beadle in the cathedral. In nine years the town filled with a tender, filial reverence. Even the conduct toward Napoleon was tacitly pardoned by a flock who adored their emperor, but loved their bishop.
Coming Up in Chapter 12
A bishop is almost always surrounded by a squadron of little abbés, as a general is by young officers. Saint Francis de Sales called them callow priests. Every power has its dependents. The seekers of the future eddy around the splendid present.
