The episcopal palace of D is a seignorial stone house from 1712, with Florentine arcades, magnificent trees, and a dining gallery where, on 29 July 1714, seven bishops sat in state. Their portraits still decorate the room. The hospital next door is a low, narrow building of one story, with a small garden. Three days after arriving, Myriel visits the sick. There are twenty-six of them. The beds crowd each other. The halls are rooms. The garden is too small for convalescents. In epidemics they have had a hundred patients and nowhere to put them. The director says one must resign oneself.
In the gallery dining-room the Bishop asks how many beds that hall alone would hold. Twenty, he thinks. Then he says there has been a mistake. Thirty-six people are packed in five or six small rooms. Three people have space for sixty. The hospital has his house, and he has theirs. Give him back his house. The next day the thirty-six patients are in the palace, and the Bishop is in the hospital. He has no property. Baptistine has five hundred francs a year. The State pays him fifteen thousand. On the day he moves, he writes a household note that sends almost all of it out: seminaries, prisoners, poor teachers, a public granary, six thousand for the poor, one thousand kept for himself. Baptistine submits. Magloire grumbles. The three live on fifteen hundred francs, and still feed visiting curés.
After three months he is still cramped. Magloire reminds him of the unused carriage allowance. He claims it. The General Council votes three thousand francs. Local burgesses howl. A senator writes that these priests are greedy, that there are no roads, that the Emperor should be rid of black-capped rascals. Magloire is delighted: at last, three thousand for us. That evening the Bishop hands his sister another list. Meat soup for the hospital, maternity societies, foundlings, orphans. The three thousand is gone before it arrives. Offerings flow. He becomes treasurer of benevolence and still adds nothing to his necessities. The countryside, choosing among his baptismal names, calls him Monseigneur Bienvenu. He likes it. Welcome, he says, makes up for the Monseigneur. Hugo will not claim the portrait is probable. He will claim it resembles the original.
Coming Up in Chapter 3
The carriage has already been turned into alms, and the diocese is still a fatiguing one: mountains, almost no roads, hundreds of chapels. The Bishop goes on foot, in a cart, or on a donkey. At Senez the mayor watches him dismount, scandalised, while citizens laugh.
