The Bishop does not drop his pastoral visits because the carriage has become alms. The diocese of D is fatiguing: few plains, many mountains, hardly any roads, thirty-two curacies, forty-one vicarships, two hundred and eighty-five auxiliary chapels. He goes on foot nearby, in a tilted spring-cart on the plain, and on a donkey in the mountains. The two old women go with him when they can. When the trip is too hard, he goes alone.
At Senez, an ancient episcopal city, he arrives on an ass because his purse is dry. The mayor receives him at the gate with scandalised eyes. Citizens laugh. The Bishop tells them he sees the shock. They think it arrogant of a poor priest to ride an animal used by Jesus Christ. He has done it from necessity, he says, not from vanity.
On the road he talks rather than preaches, and he never goes far for an example. Where people are harsh to the poor, he points to Briançon: widows and orphans may mow three days early, ruined houses are rebuilt, and for a century there has not been a murderer. In greedy harvest villages he points to Embrun, where the whole parish cuts a sick man's field after mass. To families split by inheritance he names Devolny, so wild the nightingale is not heard once in fifty years, where the boys leave the property to the girls so they may marry. To lawsuit cantons he offers Queyras, a little republic of three thousand souls with no judge and a mayor who allots taxes and divides inheritances without charge. Villages without a schoolmaster hear of Queyras again: teachers paid by the whole valley, wearing one, two, or three quill pens in the hat according to what they can teach. In default of examples he invents parables, few phrases, many images. Convinced himself, he is persuasive.
Coming Up in Chapter 4
His talk at home is as gay as a schoolboy's. Madame Magloire calls him Your Grace, and he cannot reach a high shelf. A usurer starts giving a sou at the cathedral door. A marquis says he has poor people of his own. Then a condemned man is due at the scaffold, and the prison chaplain is ill.
