At home the Bishop's talk is gay. Madame Magloire likes to call him Your Grace. He is short, cannot reach a high shelf, and sends her for a chair: his greatness does not go that far. He listens to a cousin count inheritances, then quotes Augustine: place your hopes in the man from whom you do not inherit. A death notice loaded with titles makes him say that Death has a stout back. A Lenten sermon on hell and paradise converts M. Géborand, a usurer who has never given alms, into a man who offers one sou every Sunday to six beggar-women at the cathedral door. The Bishop smiles to his sister: there is Géborand purchasing paradise for a sou. In a drawing-room the Marquis de Champtercier, royalist and Voltairian at once, says he has poor people of his own. Give them to me, says the Bishop.
In the cathedral he preaches numbers: hovels with one opening because of the tax on doors and windows; peasants in Dauphiné carrying manure on their backs, baking bread six months at a time with cow-dung, breaking it with an axe in winter. He will not blame the law. He will bless God and ask for pity. He speaks the dialects of the south and enters cottages. Examine the road over which the fault has passed, he says. To be a saint is the exception; to be an upright man is the rule. The faults of women, children, and the poor are the faults of husbands, fathers, and the rich. Society is culpable for the night it produces. In a drawing-room everyone praises a magistrate who, by faking a lover's infidelity, made a woman denounce the counterfeiter she had protected. The Bishop asks where the man and woman will be tried. At the Court of Assizes. And where will the advocate of the crown be tried?
A murderer in D is condemned. The prison chaplain falls ill. The curé refuses the mountebank. The Bishop says that place is his. He spends the day in the cell, follows the tumbril, mounts the scaffold in his camail and cross, and embraces the man as the knife is about to fall. On the way home he tells Baptistine he has just officiated pontifically. Drawing-rooms call it affectation. The populace is touched. For the Bishop the shock lasts. The scaffold is not carpentry. It is a monster that will not let him stay neutral. He stammers that death belongs to God alone. By what right do men touch that unknown thing? In time the impression weakens. He still avoids the place of execution. He can be summoned at any hour to the dying. He does not try to erase sorrow. He tries to turn a gaze on a grave into a gaze on a star.
Coming Up in Chapter 5
The private day is built like the public one: little sleep, rye bread in milk, an hour of meditation, then the business of a bishop. What time remains goes to the sick. What remains after the sick he calls gardening. The mind, he says, is a garden. The cassocks last too long, so a purple cloak has to hide them.
