The Bishop's private life is filled with the same thoughts as his public one. He sleeps little. In the morning he meditates for an hour, says mass at the cathedral or at home, and breaks his fast on rye bread dipped in the milk of his own cows. Then the work of a bishop begins: the secretary, the vicars-general, charges, sermons, curés to reconcile with mayors, the State on one side and the Holy See on the other. What time remains after offices and the breviary goes first to the necessitous, the sick, and the afflicted. What remains after them he gives to work. Sometimes he digs. Sometimes he reads or writes. He has one word for both. He calls them gardening. The mind, he says, is a garden.
Toward midday, in fine weather, he walks in the country or in town, often into lowly dwellings, eyes down, long cane, wadded purple silk, coarse shoes, a flat hat with three golden tassels. It is a festival wherever he appears. Children and old people come to the doorsteps as for the sun. They point out his house to anyone in need. He visits the poor so long as he has money. When he no longer has any, he visits the rich. The cassocks last a long while. He does not wish that noticed, so he never goes out without the purple cloak, which inconveniences him in summer.
Dinner resembles breakfast. At half-past eight he sups with Baptistine, Magloire serving. The meal is vegetables boiled in water and oil soup, unless a curé is there: then Magloire seizes the pretext for fish or game, and he does not interfere. The town says that when the Bishop does not keep the cheer of a curé, he keeps the cheer of a trappist. After half an hour of talk he writes, sometimes on loose sheets, sometimes in the margins of a folio. He leaves curious manuscripts, including a note on a quarto of Lord Germain's American correspondence. Solomon, he writes, calls God Compassion, and that is the most beautiful of all the names. Toward nine the two women go upstairs and leave him alone on the ground floor until morning. Hugo says it is necessary, here, to give an exact idea of the dwelling of the Bishop of D.
Coming Up in Chapter 6
Hugo now wants the house itself: a ground floor and one story, three rooms below, an oratory with no other exit, two cows whose milk is tithed to the hospital, and a winter salon built in the cow-shed because wood is dear. Wealthy penitents will offer a new altar. He will take the money and give it to the poor.
