Who Guarded His House for Him — Les Misérables

The house is a ground floor and one story: three rooms below, three chambers above, an attic, and a garden of a quarter acre. The women live upstairs. The Bishop lives below, in a suite that only exits through itself: dining-room on the street, then bedroom, then oratory. Country curés get the alcove bed. The hospital pharmacy is now kitchen and cellar. The old hospital kitchen is a stable for two cows, and half their milk goes to the sick every morning. He calls that paying his tithes. Wood is dear, so his winter salon is a boarded compartment in the cow-shed: a white-wood table and four straw chairs. Wealthy penitents raise money for a new altar. Each time he takes the money and gives it to the poor. The most beautiful altar, he says, is an unhappy soul consoled. When the prefect or the garrison staff arrive, rooms are dismantled for chairs. A twelfth guest finds him standing at the chimney or walking in the garden.

Baptistine has saved forty-two francs and ten sous in five years toward Utrecht velvet and a sofa. The set would cost five hundred. She has given it up. His own chamber is a hospital iron bed, a chimney painted as marble and usually without fire, a copper crucifix with the silver worn off, and two oval portraits of priests he never knew, left because they were priests and probably donors. Magloire seams the old curtain into a cross rather than buy a new one. He finds that delightful. Whitewash is the fashion of barracks and hospitals. Cleanliness is the only luxury he permits, because it takes nothing from the poor. He still keeps six silver knives and forks, a soup-ladle, and two massive candlesticks from a great-aunt. Magloire locks the silver each night. The key is never removed.

In the garden Magloire grows vegetables in three plots. He plants flowers in the fourth. She calls the bouquets useless. He says the beautiful is as useful as the useful, then, after a pause, more so perhaps. He waters with a tin pot painted green and does not take sides between Linnaeus and Jussieu. The dining-room door on the cathedral square had prison bolts. He had the ironwork taken off. Anyone can push the latch at any hour. Magloire still startles. A curé, probably put up to it, asks if he fears misfortune in a house so little guarded. He touches the man's shoulder and quotes the psalm: unless the Lord guard the house, they watch in vain who guard it. Then he speaks of something else. There is a bravery of the priest as well as of a colonel of dragoons. Theirs, he says, must be tranquil.