A RESTRICTION.
We should run a strong risk of making a mistake were we to conclude
from this that Monseigneur Welcome was "a philosophic bishop," or
"a patriotic curé." His meeting, which might almost be called his
conjunction, with the conventionalist G---- produced in him a sort of
amazement, which rendered him more gentle than ever. That was all.
Though Monseigneur was anything rather than a politician, this is
perhaps the place to indicate briefly what was his attitude in the
events of that period, supposing that Monseigneur ever dreamed of
having an attitude. We will, therefore, go back for a few years. A
short time after M. Myriel's elevation to the Episcopate, the Emperor
made him a Baron, simultaneously with some other bishops. The arrest
of the Pope took place, as is well known, on the night of July 5,
1809, at which time M. Myriel was called by Napoleon to the Synod of
French and Italian Bishops convened at Paris. This Synod was held at
Notre Dame and assembled for the first time on June 15, 1811, under
the Presidency of Cardinal Fesch. M. Myriel was one of the ninety-five
bishops convened, but he was only present at one session and three or
four private conferences. As bishop of a mountain diocese, living so
near to nature in rusticity and poverty, it seems that he introduced
among these eminent personages ideas which changed the temperature of
the assembly. He went back very soon to D----, and when questioned
about this hurried return, he replied, "I was troublesome to them.
The external air came in with me and I produced the effect of an open
door upon them." Another time he said, "What would you have? those
Messeigneurs are princes, while I am only a poor peasant bishop."
The fact is, that he displeased: among other strange things he let the
following remarks slip out, one evening when he was visiting one of his
most influential colleagues: "What fine clocks! What splendid carpets!
What magnificent liveries! You must find all that very troublesome? Oh!
I should not like to have such superfluities to yell incessantly in my
ears: there are people who are hungry; there are people who are cold;
there are poor, there are poor."
Let us remark parenthetically, that a hatred of luxury would not be an
intelligent hatred, for it would imply a hatred of the arts. Still in
churchmen any luxury beyond that connected with their sacred office is
wrong, for it seems to reveal habits which are not truly charitable.
An opulent priest is a paradox, for he is bound to live with the poor.
Now, can a man incessantly both night and day come in contact with
distress, misfortune, and want, without having about him a little of
that holy wretchedness, like the dust of toil? Can we imagine a man
sitting close to a stove and not feeling hot? Can we imagine a workman
constantly toiling at a furnace, and have neither a hair burned, a nail
blackened, nor a drop of perspiration, nor grain of soot on his face?
The first proof of charity in a priest, in a bishop especially, is
poverty. This was doubtless the opinion of the Bishop of D----.
We must not believe either that he shared what we might call the "ideas
of the age" on certain delicate, points; he mingled but slightly in
the theological questions of the moment, in which Church and State are
compromised; but had he been greatly pressed we fancy he would have
been found to be Ultramontane rather than Gallican. As we are drawing
a portrait, and do not wish to conceal anything, we are forced to add
that he was frigid toward the setting Napoleon. From 1813 he adhered
to or applauded all hostile demonstrations, he refused to see him when
he passed through on his return from Elba, and abstained from ordering
public prayers for the Emperor during the Hundred Days.
Besides his sister, Mlle. Baptistine, he had two brothers, one a
general, the other a prefect. He wrote very frequently to both of them.
For some time he owed the former a grudge, because the General, who
at the time of the landing at Cannes held a command in Provence, put
himself at the head of twelve hundred men and pursued the Emperor as if
he wished to let him escape. His correspondence was more affectionate
with the other brother, the ex-prefect, a worthy, honest man, who lived
retired at Paris.
Monseigneur Welcome, therefore, also had his hour of partisan spirit,
his hour of bitterness, his cloud. The shadow of the passions of the
moment fell athwart this gentle and great mind, which was occupied by
things eternal. Certainly such a man would have deserved to have no
political opinions. Pray let there be no mistake as to our meaning: we
do not confound what are called "political opinions" with the grand
aspiration for progress, with that sublime, patriotic, democratic and
human faith, which in our days must be the foundation of all generous
intelligence. Without entering into questions which only indirectly
affect the subject of this book, we say, it would have been better had
Monseigneur Welcome not been a Royalist, and if his eye had not turned
away, even for a moment, from that serene contemplation, in which the
three pure lights of Truth, Justice, and Charity are seen beaming above
the fictions and hatreds of this world, and above the stormy ebb and
flow of human affairs.
While allowing that GOD had not created Monseigneur Welcome for
political functions, we could have understood and admired a protest in
the name of justice and liberty, a proud opposition, a perilous and
just resistance offered to Napoleon, all-powerful. But conduct which
pleases us towards those who are rising, pleases us less towards those
who are falling. We only like the contest so long as there is danger;
and, in any case, only the combatants from the beginning have a right
to be the exterminators at the end. A man who has not been an obstinate
accuser during prosperity must be silent when the crash comes; the
denouncer of success is the sole legitimate judge of the fell. For our
part, when Providence interferes and strikes we let it do so. 1812
begins to disarm us; in 1813 the cowardly rupture of silence by the
taciturn legislative corps, emboldened by catastrophes, could only
arouse indignation; in 1814, in the presence of the traitor Marshals,
in the presence of that senate, passing from one atrocity to another,
and insulting after deifying, and before the idolaters kicking their
idol and spitting on it, it was a duty to turn one's head away; in
1815, as supreme disasters were in the air, as France had a shudder
of their sinister approach, as Waterloo, already open before Napoleon
could be vaguely distinguished, the dolorous acclamation offered by the
army and the people had nothing laughable about it, and--leaving the
despot out of the question--a heart like the Bishop of D----'s ought
not to have misunderstood how much there was august and affecting in
this close embrace between a great nation and a great man on the verge
of an abyss.
With this exception, the Bishop was in all things just, true,
equitable, intelligent, humble, and worthy; beneficent, and benevolent,
which is another form of beneficence. He was a priest, a sage, and a
man. Even in the political opinions with which we have reproached him,
and which we are inclined to judge almost severely, we are bound to
add that he was tolerant and facile, more so perhaps than the writer
of these lines. The porter of the Town Hall had been appointed by the
Emperor; he was an ex-non-commissioned officer of the old guard, a
legionary of Austerlitz, and as Bonapartist as the eagle. This poor
fellow now and then made thoughtless remarks, which the law of that
day qualified as seditious. From the moment when the Imperial profile
disappeared from the Legion of Honor, he never put on his uniform
again, that he might not be obliged, as he said, to bear his cross. He
had himself devotedly removed the Imperial effigy from the cross which
Napoleon had given him with his own hands, and though this made a hole
he would not let anything be put in its place. "Sooner die," he would
say, "than wear the three frogs on my heart." He was fond of ridiculing
Louis XVIII. aloud. "The old gouty fellow with his English gaiters,
let him be off to Prussia with his salsifies." It delighted him thus
to combine in one imprecation the two things he hated most, England
and Prussia. He went on thus till he lost his place, and then he was
starving in the street with wife and children. The Bishop sent for him,
gave him a gentle lecturing, and appointed him Beadle to the cathedral.
In nine years, through his good deeds and gentle manners, Monseigneur
Welcome had filled the town of D---- with a sort of tender and filial
veneration. Even his conduct to Napoleon had been accepted, and, as it
were, tacitly pardoned, by the people, an honest weak flock of sheep,
who adored their Emperor but loved their Bishop.