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Part 44 Grandson and Grandfather
Chapter 1 In Which the Tree with the Zinc Plaster Appears Again
Chapter 2 Marius, Emerging from Civil War, Makes Ready for Domestic War
Chapter 5 Deposit Your Money in a Forest Rather than with a Notary
Chapter 6 The Two Old Men Do Everything, Each One After His Own Fashion, to Render Cosette Happy
Chapter 7 The Effects of Dreams Mingled with Happiness
Chapter 8 Two Men Impossible to Find
Chapter 1 The 16th of February, 1833
Chapter 2 Jean Valjean Still Wears His Arm in a Sling
Part 46 The Last Draught From the Cup
Chapter 1 The Seventh Circle and the Eighth Heaven
Chapter 2 The Obscurities Which a Revelation Can Contain
Part 47 Fading Away of the Twilight
Chapter 2 Another Step Backwards
Chapter 3 They Recall the Garden of the Rue Plumet
Chapter 4 Attraction and Extinction
Part 48 Supreme Shadow, Supreme Dawn
Chapter 1 Pity for the Unhappy, but Indulgence for the Happy
Chapter 2 Last Flickerings of a Lamp Without Oil
Chapter 3 A Pen Is Heavy to the Man Who Lifted the Fauchelevent's Cart
Chapter 4 A Bottle of Ink Which Only Succeeded in Whitening
Chapter 5 A Night Behind Which There Is Day
Chapter 6 The Grass Covers and the Rain Effaces
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo
(Translator: Isabel F. Hapgood)
Published: 1862 Categorie(s): Fiction, Historical
Chapter 1 M. Myriel
In 1815, M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D—— He was an old man of about seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see of D—— since 1806.
Although this detail has no connection whatever with the real substance of what we are about to relate, it will not be superfluous, if merely for the sake of exactness in all points, to mention here the various rumors and remarks which had been in circulation about him from the very moment when he arrived in the diocese. True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do. M. Myriel was the son of a councillor of the Parliament of Aix; hence he belonged to the nobility of the bar. It was said that his father, destining him to be the heir of his own post, had married him at a very early age, eighteen or twenty, in accordance with a custom which is rather widely prevalent in parliamentary families. In spite of this marriage, however, it was said that Charles Myriel created a great deal of talk. He was well formed, though rather short in stature, elegant, graceful, intelligent; the whole of the first portion of his life had been devoted to the world and to gallantry.
The Revolution came; events succeeded each other with precipitation; the parliamentary families, decimated, pursued, hunted down, were dispersed. M. Charles Myriel emigrated to Italy at the very beginning of the Revolution. There his wife died of a malady of the chest, from which she had long suffered. He had no children. What took place next in the fate of M. Myriel? The ruin of the French society of the olden days, the fall of his own family, the tragic spectacles of '93, which were, perhaps, even more alarming to the emigrants who viewed them from a distance, with the magnifying powers of terror,—did these cause the ideas of renunciation and solitude to germinate in him? Was he, in the midst of these distractions, these affections which absorbed his life, suddenly smitten with one of those mysterious and terrible blows which sometimes overwhelm, by striking to his heart, a man whom public catastrophes would not shake, by striking at his existence and his fortune? No one could have told: all that was known was, that when he returned from Italy he was a priest.
In
