Les Miserables

by showing it the grief
which looks up to the stars.

{FANTINE|BOOK_1ST|V
V
HOW MONSEIGNEUR BIENVENU MADE HIS CASSOCK LAST SO LONG
-
THE private life of M. Myriel was full of the same thoughts as his
public life. To one who could have seen it on the spot, the
voluntary poverty in which the Bishop of D__ lived, would have been
a serious as well as a pleasant sight.
Like all old men, and like most thinkers, he slept but little, but
that little was sound. In the morning he devoted an hour to
meditation, and then said mass, either at the cathedral, or in his own
house. After mass he took his breakfast of rye bread and milk, and
then went to work.
A bishop is a very busy man; he must receive the report of the clerk
of the diocese, ordinarily a prebendary, every day; and nearly every
day his grand vicars. He has congregations to superintend, licenses to
grant, all ecclesiastical bookselling to examine, parish and
diocesan catechisms, prayer-books, etc., charges to write,
preachings to authorise, cures and mayors to make peace between, a
clerical correspondence, an administrative correspondence, on the
one hand the government, on the other the Holy See, a thousand matters
of business.
What time these various affairs and his devotions and his breviary
left him, he gave first to the needy, the sick, and the afflicted;
what time the afflicted, the sick, and the needy left him, he gave
to labour. Sometimes he used a spade in his garden, and sometimes he
read and wrote. He had but one name for these two kinds of labour;
he called them gardening. "The spirit is a garden," said he.
{FANTINE|BOOK_1ST|V ^paragraph 5}
Towards noon, when the weather was good, he would go out and walk in
the fields, or in the city, often visiting the cottages and cabins. He
would be seen plodding along, wrapt in his thoughts, his eyes bent
down, resting upon his long cane, wearing his violet doublet, wadded
so as to be very warm, violet stockings and heavy shoes, and his
flat hat, from the three corners of which hung the three golden grains
of spikenard.
His coming made a fete. One would have said that he dispensed warmth
and light as he passed along. Old people and children would come to
their doors for the bishop as they would for the sun. He blessed,
and was blessed in return. Whoever was in need of anything was shown
the way to his house.
Now and then he would stop and talk to the little boys and girls-
and give a smile to their mothers. When he had money his visits were
to the poor; when he had none, he visited the rich.
As he made his cassock last a very long time, in order that it might
not be perceived, he never went out into the city without his violet
doublet. In summer this was rather irksome.
On his