The Bishop and the Candlesticks

Welcome to Vespers, where we take up the last hour of your day.

Tonight: the Bishop and the candlesticks, from Les Misérables.

A reminder: this is a survey of great ideas, not necessarily an endorsement of any one contribution.

Victor Hugo was born at Besançon, the son of a general in Joseph Bonaparte's army, and as a boy he followed his father through the campaigns in Italy and Spain. He wrote a tragedy at fourteen. By thirty he stood at the head of the French Romantics. He was made a peer in eighteen forty-five. Then the politics turned. After the coup d'état he fled to Brussels, and from Brussels to Jersey, and from Jersey to Guernsey — and it was on Guernsey, in a house called Hauteville House, that he wrote the book we are reading tonight.

He put a preface in front of it, and signed it from that house, in eighteen sixty-two. The preface names three problems he says the century has not solved: the degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light. So long as those remain, he writes, so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of this nature cannot fail to be of use. That is a novelist telling you in advance that he is not writing to entertain you.

The story. A man named Jean Valjean has just come out of the galleys at Toulon after nineteen years. He went in for stealing a loaf of bread; the years multiplied because he kept trying to escape. He walks out with a yellow passport that marks him as a discharged convict, and in the town he comes to, that passport closes every door. The inns turn him out, and a tavern, and a doorstep, and at last a dog's kennel. Someone points him toward a house where an old man lives, and the old man is the bishop of that diocese — Monseigneur Bienvenu, which is to say, Monseigneur Welcome. The Bishop seats him at his own table, feeds him off the household silver, and puts him to bed in the alcove next to his own room.

The reading is Isabel Hapgood's, from eighteen eighty-seven.

From Hugo:

Jean Valjean listened. Not a sound.

He gave the door a push.

He pushed it gently with the tip of his finger, lightly, with the furtive and uneasy gentleness of a cat which is desirous of entering.

The door yielded to this pressure, and made an imperceptible and silent movement, which enlarged the opening a little.

He waited a moment; then gave the door a second and a bolder push.

It continued to yield in silence. The opening was now large enough to allow him to pass. But near the door there stood a little table, which formed an embarrassing angle with it, and barred the entrance.

Jean Valjean recognized the difficulty. It was necessary, at any cost, to enlarge the aperture still further.

He decided on his course of action, and gave the door a third push, more energetic than the two preceding. This time a badly oiled hinge suddenly emitted amid the silence a hoarse and prolonged cry.

Jean Valjean shuddered. The noise of the hinge rang in his ears with something of the piercing and formidable sound of the trump of the Day of Judgment.

In the fantastic exaggerations of the first moment he almost imagined that that hinge had just become animated, and had suddenly assumed a terrible life, and that it was barking like a dog to arouse every one, and warn and to wake those who were asleep. He halted, shuddering, bewildered, and fell back from the tips of his toes upon his heels. He heard the arteries in his temples beating like two forge hammers, and it seemed to him that his breath issued from his breast with the roar of the wind issuing from a cavern. It seemed impossible to him that the horrible clamor of that irritated hinge should not have disturbed the entire household, like the shock of an earthquake; the door, pushed by him, had taken the alarm, and had shouted; the old man would rise at once; the two old women would shriek out; people would come to their assistance; in less than a quarter of an hour the town would be in an uproar, and the gendarmerie on hand. For a moment he thought himself lost.

He goes on:

He remained where he was, petrified like the statue of salt, not daring to make a movement. Several minutes elapsed. The door had fallen wide open. He ventured to peep into the next room. Nothing had stirred there. He lent an ear. Nothing was moving in the house. The noise made by the rusty hinge had not awakened any one.

This first danger was past; but there still reigned a frightful tumult within him. Nevertheless, he did not retreat. Even when he had thought himself lost, he had not drawn back. His only thought now was to finish as soon as possible. He took a step and entered the room.

This room was in a state of perfect calm. Here and there vague and confused forms were distinguishable, which in the daylight were papers scattered on a table, open folios, volumes piled upon a stool, an armchair heaped with clothing, a prie-Dieu, and which at that hour were only shadowy corners and whitish spots. Jean Valjean advanced with precaution, taking care not to knock against the furniture. He could hear, at the extremity of the room, the even and tranquil breathing of the sleeping Bishop.

He suddenly came to a halt. He was near the bed. He had arrived there sooner than he had thought for.

He goes on:

Nature sometimes mingles her effects and her spectacles with our actions with sombre and intelligent appropriateness, as though she desired to make us reflect. For the last half-hour a large cloud had covered the heavens. At the moment when Jean Valjean paused in front of the bed, this cloud parted, as though on purpose, and a ray of light, traversing the long window, suddenly illuminated the Bishop’s pale face. He was sleeping peacefully. He lay in his bed almost completely dressed, on account of the cold of the Basses-Alps, in a garment of brown wool, which covered his arms to the wrists. His head was thrown back on the pillow, in the careless attitude of repose; his hand, adorned with the pastoral ring, and whence had fallen so many good deeds and so many holy actions, was hanging over the edge of the bed. His whole face was illumined with a vague expression of satisfaction, of hope, and of felicity. It was more than a smile, and almost a radiance. He bore upon his brow the indescribable reflection of a light which was invisible. The soul of the just contemplates in sleep a mysterious heaven.

A reflection of that heaven rested on the Bishop.

It was, at the same time, a luminous transparency, for that heaven was within him. That heaven was his conscience.

At the moment when the ray of moonlight superposed itself, so to speak, upon that inward radiance, the sleeping Bishop seemed as in a glory. It remained, however, gentle and veiled in an ineffable half-light. That moon in the sky, that slumbering nature, that garden without a quiver, that house which was so calm, the hour, the moment, the silence, added some solemn and unspeakable quality to the venerable repose of this man, and enveloped in a sort of serene and majestic aureole that white hair, those closed eyes, that face in which all was hope and all was confidence, that head of an old man, and that slumber of an infant.

There was something almost divine in this man, who was thus august, without being himself aware of it.

Hugo continues:

Jean Valjean was in the shadow, and stood motionless, with his iron candlestick in his hand, frightened by this luminous old man. Never had he beheld anything like this. This confidence terrified him. The moral world has no grander spectacle than this: a troubled and uneasy conscience, which has arrived on the brink of an evil action, contemplating the slumber of the just.

That slumber in that isolation, and with a neighbor like himself, had about it something sublime, of which he was vaguely but imperiously conscious.

No one could have told what was passing within him, not even himself. In order to attempt to form an idea of it, it is necessary to think of the most violent of things in the presence of the most gentle. Even on his visage it would have been impossible to distinguish anything with certainty. It was a sort of haggard astonishment. He gazed at it, and that was all. But what was his thought? It would have been impossible to divine it. What was evident was, that he was touched and astounded. But what was the nature of this emotion?

His eye never quitted the old man. The only thing which was clearly to be inferred from his attitude and his physiognomy was a strange indecision. One would have said that he was hesitating between the two abysses,—the one in which one loses one’s self and that in which one saves one’s self. He seemed prepared to crush that skull or to kiss that hand.

He goes on:

At the expiration of a few minutes his left arm rose slowly towards his brow, and he took off his cap; then his arm fell back with the same deliberation, and Jean Valjean fell to meditating once more, his cap in his left hand, his club in his right hand, his hair bristling all over his savage head.

The Bishop continued to sleep in profound peace beneath that terrifying gaze.

The gleam of the moon rendered confusedly visible the crucifix over the chimney-piece, which seemed to be extending its arms to both of them, with a benediction for one and pardon for the other.

Suddenly Jean Valjean replaced his cap on his brow; then stepped rapidly past the bed, without glancing at the Bishop, straight to the cupboard, which he saw near the head; he raised his iron candlestick as though to force the lock; the key was there; he opened it; the first thing which presented itself to him was the basket of silverware; he seized it, traversed the chamber with long strides, without taking any precautions and without troubling himself about the noise, gained the door, re-entered the oratory, opened the window, seized his cudgel, bestrode the window-sill of the ground floor, put the silver into his knapsack, threw away the basket, crossed the garden, leaped over the wall like a tiger, and fled.

That is where the chapter ends. The next morning:

The next morning at sunrise Monseigneur Bienvenu was strolling in his garden. Madame Magloire ran up to him in utter consternation.

“Monseigneur, Monseigneur!” she exclaimed, “does your Grace know where the basket of silver is?”

“Yes,” replied the Bishop.

“Jesus the Lord be blessed!” she resumed; “I did not know what had become of it.”

The Bishop had just picked up the basket in a flower-bed. He presented it to Madame Magloire.

“Here it is.”

“Well!” said she. “Nothing in it! And the silver?”

“Ah,” returned the Bishop, “so it is the silver which troubles you? I don’t know where it is.”

“Great, good God! It is stolen! That man who was here last night has stolen it.”

In a twinkling, with all the vivacity of an alert old woman, Madame Magloire had rushed to the oratory, entered the alcove, and returned to the Bishop. The Bishop had just bent down, and was sighing as he examined a plant of cochlearia des Guillons, which the basket had broken as it fell across the bed. He rose up at Madame Magloire’s cry.

“Monseigneur, the man is gone! The silver has been stolen!”

As she uttered this exclamation, her eyes fell upon a corner of the garden, where traces of the wall having been scaled were visible. The coping of the wall had been torn away.

“Stay! yonder is the way he went. He jumped over into Cochefilet Lane. Ah, the abomination! He has stolen our silver!”

The Bishop remained silent for a moment; then he raised his grave eyes, and said gently to Madame Magloire:—

“And, in the first place, was that silver ours?”

Madame Magloire was speechless. Another silence ensued; then the Bishop went on:—

“Madame Magloire, I have for a long time detained that silver wrongfully. It belonged to the poor. Who was that man? A poor man, evidently.”

“Alas! Jesus!” returned Madame Magloire. “It is not for my sake, nor for Mademoiselle’s. It makes no difference to us. But it is for the sake of Monseigneur. What is Monseigneur to eat with now?”

The Bishop gazed at her with an air of amazement.

“Ah, come! Are there no such things as pewter forks and spoons?”

Madame Magloire shrugged her shoulders.

“Pewter has an odor.”

“Iron forks and spoons, then.”

Madame Magloire made an expressive grimace.

“Iron has a taste.”

“Very well,” said the Bishop; “wooden ones then.”

A few moments later he was breakfasting at the very table at which Jean Valjean had sat on the previous evening. As he ate his breakfast, Monseigneur Welcome remarked gayly to his sister, who said nothing, and to Madame Magloire, who was grumbling under her breath, that one really does not need either fork or spoon, even of wood, in order to dip a bit of bread in a cup of milk.

“A pretty idea, truly,” said Madame Magloire to herself, as she went and came, “to take in a man like that! and to lodge him close to one’s self! And how fortunate that he did nothing but steal! Ah, mon Dieu! it makes one shudder to think of it!”

As the brother and sister were about to rise from the table, there came a knock at the door.

“Come in,” said the Bishop.

The door opened. A singular and violent group made its appearance on the threshold. Three men were holding a fourth man by the collar. The three men were gendarmes; the other was Jean Valjean.

A brigadier of gendarmes, who seemed to be in command of the group, was standing near the door. He entered and advanced to the Bishop, making a military salute.

“Monseigneur—” said he.

Hugo continues:

At this word, Jean Valjean, who was dejected and seemed overwhelmed, raised his head with an air of stupefaction.

“Monseigneur!” he murmured. “So he is not the curé?”

“Silence!” said the gendarme. “He is Monseigneur the Bishop.”

In the meantime, Monseigneur Bienvenu had advanced as quickly as his great age permitted.

“Ah! here you are!” he exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. “I am glad to see you. Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too, which are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get two hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with your forks and spoons?”

Jean Valjean opened his eyes wide, and stared at the venerable Bishop with an expression which no human tongue can render any account of.

“Monseigneur,” said the brigadier of gendarmes, “so what this man said is true, then? We came across him. He was walking like a man who is running away. We stopped him to look into the matter. He had this silver—”

“And he told you,” interposed the Bishop with a smile, “that it had been given to him by a kind old fellow of a priest with whom he had passed the night? I see how the matter stands. And you have brought him back here? It is a mistake.”

“In that case,” replied the brigadier, “we can let him go?”

“Certainly,” replied the Bishop.

The gendarmes released Jean Valjean, who recoiled.

“Is it true that I am to be released?” he said, in an almost inarticulate voice, and as though he were talking in his sleep.

“Yes, thou art released; dost thou not understand?” said one of the gendarmes.

“My friend,” resumed the Bishop, “before you go, here are your candlesticks. Take them.”

He stepped to the chimney-piece, took the two silver candlesticks, and brought them to Jean Valjean. The two women looked on without uttering a word, without a gesture, without a look which could disconcert the Bishop.

Jean Valjean was trembling in every limb. He took the two candlesticks mechanically, and with a bewildered air.

“Now,” said the Bishop, “go in peace. By the way, when you return, my friend, it is not necessary to pass through the garden. You can always enter and depart through the street door. It is never fastened with anything but a latch, either by day or by night.”

He goes on:

Then, turning to the gendarmes:—

“You may retire, gentlemen.”

The gendarmes retired.

Jean Valjean was like a man on the point of fainting.

The Bishop drew near to him, and said in a low voice:—

“Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money in becoming an honest man.”

Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of ever having promised anything, remained speechless. The Bishop had emphasized the words when he uttered them. He resumed with solemnity:—

“Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”

Notice what the Bishop does not do. He does not forgive Jean Valjean, in the sense of releasing a debt that has been confessed. Jean Valjean confesses nothing. He is standing in the collar of three gendarmes with the stolen silver on his back, and he has managed almost nothing beyond a bewildered question about whether he is really being let go. There is no repentance in the room. The kindness arrives first, and it arrives while the man is still a thief.

From Paul, to the Romans:

Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance?

Leadeth. Not rewards. The goodness comes first, and the repentance follows it out of the room. That is the order of the passage we just read, and it is the order most of us instinctively reverse. We would have the Bishop wait. We would have him say: when you are sorry, then the candlesticks.

He goes to the Ephesians:

But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, by grace ye are saved.

Even when we were dead in sins. Not when we had begun to stir.

Hugo has built the scene so that the mercy cannot be mistaken for a reward. He gives us the theft in full first, and lets us stand in the room with the worst version of Jean Valjean before he lets the Bishop speak. And then, in the morning, the Bishop's first recorded word on the subject is a question to his housekeeper: and, in the first place, was that silver ours?

That is the whole thing in nine words. The Bishop does not experience the theft as a loss, because he did not experience the silver as a possession. He says it belonged to the poor and that he had detained it wrongfully for a long time. A man who has already given everything away in his own mind cannot be robbed. He can only be relieved of the administration.

From the Gospel of Luke:

But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil. Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.

Kind unto the unthankful and to the evil. That is not a description of a temperament. It is a description of a policy.

Thomas Watson, in his Body of Divinity, puts the same thing in a country image: the wicked have some crumbs from mercy's table; sweet dewdrops are on the thistle, as well as on the rose. The dew does not consult the plant. Watson has another line worth carrying, and it runs like this: God's holiness makes him illustrious; his mercy makes him endearing.

Now the hard part. We are not going to walk around it.

The Bishop lies. A brigadier of gendarmes asks him a direct question about a crime, and the Bishop, smiling, tells him a false story: that the silver was a gift, that the arrest is a mistake. He then hands over the candlesticks, which manufactures evidence for the lie. The scene most people remember as the purest act of grace in the European novel is also a bishop deceiving the police.

Hugo does not resolve this. He does not have the Bishop agonise over it, or explain it, or repent of it later. He lets it stand, and the tradition that loves this scene has been quietly uneasy about it ever since. Some have said the Bishop makes the lie true by giving — that a gift given at the moment of the telling is a real gift, retroactively. Others have said that is a lawyer's escape hatch.

You will have to decide that one yourself. We say every night that this is a survey of great ideas and not an endorsement of any one contribution, and this is exactly the sort of place that sentence was written for. Admire the grace; name the problem.

From Collacon's encyclopedia, a line from E. Hopkins that fits the whole difficulty: no man thinks his conscience erroneous; every one judges himself to be in the right, and to be rightly informed.

Go back to the moment before the theft. It is the part people forget, and the part with the most theology in it.

Jean Valjean is standing over the sleeping Bishop with a miner's candlestick in his hand — a bar of massive iron, pointed at one end, that might be taken for a lever or for a club. And Hugo will not tell us what the man is thinking. He says: no one could have told what was passing within him, not even himself. He says the only thing clearly to be inferred was a strange indecision. And then the sentence the whole book turns on: one would have said that he was hesitating between the two abysses — the one in which one loses one's self and that in which one saves one's self. He seemed prepared to crush that skull or to kiss that hand.

Two abysses. Not a height and a depth — two depths. Hugo will not let salvation be the safe option. Both directions are a fall; only one of them is a fall upward.

And over the two of them, in the moonlight, Hugo hangs the crucifix on the chimney-piece, which he says seemed to be extending its arms to both of them, with a benediction for one and pardon for the other. That is the most compressed piece of theology in the passage. One man in that room needs blessing and one needs pardon, and the same cross is doing both jobs at once, and Hugo does not tell you which arm is reaching for which man. The sleeping bishop needs pardon too.

On that hesitation the commonplace books are full. Milton: conscience, into what abyss of fears and horrors hast thou driven me, out of which I find no way, from deep to deeper plunged. And a line from Valerius Maximus that could be the caption under the whole chapter: it is more beautiful to overcome injury by the power of kindness than to oppose to it the obstinacy of hatred.

Paul, again to the Romans, on that overcoming:

Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head. Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.

Coals of fire. That is the candlesticks exactly. Jean Valjean leaves that house carrying two pieces of silver that burn in his hands for the rest of his life. He keeps them — Hugo tells us so, more than once, hundreds of pages later. The man changes his name, his city and his fortune, and through all of it he preserves the Bishop's candlesticks and will let nobody see them. They sit on his chimney-piece at the end as they sat on the Bishop's at the beginning.

In Luke there is another scene with a thief in it, and it runs the opposite way.

From Luke:

And Zacchaeus stood, and said unto the Lord; Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold. And Jesus said unto him, This day is salvation come to this house, forsomuch as he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.

Zacchaeus gives back. Jean Valjean is given more. Same story from opposite ends — because the restitution in Luke does not purchase the salvation, it announces it. Christ had already invited himself to the house. The fourfold restoration is what a man does after grace has walked in the door, not what he does to get it open.

Which brings us to the last line, and to the one place where the Bishop's theology needs a careful hand.

He says: Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.

It is your soul that I buy from you. It is a magnificent sentence, and it is not quite true. No bishop purchases a soul. If two hundred francs of silver could redeem a man, redemption would be a matter of somebody having enough silver.

From Peter:

Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers; but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.

Peter names the exact currency lying in Jean Valjean's knapsack and says it is the wrong one. And Paul, to the Corinthians, on the price that was the right one: ye are not your own, for ye are bought with a price.

So the Bishop is speaking above his station — or rather, he is speaking below it, as a steward. The purchase he is announcing is not his. He is handing a man over to a transaction completed long before either of them was born, and he is doing it with the only sacrament available to him, which is a pair of candlesticks. Read that way the sentence stops being presumption and becomes a benediction: your soul has been bought, and here is the silver that will remind you of it every night for the rest of your life.

And what the purchase produces is not a discharge but a duty.

From Paul, to Titus:

For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world; looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ; who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.

Grace teaching. Grace obligating. The Bishop's last practical instruction to Jean Valjean is not go and be forgiven; it is do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money in becoming an honest man — a promise, Hugo carefully tells us, that Jean Valjean has no recollection of ever making. The Bishop supplies the promise and then holds him to it. That is what grace does. It hands you an obligation you did not agree to and makes you glad of it.

One last thing.

The old man was christened Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel, and the people of his diocese dropped everything but the third name. They call him Monseigneur Bienvenu. Bienvenu is the word you say at a door. It is welcome.

So the scene we have just read is a man named Welcome opening a door to a man every other door in France has closed, feeding him at a table, and then, when the man robs him, opening the door a second time: it is never fastened with anything but a latch, either by day or by night. The mercy is not an episode in the Bishop's life. It is his name, and Hugo spent the whole opening of the novel establishing it before he let Jean Valjean near the house.

There is an English poem about being welcomed at a door you know you have no business entering, by a host who will not accept your reasons for standing outside. George Herbert, from The Temple:

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, Guilty of dust and sin. But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, If I lacked any thing.

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here: Love said, You shall be he. I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear, I cannot look on thee. Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame Go where it does deserve. And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame? My dear, then I will serve. You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: So I did sit and eat.

The door is on the latch, by day and by night. Go in peace.

Good night.