Part I, Book 1, Chapter 2
Monsieur Myriel Bcomes Monseigneur Bienvenu
I have decided that I love the bishop.
I went into this knowing that the bishop was a Good Guy, godly maybe to the point of being kind of annoying, because of the whole Valjean-stealing-the-silver incident from the musical. I did not know that the bishop isn’t just good, he’s good with style. With verve!
But before I fangirl over Bishop Myriel, I have to fangirl over Victor Hugo a bit.
I am very skeptical about Great Man worship and try not to partake in it, and have chosen to approach this book without the baseline assumption that Hugo is a genius, and just read it as I would any other book. But Chapter 2 gave me my first moment of thinking, “Oh, this writer is kind of a genius, dammit.”
If I were to write a shitty summary of the beginning of the chapter (or asked—shudder—AI to summarize it for me, which you could not pay me to do), it would just say “The bishop lives in a house that is very big next to a hospital that is very small.” No style or poetry to the statement, but it gets to the point. I suspect this is what tech bros want out of their literature, which I find incredibly depressing.
Luckily, Hugo is not a tech bro. He opens the chapter with a luxuriant description of the episcopal palace that serves as Myriel’s new digs, and we the reader are treated to an absolute cascade of description and detail: the huge halls and manicured gardens, the endless rooms, the name-dropping of the illustrious figures who were wined and dined in this huge gorgeous place. If you’ve ever read period novels with extended mouth-watering descriptions of the beautiful trappings of wealth, this is the vibe.
Then he follows it with a short, simple sentence stating that the hospital is a small one-story building, and moves on.
This is the type of thing that hits me (a person who longs for the days of AP English class) in the gut with how damned clever it is. “You built me palaces out of paragraphs / You built cathedrals,” Eliza sings in Hamilton, and that’s literally what Hugo has done here. He builds the hulking episcopal palace with a huge block of a paragraph, with long florid sentences to evoke the excess of the edifice, stacking words like bricks and clauses like lingering echoes in a long hallway.
Then, in sharp contrast, he follows it with one tiny line describing the hospital, its short length representing the single story of the building.
I can’t get over what smart writing this is. I’m sure there is an actual literary term for this and that I learned it at some point, but most of that knowledge has been crowded out at this point with musical terms, so I’ll use one here. It feels like the literary version of text-painting, where the music is written to literally depict what is happening in text; a singer sings the words “rising upwards,” for example, and the corresponding notes go up in an ascending line. (One of my favorite modern examples of text-painting in popular music is how in “I See the Light” from Tangled, one of the instances of “And the world has somehow shifted” inserts a little beat before “shifted,” so that the word “shifted” is literally shifted in time. I see what you did there, Alan Menken.)
Anyway. I freaking loved what Hugo did there, and we’re going to move on, because at this point I may have written more words about this passage than the actual passage itself.
Here we get to why I love the bishop. Hugo doesn’t have to say it, but we know the idea of living in a big-ass fancy palace while sick people are crammed into tiny wards next door doesn’t sit well with Myriel. So the bishop invites the director of the hospital to his palace, receives him in a dining room big enough to house almost all the hospital’s patients by itself, and says this:
“Now I tell you what, monsieur le directeur de l’hôpital, obviously something’s wrong here. […] Something’s wrong, I tell you. You’re in my house and I’m in yours. You give me back my house.”
The sheer VERVE of this man! I LOVE HIM. This is like when I’m at a restaurant with a friend and I bully them into taking the last morsel on the share plate, only 100x more iconic.
The next day the bishop writes out the budget for his state salary of 15,000 francs, which as we’re made to understand is a pretty good amount of money, and he promptly gives 14,000 away (to help prisoners, the poor, girls’ education, etc.) and keeps only 1,000 a year for himself. This man is a living “if I won the lottery, I wouldn’t tell anyone, but there would be signs” meme in the best possible way.
His housekeeper, Madame Magloire, isn’t the most jazzed by this whole situation, not because she’s a bad person, but because it’s her job to keep everything going in a three-person household and that’s kind of hard on only 1,000 francs. And you know what, as someone who is routinely horrified at how much adult life is just spending more money than you think on various kinds of soap for a household to function, I kind of get it.
So she tells him that the local council offers a stipend for bishops to cover the costs of transportation and such, and that he hasn’t applied for it, and he’s like “Oh gosh, I’m such a dummy and you’re so right, I’ll apply for it now!”
He’s approved for 3,000 francs a year, Madame Magloire is thrilled, and he immediately hands out a memo saying all 3,000 francs are to be given to the sick, poor, and orphaned. Madame sees an easier household budget for all of like three seconds. I know the bishop is genuinely a good guy but it kind of seems like he’s trolling Madame Magloire a little bit.
All of this is told via dry expenditure lists which somehow makes it all 1000x funnier.
The cherry on top of all this is that a random politician gets big mad. He writes a long outraged invective about Bishop Myriel getting 3,000 francs a year for expenses and rails against this greedy priest leeching off the state to live in luxury. Victor Hugo points out that this senator comes from unearned privilege and was given a “magnificent estate” as part of his senator position. I was not aware that American GOP senators existed in 1800s France but you learn something new every day.
As part of this rant, our angry little senator says “Down with the pope!” and Victor Hugo says, in parentheses, “(Relations with Rome were not good.)”
Victor, I owe you an apology. I wasn’t really familiar with your game. This whole chapter was so freaking funny. I am having the best time.
We finish the chapter with Hugo saying that the bishop makes his budget work by charging more fees (for baptisms and marriage banns and such) to the wealthy so he can give more to the poor. The people love him so much they start calling him “Monsieur Bienvenu” (which in my head is “Mr. Welcome”) which is frankly really adorable. I now love the bishop with all my heart. (Jean Valjean who?)
I cannot believe I had such a good time reading a chapter about budget expenditures.
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