Part I, Book 1, Chapter 6
Under Whose Protection He Placed his House
🚨 🚨 🚨 Silverware alert!!!!!!! 🚨 🚨 🚨
It’s mentioned as a sort of passing note, but I have seen the musical! I know the significance of this particular detail! Victor Hugo, I know exactly what you are doing!
This chapter is generally an accounting of what the bishop’s home in the former hospital is like—by listing all his furniture and possessions, Hugo calls attention to how few material goods he has, which is similar to what Betty Smith does by listing all the contents of the Nolan family’s tenement apartment in a single paragraph in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
(For those of you who know me, you will appreciate my amazing self-restraint in not mentioning A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for five whole chapters, which might be some kind of record for me, a person who can make literally anything about A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.)
I will not list all of the details of the former-hospital-now-bishop’s-home, because you can read the chapter yourself for that, but here are some notable details that jumped out at me:
- There are two cows, kept outside, which provide all the milk for the bishop’s very plain meals, and of course half the milk they make is given to the patients of the hospital.
- Whenever the bishop has people over the members of the household have to go through the house and cowshed rounding up all the old random mismatched chairs and haul them all together so everyone has a place to sit. It’s very endearing and reminds me of throwing dinner parties in underfurnished apartments right out of college.
- The bishop’s own altar in his makeshift chapel is an old sideboard with ragged old cloths draped over it. Rich people and fussy ladies keep donating money so he can have a new fancy altar and he keeps turning around and giving that money straight to the poor. Wealthy donors, do you know anything about this man?
- Mademoiselle Baptistine’s (the bishop’s sister) lifelong dream was to have a set of matching furniture for her drawing room.
“But this would have cost five hundred francs at least, and seeing that she had been able to save up only forty-two francs and ten sous in five years, she eventually gave up the idea. Anyway, who ever attains their ideal?”
Will someone for the love of god just buy this poor woman a decent furniture set? So many people have much worse dreams and this is all she wants! 🙁 - In his description of the bishop’s bedroom, Hugo drops this intriguing detail: “…behind a curtain, the toilet articles that betrayed the old stylish ways of the man of the world.”
As a reminder if you’re more used to reading modern stuff, “toilet” here doesn’t refer to the thing you poop in, but to stuff you use to groom yourself. Given that the bishop is described as “good-looking” in Chapter 1, and is just vain enough to keep himself well-groomed like the fancy boy he once was, I think we can safely conclude that the bishop is canonically hot. This is very important to me, thank you for your attention to this matter. - The floors are constantly washed and “this place, looked after by two women, was immaculately clean from top to bottom.” Once again, thank you Madame Magloire!!! (and Mademoiselle Baptistine! You should have had your drawing-room set!)
- There are four plots in their little garden. Madame Magloire grows vegetables in three of the plots (yet again, the real MVP here!!!) and the fourth plot is where the bishop plants flowers. Madame Magloire, who has a a point, says it would be more useful if said fourth plot had more vegetables, and the bishop says, “The beautiful is just as useful as the useful. […] Perhaps more so.” Can I put that on a board and smack everyone against arts funding with it?
- None of the doors are ever locked, even at night, because the bishop is very literal about having an open door policy.
All in all, this chapter had the same vibe as the cozy-shabby living spaces I build for animals in Animal Crossing: New Horizons Happy Home Paradise. I know all of that seems like a lot, but Victor Hugo is even less concise than I am and I left out a lot of stuff.
Anyway, back to the silver. The silverware they eat with is the only luxury left over from the bishop’s old life (mmm, if you forget the toilet articles used to keep himself a Hot Priest), and it’s not even a lot of silver. It’s 6 forks and spoons and a ladle, and seeing them on the table is a “daily joy.” Eating off silver is one of the only nice things the bishop can’t bear to give up, and this is a man who more or less gave up consuming protein.
In addition to the 6 sets of silverware (what on earth do they do when more than 6 people are over for dinner? Is it a BYOFAS—Bring Your Own Fork and Spoon—situation?) and single ladle, the bishop has two silver candlesticks inherited from a great-aunt, and when I read that line, I immediately got all worked up, knowing what becomes of them. It is so hard to know these scant pieces of silver have meaning and are the only nice thing remaining in his life and to know that he’s going to hand them off without a second thought to Jean Valjean.
I know it’s just stuff. But you would not see me handing off the only thing I have from a grand- or great- relative to a total stranger who had just robbed me. This is why I’m not as good of a person as the bishop, but I think we all realized that when I decided that him being canonically hot was important.
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