Part I, Book 1, Chapter 10
The Bishop in the Presence of an Unknown Light
In this chapter, the bishop debates an old man to death. Not hyperbole, the man actually dies. Myriel, what the f are you doing.
Sure, he was already dying, and there are worse people than the bishop to have around when you shuffle off this mortal coil, but I remain very very bothered about Monseigneur Bienvenu going to a man on his deathbed and debating him. Where was that energy earlier, man?
Let’s back up a sec. There’s a guy, G, living in the area all on his own, and the townspeople, the bishop included, avoid the hell out of going near him because he was a member of the Convention. At this point I had to take a jaunt over to Wikipedia because I suspected that not knowing what the Convention was would seriously limit my understanding of the chapter.
TLDR (this is my quick and dirty summary, don’t use this for your AP Euro prep, kids), “the Convention” refers to the National Convention, a swing at representational government as part of the French Revolution that ended up sentencing the king (aka Marie Antoinette’s husband) to death and ushering in the Reign of Terror.
The French Revolution, in bishop lore, traumatized Myriel so hard he became a priest about it. So it’s somewhat understandable that, despite his deep wells of goodness and understanding, he would find anyone even indirectly responsible for those horrors personally repellent. When he hears through the grapevine that G is dying, the bishop goes to see him, more out of curiosity than a wish to comfort the dying man.
When he sees G, in a wheelchair in his garden watching the sun for the last time, G actually looks pretty good. So the bishop says, “You certainly don’t look ill to me,” and G responds, “Monsieur, I am going to get better. I shall be dead in three hours’ time.”
Freaking iconic.
G can feel death creeping through his body and is facing it with acceptance and dignity. This is the chapter where we find the bishop at his most child-like, because instead of leaving it at that, he takes this as his one chance to hold someone personally accountable for the horrors he witnessed of the Revolution (and, I suspect, his trauma from accompanying a man being executed by guillotine).
So Myriel provokes a political debate with a dying octogenarian. Not his best look! What follows is a debate that feels remarkably similar to a lot of conversations that happened in the US during and following the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.
He fires a sarcastic/passive-aggressive shot about G not being personally responsible for the death of the king, and G comes back at him swinging. When the bishop rattles off the terrible crimes of the Revolution, G responds with the terrors, abuses, and many examples of state-sanctioned violence against the common people and tells the bishop that revolutions are the inevitable events that the powerful bring about when they mistreat the marginalized and lower classes and consider it business as usual.
Or, to be one of those people who overquotes the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.:
These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.
It’s an interesting debate, because G has a much stronger case to make than the out-of-touch senator, and Myriel is forced to admit that he agrees that the murder of a commoner child is equally as tragic as the murder of a royal one, and yet the former will never elicit as much outrage as the latter, and yes there’s something very wrong with that.
Myriel tries to argue that the events of 1793 should never have happened (implying that G has personal responsibility here), and G responds, “A cloud gathered for fifteen hundred years. At the end of fifteen centuries it burst. And you put the thunderbolt on trial.”
I am so impressed that G here has more eloquence and rational thought than many octogenarians today.
After spending several pages wanting to smack the bishop over the head and go “What are you DOING?”, I was slightly mollified when G makes a personal attack on the bishop for being a “prince of the church,” collecting his 15,000 franc salary and riding around in a taxpayer-funded carriage and living in a palace dining like a king. Sir did you not read my chapter recaps explaining how this man lives? How dare you come for him like this? Not gonna lie, I was expecting the next paragraph to show the bishop whooshing off his coat to expose his ragged-ass cassock, like a less fabulous version of Gandalf throwing off his cloak to reveal himself as Gandalf the White to King Theoden in The Two Towers.
Unfortunately my LOTR/Les Misérables crossover dreams were dashed. The bishop completely sidesteps the chance to pwn G, doesn’t refute the accusations, and simply asks how his living like a prince proves G’s point. G then apologizes for stooping to making a personal attack—a move that I wish happened in political debates, and also one that reveals G to be equally as judgmental as the bishop.
Besides, he doesn’t need to go low. “I won’t go on,” G says magnanimously. “I’ll stop there, I have the winning hand. Besides, I’m dying.”
Absolutely. Iconic. This man is firing off bangers on the brink of death.
The bishop makes one last attempt to shore up his position by asserting the necessity of God in matters (implicitly stating that G and the Convention were godless and are thus invalid in their arguments). G simply looks upwards, is moved to tears by the sky, and expresses his awe at “the infinite,” saying “That selfhood of the infinite is God.” It’s a beautiful example of how you can be a nonbeliever and still feel the same profound awe at the universe, and the smallness of your place in it, as the devout.
With his dying breath (“It was obvious he had just lived the few hours of life left to him within the space of a minute,” aka the bishop is kind of literally killing this man by arguing politics and theology with him), G makes an impassioned speech about how he lived his life devoted to doing good, fighting inequality, and defending the downtrodden, and that he has no regrets about standing by his moral convictions. He says he’s been attacked for doing so and he’s made his peace that some of the people he’s fought for will forever see him as a villain. He’s accepted it, he says, and finishes with a question to the bishop: “What is it you want of me?”
The bishop kneels before him and responds, “Your blessing.”
G dies.
I feel incredibly sorry for G that he had to spend his last moments defending his life to a judgmental stranger, but what a way to end things.
I got the sense with this chapter that the bishop, as understanding and thoughtful as he is, seems to have operated his whole religious career with the assumption that people who don’t share his specific relationship to God/the Church are lacking in goodness/humility/selflessness and must find God to become better. G has quietly rocked his world by proving that you can live with a different philosophical/moral language and have convictions and a sense of duty just as strong as the bishop’s—if not stronger.
G didn’t just win the argument by dying, he showed the bishop that he’d arrived at a state of grace the bishop himself had yet to find. It is to Myriel’s credit that he finally realized this and understood enough that it was not he who needed to bless G, but the other way around.
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