f by the devil."
　　One day a dowager of the impertinent variety who thinks herself spiritual, addressed this sally to him, "Monseigneur, people are inquiring when Your Greatness will receive the red cap!"--"Oh! oh! that's a coarse color," replied the Bishop. "It is lucky that those who despise it in a cap revere it in a hat."


BOOK FIRST--A JUST MAN
CHAPTER XI
　　A RESTRICTION
　　 We should incur a great risk of deceiving ourselves, were we to conclude from this that Monseigneur Welcome was "a philosophical bishop," or a "patriotic cure."
　　His meeting, which may almost be designated as his union, with conventionary G----, left behind it in his mind a sort of astonishment, which rendered him still more gentle. That is all.
　　Although Monseigneur Bienvenu was far from being a politician, this is, perhaps, the place to indicate very briefly what his attitude was in the events of that epoch, supposing that Monseigneur Bienvenu ever dreamed of having an attitude.
　　Let us, then, go back a few years.
　　Some time after the elevation of M. Myriel to the episcopate, the Emperor had made him a baron of the Empire, in company with many other bishops.
　　The arrest of the Pope took place, as every one knows, on the night of the 5th to the 6th of July, 1809; on this occasion, M. Myriel was summoned by Napoleon to the synod of the bishops of France and Italy convened at Paris.
　　This synod was held at Notre-Dame, and assembled for the first time on the 15th of June, 1811, under the presidency of Cardinal Fesch.
　　M. Myriel was one of the ninety-five bishops who attended it.
　　But he was present only at one sitting and at three or four private conferences. Bishop of a mountain diocese, living so very close to nature, in rusticity and deprivation, it appeared that he imported among these eminent personages, ideas which altered the temperature of the assembly.
　　He very soon returned to D---- He was interrogated as to this speedy return, and he replied:
　　"I embarrassed them. The outside air penetrated to them through me.
　　I produced on them the effect of an open door."
　　On another occasion he said, "What would you have?
　　Those gentlemen are princes.
　　I am only a poor peasant bishop."
　　The fact is that he displeased them.
　　Among other strange things, it is said that he chanced to remark one evening, when he found himself at the house of one of his most notable colleagues:
　　"What beautiful clocks!
　　What beautiful carpets!
　　What beautiful liveries! They must be a great trouble.
　　I would not have all those superfluities, crying incessantly in my ears:
　　`There are people who are hungry! There are people who are cold!
　　There are poor people!
　　There are poor people!'"＠＠網＠
　　Let us remark, by the way, that the hatred of luxury is not an intelligent hatred.
　　This hatred would involve the hatred of the arts.
　　Nevertheless, in churchmen, luxury is wrong, except in connection with representations and ceremonies.
　　It seems to reveal habits which have very little that is charitable about them. An opulent priest is a contradiction.
　　The priest must keep close to the poor.
　　Now, can one come in contact incessantly night and day with all this distress, all these misfortunes, and this poverty, without having about one's own person a little of that misery, like the dust of labor?
　　Is it possible to imagine a man near a brazier who is not warm?
　　Can one imagine a workman who is working near a furnace, and who has neither a singed hair, nor blackened nails, nor a drop of sweat, nor a speck of ashes on his face?
　　The first proof of charity in the priest, in the bishop especially, is poverty.
　　This is, no doubt, what the Bishop of D---- thought.
　　It must not be supposed, however, that he shared what we call the "ideas of the century" on certain delicate points.
　　He took very little part in the theological quarrels of the moment, and maintained silence on questions in which Church and State were implicate