to counsel and calm the despairing man, by
pointing out to him the resigned man, and to transform the grief which
gazes upon a grave by showing him the grief which fixes its gaze upon a
star.

CHAPTER V--MONSEIGNEUR BIENVENU MADE HIS CASSOCKS LAST TOO LONG

The private life of M. Myriel was filled with the same thoughts as his
public life. The voluntary poverty in which the Bishop of D---- lived,
would have been a solemn and charming sight for any one who could have
viewed it close at hand.

Like all old men, and like the majority of thinkers, he slept little.
This brief slumber was profound. In the morning he meditated for an
hour, then he said his mass, either at the cathedral or in his own
house. His mass said, he broke his fast on rye bread dipped in the milk
of his own cows. Then he set to work.

A Bishop is a very busy man: he must every day receive the secretary
of the bishopric, who is generally a canon, and nearly every day his
vicars-general. He has congregations to reprove, privileges to grant,
a whole ecclesiastical library to examine,--prayer-books, diocesan
catechisms, books of hours, etc.,--charges to write, sermons to
authorize, cures and mayors to reconcile, a clerical correspondence, an
administrative correspondence; on one side the State, on the other the
Holy See; and a thousand matters of business.

What time was left to him, after these thousand details of business, and
his offices and his breviary, he bestowed first on the necessitous,
the sick, and the afflicted; the time which was left to him from the
afflicted, the sick, and the necessitous, he devoted to work. Sometimes
he dug in his garden; again, he read or wrote. He had but one word
for both these kinds of toil; he called them gardening. "The mind is a
garden," said he.

Towards mid-day, when the weather was fine, he went forth and took a
stroll in the country or in town, often entering lowly dwellings. He
was seen walking alone, buried in his own thoughts, his eyes cast down,
supporting himself on his long cane, clad in his wadded purple garment
of silk, which was very warm, wearing purple stockings inside his coarse
shoes, and surmounted by a flat hat which allowed three golden tassels
of large bullion to droop from its three points.

It was a perfect festival wherever he appeared. One would have said that
his presence had something warming and luminous about it. The children
and the old people came out to the doorsteps fo