Les Misérables - Volume I - Fantine

Classic from the year 2009 in the subject French Studies - Literature language: English abstract: BOOK FIRST. A JUST MAN***CHAPTER I. M. MYRIEL***In 1815 M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of Digne. He was an old man of about seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see of Digne since 1806.Although this detail has no connection whatever with the real substance of what we are about to relate it will not be superfluous if merely for the sake of exactness in all points to mention here the various rumors and remarks which had been in circulation about him from the very moment when he arrived in the diocese. True or false that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives and above all in their destinies as that which they do. M. Myriel was the son of a councilor of the Parliament of Aix; hence he belonged to the nobility of the bar. It was said that his father destining him to be the heir of his own post had married him at a very early age eighteen or twenty in accordance with a custom which is rather widely prevalent in parliamentary families. In spite of this marriage however it was said that Charles Myriel created a great deal of talk. He was well formed though rather short in stature elegant graceful intelligent; the whole of the first portion of his life had been devoted to the world and to gallantry.The Revolution came; events succeeded each other with precipitation; the parliamentary families decimated pursued hunted down were dispersed. M. Charles Myriel emigrated to Italy at the very beginning of the Revolution. There his wife died of a malady of the chest from which she had long suffered. He had no children. What took place next in the fate of M. Myriel? The ruin of the French society of the olden days the fall of his own family the tragic spectacles of '93 which were perhaps even more alarming to the emigrants who viewed them from a distance with the magnifying powers of terro