Les Miserables: Volume 1, Book 1 Summary & Analysis

Chapter 1 We learn the name of the Bishop of “D----” (the town’s real name isn’t given), an old man named Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel. He was the son of a man of Parliament, and he spent his younger years devoted to worldly affairs. But during the French Revolution, he was forced to emigrate to Italy, and his wife died before having children. The narrator isn’t sure if it was the tragedy in his own family, the revolutionary madness of 1793, or something else, but when Myriel returned, he had become a priest.

Around the turn of the century, when he was still just a priest, Myriel went to Paris to ask for aid for his parishioners. He was waiting to speak to Cardinal Fesch, the uncle of Napoleon, when Napoleon himself entered the anteroom and asked who this good man was. The Bishop said he might be good, but Napoleon was a great man. Soon after, he was surprised to learn that he had been appointed Bishop of D----.

Though D---- is a small town where gossip and rumors rule, after around nine years, any rumors about the Bishop had dissipated. Myriel had arrived with his sister, Mademoiselle Baptistine, a spinster ten years younger than he was, and with a servant of the same age, Madame Magloire. Mademoiselle Baptistine is a respectable woman, not pretty, but deeply good, though her goodness seems to make her light and transparent, merely a conduit for her soul’s eventual ascent to heaven.

Chapter 2 In D----, the episcopal palace—a huge, grand house where the Bishop is installed—had in the past welcomed major political figures from Paris, and is home to opulent furniture. It’s located next to the small, narrow town hospital, which the Bishop visits after his arrival. He asks the director how many sick people there are in the hospital presently: there are 26. He notes that the beds are crowded, there isn’t much light, and the hospital can be overwhelmed. The director asks what can be done other than resign himself. The Bishop is quiet and asks how many beds his own dining room would hold—he gathers it would be around 20. He says there’s been a mistake—the two of them must switch houses. The next day the Bishop settles into the hospital, while the 36 patients are installed in the palace.

Myriel, whose family was ruined in the Revolution, has no property, and receives 15,000 francs yearly from the State. At the beginning of his stay, he draws up a note of expenses. He declares only 1,000 francs for his personal expenses, and the rest for charity. Mademoiselle Baptistine admires and venerates her brother and submits to his every wish. It’s only Madame Magloire who is a little unhappy with the situation. After about three months, she tells the Bishop that he hasn’t even claimed the allowance due to him for a customary town carriage. The General Council votes him an annual sum of 3,000 francs, but the local bourgeois inhabitants are indignant at this expense, which seems extravagant for such a small town. One General Council member writes a letter to a minister claiming that all priests are greedy and live in luxury. Madame Magloire, however, is delighted at the 3,000 francs. That night the Bishop writes out a note of expenses, devoting all 3,000, again, to various charitable donations.

Money offerings and alms soon flow in, and those who have little of their own begin to knock at the Bishop’s door to collect them. Though he becomes a kind of treasurer or cashier, he’s never tempted to add anything to his bare necessities. The peasants of the town begin to call the Bishop Monseigneur Bienvenu [Welcome], which pleases him.

Chapter 3 Though the Bishop lacks a carriage, he still manages to visit the dozens of chapels and vicarships in the area, on foot or cart. One day he arrives at the ancient city of Senez mounted on an ass (donkey), the only means of transport he could afford. People in the village begin to laugh, and the mayor seems scandalized. The Bishop apologizes for what he says must seem arrogant—riding the same animal that was used by Jesus Christ.

During his visits, the Bishop is kind rather than harsh, using stories and examples from neighboring villages he’s visited to show why people should be generous and kind to their neighbors. In other cases, he invents parables that are direct rather than obtuse, so that people can understand them better.

Chapter 4 The Bishop is cheerful and enjoys joking around. One day he tries to reach a book on an upper shelf of his library, but he’s short and can’t reach it. He asks Madame Magloire to fetch him a chair, since his “grandeur” doesn’t reach as high as the shelf.

Once, during Lent, a young vicar comes to preach on charity, telling the rich to give to the poor to avoid hell (which he portrays in vivid, terrifying detail). A wealthy merchant named M. Geborand, who had never given to the poor in his life, begins to give a sou (5 centimes, or 1/20 of a franc) each Sunday to the beggar at the cathedral door. The Bishop remarks that there goes M. Geborand, buying paradise for a sou.

The Bishop constantly reminds his congregation of the suffering of the poor. He adopts the peasants’ dialects wherever he goes. He treats everyone from all classes the same, and isn’t quick to judge, since he says he himself is an ex-sinner. He’s indulgent towards women and the poor, since they are treated the worst of all society. He says that society is in fact guilty for the ignorance of those who commit sins.

One day the Bishop hears a criminal case about a very poor man who had coined counterfeit money to support his lover and child. The woman, the only source of proof, had been caught, and she refused to accuse her lover. Then her attorney made up a story about her lover’s infidelity, giving her scraps of supposed letters as proof. She was distraught and confessed everything, and the man was ruined. He was now waiting to be tried. The Bishop listens to this in silence, and then asks where the man will be tried. Then he asks where his attorney will be tried.

Not long after, a somewhat uneducated man from D--- is sentenced to death for murder, in a trial of great interest to the public. The day before the execution, the town priest refuses to attend to the prisoner in his last moments, so the Bishop volunteers to. He spends the entire day with him, speaking with and consoling him, until he is able to “see light.” The next day the Bishop mounts the scaffold with him, and the man seems calm and reconciled to his fate. As the Bishop descends from the scaffold, people admire both his deathly pale face and his calm. Some wealthier townspeople call this an act, but the regular people recognize holy deeds when they see them.

The Bishop had been shocked to see the guillotine. The narrator goes on to show how no one can remain indifferent to the death penalty after gazing upon the scaffold—one must decide for or against it, and it doesn’t permit remaining neutral. In the days after the execution, the Bishop seems crushed and tortured. One evening his sister overhears him muttering that it is wrong to care only about divine rather than human law: men have no right to touch what is God’s alone.

Myriel is often summoned to the bedsides of those who are dying, and counsels them to remain strong and hopeful for the world to come.

Chapter 5 Myriel leads a monastic life, sleeping little and saying mass every morning. He is very busy, but always spends his free time caring for the sick or reading, writing, and gardening. He often walks alone, deep in thought, but every so often stops to speak to children and their mothers. To make his cassocks last longer, he always goes around in a thick purple cloak. He eats a frugal supper with his two female companions, only splurging when he has guests. At night he writes, finishing several manuscripts on biblical exegesis before the end of his life, some of which are covered with notes of praise to God scrawled in the margins.

Chapter 6 The Bishop sleeps on the second floor of his house, and the oratory is in the attic. It can only be reached through his bedroom, but he uses it at times to host guests. There is a stable in the backyard garden, holding two cows, and the Bishop always gives at least half their milk to the hospital. In his oratory, he has constructed an altar out of a sideboard with cheap materials. Every time the women of D---- raise money for a new altar, he takes it and gives it to the poor. Mademoiselle Baptistine would have loved to buy a set of velvet drawing-room furniture, but 500 francs is far above their budget.

The Bishop’s bedchamber is simple and decorated only with crosses and two portraits of abbés. The only luxury the Bishop allows is for the house to remain sparklingly clean. However, he still retains six silver knives, forks, and a soup ladle, as well as two silver candlesticks from his former life, and admits it would be hard for him to renounce them. Madame Magloire keeps them in a small locked cupboard, though she never removes the key.

In the garden, Madame Magloire grows vegetables while the Bishop grows flowers. Madame Magloire once remarked at the uselessness of growing flowers rather than food, to which the Bishop responded that what is beautiful is also useful.

The house has no doors that could be locked, and the Bishop keeps them open day and night: he believes the door of the physician and of the priest should always be open. One day another priest asked if he was ever afraid of anyone who might enter, and the Bishop said to him in Latin that “anyone but the Lord guards his house in vain.”

Chapter 7 The narrator tells the story of one incident to explain the Bishop’s nature. An ex-lieutenant and now bandit, Cravatte, escaped and made his way through many small villages of France, where his highway robberies and sacking of cathedrals made the news. The Bishop was doing his rounds in the area where Cravatte was hiding around this time. The Bishop claimed he would go without an escort, and that he couldn’t forsake one of his beloved mountain communities. He went alone, and arrived at a shepherd’s village, where he stayed for a month. At the end of his stay, the villagers were embarrassed not to have the correct ornaments for him to say a certain prayer, at which point two unknown horseman brought a large chest to him. It contained gold ornaments, cloths, and crosses—all stolen from a cathedral—and a note saying “From Cravatte to Monseigneur Bienvenu.” The Bishop smiled and said it must have come from God. That evening, before going to bed, he said that we should not fear robbers or murderers from without, but instead prejudice and vice from within.

Chapter 8 One day, a senator comes to D--- to dine with Myriel and the prefect. The senator declares that he wants to explain his philosophy—he laughs at infinite and eternal things and believes himself a product of Epicurus. He begins a monologue comparing Diderot to Voltaire, and expressing skepticism about Jesus’ preaching renunciation and sacrifice. He says people should simply live merrily rather than worry about life after death, since there is no such thing as good and evil. He laughs at the idea of paradise and God, saying that he’s only a piece of dust collected on earth for a time, and whatever he does will lead to nothingness, so he might as well enjoy himself.

The Bishop claps his hands and says this materialism is marvelous, allowing anyone who promotes it to consider himself not responsible for anything. He says it’s an agreeable philosophy, exquisite, refined, and perfect for the rich alone. But he says the rich shouldn’t begrudge the common people their belief in God, as “goose stuffed with chestnuts is the truffled turkey of the poor.”

Chapter 9 To better understand the Bishop, the narrator transcribes a letter from Mademoiselle Baptistine to her childhood friend, in which she discusses how good and generous her brother is, though while complaining a bit about her own privations. She writes that she used to worry about how he exposed himself to such dangers, but is now getting used to it. She has learned how to manage him as a man with “grandeur of soul.”

Chapter 10 An even more dangerous act of the Bishop is the subject of this chapter. A member of the French Convention, “G---,” who hadn’t voted for the king’s death but was still considered a “quasi-regicide” (now, twenty years later, France is again a monarchy), lives far away from the city in the countryside. He is loathed in the town, and people are pleased when a rumor spreads that G--- is now dying and won’t live to see dawn. The Bishop immediately sets out to the small, poor hut where he sees a white-haired man next to his servant, a shepherd boy. The Bishop introduces himself, and the old man recognizes him and says he expects to die in around three hours.

The Bishop, despite his modesty, is a little shocked not to be addressed as Monseigneur by G---, and feels a bit severe, while G--- watches him cordially and humbly. The Bishop thinks he looks strong, as if he’s welcoming death on purpose and freely. He sits down and congratulates the old man for not voting for the death of the king. The man stops smiling and says he did vote for the death of the tyrant—that is, for the death of ignorance. Man should only be governed by science, he says. When the Bishop adds, “and conscience,” G--- says that conscience is the innate science we have within us.

G--- begins to speak of his desire for the end of slavery and evil, which he promoted by voting for the Republic. He admits that they destroyed the old regime in deeds but not entirely in ideas—but he claims that the French Revolution was the consecration of humanity, even despite ’93—that is, the Terror. Each time the Bishop introduces a counterpoint—for instance, the murder of the child Louis XVII with his father—the man rejoins with a counterexample, such as the child who was the brother of a revolutionary and also hanged. He says that he weeps more over the children of the people, who suffered for centuries before the Revolution, than the children of the monarchy. The Bishop, G--- says, is probably one of those churchmen who revel in a large income and all the material enjoyments of life. The Bishop hangs his head and says he is only a worm, but asks what all those riches could prove about the horrors of 1793.

G--- begins to compare a series of names, some of whom are revolutionaries turned evil, but others of whom are tyrants of the monarchy—making the point that there was good and evil in both parties. He says that even from the most terrible blows, the revolution found a way to support progress and bring the human race forward. The brutalities of progress are called revolution, he says. The Bishop says that progress should believe in God and follow him. Suddenly, the old man begins to tremble and weep, finally pointing a finger heavenward and saying that he believes in the infinite. He closes his eyes, and then slowly opens them. G--- tells the Bishop that he spent his life in study and contemplation, following his country when he was asked to. He tried to combat abuses and destroy tyrannies, tearing up the cloth from the altar only to care for his country. He’s always upheld the human race’s march forward. After he did his best in all this, he was hunted down, persecuted, scorned, and cursed. He has accepted this isolation, and now, at 86 years old, he asks the Bishop what he has come to ask of him. The Bishop says, “Your blessing,” and bends down. When he stands up again G--- has died. From then on the Bishop seems to be more thoughtful, sinking into silence whenever G--- is mentioned.

Chapter 11 The narrator cautions that Monseigneur Welcome is not a “philosophical Bishop”—rather, the encounter with the Convention man (G---) astonished him and only made him more gentle. To understand the Bishop’s attitude towards political events in France, the narrator takes us back to the 1811 assembly of French and Italian bishops, following the 1809 arrest of the Pope. The Bishop was not exactly at home in this group, and he remarks on the luxury of his colleagues while there are still poor people in the world. The Bishop believes that the priest’s first proof of charity is poverty. Nevertheless, he is not one to enter into contemporary theological quarrels, and is generally disapproving of Napoleon. He has two sergeant brothers whom he writes to regularly, though one had not done his best in pursuing the escaping Emperor Napoleon. The Bishop disapproved of this.

The narrator remarks that one can easily admire the Bishop’s protest against Napoleon in the name of liberty while Napoleon was all-powerful, though the same protest becomes less justifiable against a weak, powerless Napoleon. It can be a crime to applaud and to condemn the same man, depending on the time and place.

The Bishop is tolerant overall, however. There was a porter of the town-hall placed by the Emperor, who, after Napoleon’s fall, refused to wear royal markers and would scoff aloud at Louis XVII. Finally, he was fired and his family grew hungry, so the Bishop appointed him usher in the cathedral.

Chapter 12 The narrator notes that most bishops have a whole parade of officials and servants around them, a pulsing group that can support the high ambitions of any priest. Bienvenu has no such gang of young priests around him, and lacks any ambition for success. He is thus very isolated. The narrator notes that the philosophy of success has won out in society, so that you can win in the lottery or be born with a silver spoon and be considered clever and of great merit. People claw to success based on luck, accident, greed, or sin, and are considered men of genius.

Chapter 13 The narrator cannot tell exactly what the Bishop thinks of certain dogmas or mysteries, because more important than theology to him is love and good works. The Bishop rarely grows angry or indignant. As a young man, he had been passionate and violent, but he changed because of a growing conviction in the right way to live. In 1815 he turns 75, though he seems younger.

When the Bishop speaks he seems joyful and at ease, but when he is alone and in thought he grows serious and calm. His days pass in a flurry of study, work, and charity, though he always spends time in the garden before bed. He thinks about the great mysteries of eternity and infinity as he works, and then sits on a garden bench: this is all he needs to adore God.

Chapter 14 The Bishop refrains from thinking too hard about the insoluble problems of life and the universe. He is not a genius, but instead is content to adore God and follow the Gospels. He sees sickness and suffering everywhere but is drawn towards it, feeling tenderness and pity and continuing to profess love. He leaves to the side the terrifying questions to which there are no human answers. He takes note of the exterior of these questions, and respects them, but they are not a central part of his life or thought.