The Bishop's Candlesticks

In October 1815, a man came walking into the small town of Digne, in the south of France, at the end of a long day.

He was strong and weather-beaten, with a cap pulled low over his face, a heavy stick and an old knapsack. His clothes were ragged. His shoes were full of holes.

His name was Jean Valjean. He had just been released from nineteen years of hard labour in the prison galleys. His first crime, long ago, had been to break a baker's window and steal a loaf of bread for his sister's starving children. His sentence had been five years. His attempts to escape had added the rest.

Now he carried a yellow passport, which every ex-convict had to show. It told everyone who read it exactly what he was.

Turned away

He went to the inn, where a fire was roasting meat. The innkeeper took one look at his passport and told him there was no room.

He went to a smaller tavern. They threw him out.

He knocked at the prison and asked to sleep there. The jailer said this was not an inn: get yourself arrested, and you can come in.

He lay down on a stone bench in the square, exhausted and furious at the whole world. An old woman coming out of the cathedral asked him what he was doing.

"Can't you see? I'm going to sleep here."

She pointed across the square to a small, low house. "Have you knocked at that door?"

The open door

It was the house of the Bishop of Digne, Monseigneur Bienvenu Myriel, an old man who had given away almost everything he owned. He had turned his large episcopal palace into a hospital and moved into the little house next door. His only remaining luxuries were six silver plates and spoons, a silver soup ladle and two silver candlesticks that had been left to him.

Valjean knocked. The Bishop said, "Come in."

Valjean stepped inside and spoke at once, roughly, as if to get the worst over with. "My name is Jean Valjean. I'm a convict. I've spent nineteen years in the galleys. I was let out four days ago. Everyone has turned me away. Here is my yellow passport. Will you give me something to eat, and a place to sleep? I can pay."

The Bishop turned to his housekeeper. "Madame Magloire, put another place at the table."

Valjean thought he had not understood. He said it all again. The Bishop only said, "Sit down and warm yourself. We shall have supper in a moment, and your bed will be made up while you eat."

The housekeeper brought out the silver for the guest. The Bishop placed the two silver candlesticks, lit, on the table. He called Valjean "monsieur". He did not ask him about his crimes. He said, "This is not my house; it is the house of Jesus Christ. This door does not ask a man who enters whether he has a name, but whether he has a sorrow."

In the night

Valjean slept for a few hours in a real bed for the first time in nineteen years. At about two in the morning he woke.

He lay in the dark and thought about the silver. He had seen where the housekeeper put it, in a cupboard near the Bishop's bed. It was worth more than he had earned in all his years of prison labour.

He got up. He took his heavy stick, crept through the Bishop's room, past the old man sleeping peacefully, opened the cupboard and took the basket of silver. Then he climbed over the garden wall and ran.

Morning

The next morning, as the Bishop was walking in his garden, three police officers came to the door, holding Jean Valjean by the collar. They had stopped him because he was running, and had found the silver in his knapsack.

The Bishop came towards them as quickly as his age allowed.

"Ah, there you are!" he said to Valjean. "I'm glad to see you. But I gave you the candlesticks too, which are silver like the rest, and would bring you two hundred francs. Why did you not take them with your plates?"

Valjean stared at the old man with a look no human language could describe.

"Monseigneur," said the officer, "is what this man said true, then? We met him running away and we thought..."

"He told you the silver was given to him by an old priest where he stayed the night? And you brought him back? That's a mistake."

The police let Valjean go. The Bishop went to the mantelpiece, took down the two silver candlesticks and gave them to him. Valjean trembled from head to foot. He took them mechanically, with a bewildered air.

"Now go in peace," said the Bishop. Then he came close and spoke in a low voice.

"Do not forget, ever, that you have promised me to use this silver to become an honest man."

Valjean, who had no memory of having promised anything, stood speechless.

"Jean Valjean, my brother," the Bishop said solemnly, "you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I am buying from you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God."

A different man

Valjean walked out of the town like a man escaping. He wandered the fields all day, shaken by feelings he could not understand. He had built a wall of hatred around himself for nineteen years, and the old man had walked straight through it.

That evening, on a lonely road, a little chimney sweep dropped a coin, and Valjean, still confused and half in a dream, put his foot on it and frightened the boy away. When he came to his senses, he called after the child and searched for him in the darkness, desperate to give back the coin. He could not find him.

He sat down on a rock and wept, for the first time in nineteen years.

In Hugo's novel, Jean Valjean goes on to become an honest man, a factory owner, a mayor and a protector of the poor. He keeps the Bishop's silver candlesticks all his life. And at the end of the book, as he dies, their candles are burning beside him.

About this story

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) published Les Misérables in 1862. It is one of the longest novels ever written, and one of the most loved, and this opening episode has been retold on stage and screen many times. This is a shortened retelling; the Bishop's words follow the meaning of Hugo's original, which is in the public domain.