Les Miserables

op of D--He was an old man of about seventy-five year

f 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 councillor 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, i

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 terror,--did these cause the ideas of renunciation and solitude to germinate in him? Was he, in the midst of these dist

Brignolles]. He was already advanced in

om he went to solicit aid for his parishioners was M. le Cardinal Fesch.One day, when the Emperor had come to visit his uncle, the worthy Cure, who was waiting in the a

ood man who is

oking at a good man, and I at a gre

f the Cure, and some time afterwards M. Myriel was utterly a

tories which were invented as to the earl

acquainted with the Myriel

omer in a little town, where there are many mou

after all, the rumors with which his name was connected were rumors only,--noise, saying

and subjects of conversation which engross petty towns and petty people at the outset had fallen int

an elderly spinster, Mademoiselle Baptistine

e, and named Madame Magloire, who, after having been the servant of M. le Cure, no

rable.She had never been pretty; her whole life, which had been nothing but a succession of holy deeds, had finally conferred upon her a sort of pallor and transparency; and as she advanced in

s hardly sufficient body to provide for sex; a little matter enclosing a light; l

and bustling; always out of breath,--in the first place, bec

perial decrees, which class a bishop immediately after a major-general. The mayor and the presiden

, the town waited to