This priest, now sixty years of age, had been Curé of Nemours ever since the reestablishment of Catholic worship. He had refused promotion to be vicar-general of his diocese out of attachment to his flock. If those who were indifferent to religion thought the better of him for it, the faithful loved him all the more. Thus venerated by his flock, and esteemed by the community, the curé did good without inquiring too closely as to the religious views of those who were unfortunate. His own dwelling, scarcely supplied with furniture enough for the strictest necessities of life, was as cold and bare as a miser’s hovel. Avarice and charity betray themselves by similar results; does not charity lay up in heaven the treasure that the miser hoards on earth? The Abbé Chaperon took his servant to task for every expense, more severely than Gobseck ever scolded his—if, indeed, that notorious Jew ever had a servant. The good priest often sold his silver shoe buckles and breeches buckles to give the money to some poor wretch he had found destitute. On seeing him come out of church with the tongues of his knee-straps pulled through the buttonholes, the devout ladies of the town would trot off to look for the curé’s buckles at the one jeweler’s and watchmaker’s shop in Nemours, and reproach their pastor as they restored them to him. He never bought himself linen or clothes, and wore them till they were dropping to pieces. His underclothing, thick with darns, fretted his skin like a hair-shirt. Then Madame de Portenduère, or some other good soul, plotted with his housekeeper to replace his old shirts or cloth clothes by new ones while he slept; and the priest did not always immediately perceive the exchange. He dined off pewter, with iron forks and spoons; when, on great occasions, he had to receive his subordinate clergy and other curés, a duty that falls on the head of a district, he borrowed silver and table-linen from his friend the atheist.
“My plate is working out its salvation,” the doctor would say.
His good deeds, which were sooner or later found out, and which he always reinforced with spiritual comfort, were carried out with sublime simplicity. And such a life was all the more meritorious because the Abbé was full of erudition, as vast as it was various, and a man of superior abilities. In him refinement and elegance, the inseparable attributes of simplicity, added charm to elocution worthy of a prelate. His manners, his character, and his conduct gave to his society the exquisite flavor of all that is at once candid and subtle in a lofty intellect. Enjoying pleasantry, in a drawing-room he was never the priest. Until Doctor Minoret’s arrival, this worthy man left his light under a bushel without a regret; but he no doubt liked him the better for calling it into play.
Possessed of a fairly good library and two thousand francs a year when he came to Nemours, in 1829 the curé had nothing left but the income from his church, and that he gave away almost entirely year by year. A man of good judgment in delicate affairs or in misfortune, more than one of those who never went to church in search of consolation went to the priest’s house in quest of advice. An anecdote will suffice to complete this portrait of a character. Certain peasants, seldom it is true, but bad folks at any rate, said they were in danger of imprisonment for debt, or had themselves sued falsely, to stimulate the Abbé’s beneficence. They deceived their wives; and the women, seeing themselves threatened with eviction and their cows seized, by their innocent tears, deceived the poor curé, who would find the seven or eight hundred francs demanded, which the peasants would spend on a little plot of ground. When some pious persons, churchwardens, pointed out the fraud, begging the curé to consult them for the future, that he might not be the victim of greed, he replied:
“Perhaps those men would have committed some crime to get their acre of land, and is it not a form of good to hinder evil?”
The reader may perhaps find pleasure in this sketch of a figure, remarkable because science and literature had entered that heart and that capable brain without corrupting them in any way.
At sixty years of age the Abbé Chaperon’s hair was perfectly white, so keenly was he alive to the sufferings of others, and so deeply had the events of the Revolution affected him. Twice imprisoned for having twice refused to take certain oaths, he had twice (to use his own expression) said his “In manus.” He was of middle height, neither stout nor thin. His face, deeply furrowed, hollow-cheeked, and colorless, attracted the eye at once by the perfect calm of the lines and the purity of its outline, which looked as if fringed with light. There is a mysterious kind of radiance from the face
