Page 91 - les-miserables

Perrette’s pot of milk! Who knows how easy it is for am-
bition to call itself vocation? in good faith, perchance, and
deceiving itself, devotee that it is.
Monseigneur Bienvenu, poor, humble, retiring, was not
accounted among the big mitres. This was plain from the
complete absence of young priests about him. We have seen
that he ‘did not take’ in Paris. Not a single future dreamed
of engrafting itself on this solitary old man. Not a single
sprouting ambition committed the folly of putting forth
its foliage in his shadow. His canons and grand-vicars
were good old men, rather vulgar like himself, walled up
like him in this diocese, without exit to a cardinalship, and
who resembled their bishop, with this difference, that they
were finished and he was completed. The impossibility of
growing great under Monseigneur Bienvenu was so well
understood, that no sooner had the young men whom he
ordained left the seminary than they got themselves recom-
mended to the archbishops of Aix or of Auch, and went off
in a great hurry. For, in short, we repeat it, men wish to be
pushed. A saint who dwells in a paroxysm of abnegation is
a dangerous neighbor; he might communicate to you, by
contagion, an incurable poverty, an anchylosis of the joints,
which are useful in advancement, and in short, more re-
nunciation than you desire; and this infectious virtue is
avoided. Hence the isolation of Monseigneur Bienvenu. We
live in the midst of a gloomy society. Success; that is the les-
son which falls drop by drop from the slope of corruption.
Be it said in passing, that success is a very hideous thing.
Its false resemblance to merit deceives men. For the masses,

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