habits which have very little that is charitable about them.
An opulent priest is a contradiction. The priest must keep close
to the poor. Now, can one come in contact incessantly night and day
with all this distress, all these misfortunes, and this poverty,
without having about one's own person a little of that misery,
like the dust of labor? Is it possible to imagine a man near a brazier
who is not warm? Can one imagine a workman who is working near
a furnace, and who has neither a singed hair, nor blackened nails,
nor a drop of sweat, nor a speck of ashes on his face? The first
proof of charity in the priest, in the bishop especially, is poverty.

This is, no doubt, what the Bishop of D---- thought.

It must not be supposed, however, that he shared what we call the "ideas
of the century" on certain delicate points. He took very little part
in the theological quarrels of the moment, and maintained silence
on questions in which Church and State were implicated; but if he
had been strongly pressed, it seems that he would have been found
to be an ultramontane rather than a gallican. Since we are making
a portrait, and since we do not wish to conceal anything, we are
forced to add that he was glacial towards Napoleon in his decline.
Beginning with 1813, he gave in his adherence to or applauded all
hostile manifestations. He refused to see him, as he passed through
on his return from the island of Elba, and he abstained from ordering
public prayers for the Emperor in his diocese during the Hundred Days.

Besides his sister, Mademoiselle Baptistine, he had two brothers,
one a general, the other a prefect. He wrote to both with tolerable
frequency. He was harsh for a time towards the former, because,
holding a command in Provence at the epoch of the disembarkation