The Bishop Who Traded His Palace

In the opening pages of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, we meet Bishop Myriel of Digne — and most readers rush past him to get to Jean Valjean. But Hugo lingers on this man for good reason.

When Myriel arrived in Digne, he found the bishop's palace standing grand and spacious next to a cramped, inadequate hospital. That night, he visited the sick crammed into tiny rooms. The next morning, he moved out of the palace and offered it to the hospital. He took the small building as his own residence instead.

He gave away most of his fifteen-thousand-franc salary to the poor, keeping only a fraction for himself. He walked rather than use a carriage. He left his door unlocked so that anyone in need could find him.

Hugo doesn't present Myriel as a saint performing for an audience. He presents a man who had simply stopped calculating his own importance. And that is what made his famous act of grace toward Valjean possible — when a desperate ex-convict stole his silver, the Bishop could give away the candlesticks too, because he had already been practicing letting go of what the world said was rightfully his.

Humility is rarely a single dramatic gesture. It is a daily pattern of holding loosely what we could grip tightly. Paul urged us to "count others more significant than yourselves" (Philippians 2:3). Bishop Myriel shows us what that looks like — not as a sermon, but as a life.