In spite of this marriage, however, it was said that Charles Myriel created a great deal of talk.

He was well formed, though rather short in stature, elegant, graceful, intelligent; the whole of the first portion of his life had been devoted to the world and to gallantry.
The Revolution came; events succeeded each other with precipitation; the parliamentary families, decimated, pursued, hunted down, were dispersed.
M.Charles Myriel emigrated to Italy at the very beginning of the Revolution.

There his wife died of a malady of the chest, from which she had long suffered.

He had no children.

What took place next in the fate of 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 distractions, these affections which absorbed his life, suddenly smitten with one of those mysterious and terrible blows which sometimes overwhelm, by striking to his heart, a man whom public catastrophes would not shake, by striking at his existence and his fortune?
No one could have told: all that was known was, that when he returned from Italy he was a priest.
In 1804, M.Myriel was the Cure of B---- [Brignolles].