第 16 页

battle charger, that princely present made to them by the fairy Orlanda.

And inside were narratives of bloody fights, of the building and

besieging of fortresses, of the terrible swordthrusts exchanged by Roland

and Renaud, who was at last about to free the Holy Land, without

mentioning the tales of Maugis the Magician and his marvellous

enchantments, and the Princess Clarisse, the King of Aquitaine's sister,

who was more lovely than sunlight. Her imagination fired by such stories

as these, Bernadette often found it difficult to get to sleep; and this

was especially the case on the evenings when the books were left aside,

and some person of the company related a tale of witchcraft. The girl was

very superstitious, and after sundown could never be prevailed upon to

pass near a tower in the vicinity, which was said to be haunted by the

fiend. For that matter, all the folks of the region were superstitious,

devout, and simple-minded, the whole countryside being peopled, so to

say, with mysteries--trees which sang, stones from which blood flowed,

cross-roads where it was necessary to say three "Paters" and three

"Aves," if you did not wish to meet the seven-horned beast who carried

maidens off to perdition. And what a wealth of terrifying stories there

was! Hundreds of stories, so that there was no finishing on the evenings

when somebody started them. First came the wehrwolf adventures, the tales

of the unhappy men whom the demon forced to enter into the bodies of

dogs, the great white dogs of the mountains. If you fire a gun at the dog

and a single shot should strike him, the man will be delivered; but if

the shot should fall on the dog's shadow, the man will immediately die.

Then came the endless procession of sorcerers and sorceresses. In one of

these tales Bernadette evinced a passionate interest; it was the story of

a clerk of the tribunal of Lourdes who, wishing to see the devil, was

conducted by a witch into an untilled field at midnight on Good Friday.

The devil arrived clad in magnificent scarlet garments, and at once

proposed to the clerk that he should buy his soul, an offer which the

clerk pretended to accept. It so happened that the devil was carrying

under his arm a register in which different persons of the town, who had

already sold themselves, had signed their names. However, the clerk, who

was a cunning fellow, pulled out of his pocket a pretended bottle of ink,

which in reality contained holy water, and with this he sprinkled the

devil, who raised frightful shrieks, whilst the clerk took to flight,

carrying the register off with him. Then began a wild, mad race, which

might last throughout the night, over the mountains, through the valleys,

across the forests and the torrents. "Give me back my register!" shouted

the fiend. "No, you sha'n't have it!" replied the clerk. And again and

again it began afresh: "Give me back my register!"--"No, you sha'n't have

it'!" And at last, finding himself out of breath, near the point of

succumbing, the clerk, who had his plan, threw himself into the cemetery,

which was consecrated ground, and was there able to deride the devil at

his ease, waving the register which he had purloined so as to save the

souls of all the unhappy people who had signed their names in it. On the

evening when this story was told, Bernadette, before surrendering herself

to sleep, would mentally repeat her rosary, delighted with the thought

that hell should have been baffled, though she trembled at the idea that

it would surely return to prowl around her, as soon as the lamp should

have been put out.

Throughout one winter, the long evenings were spent in the church. Abbe

Ader, the village priest, had authorised it, and many families came, in

order to economise oil and candles. Moreover, they felt less cold when

gathered together in this fashion. The Bible was read, and prayers were

repeated, whilst the children ended by falling asleep. Bernadette alone

struggled on to the finish, so pleased she was at being there, in that

narrow nave whose slender nervures were coloured blue and red. At the

farther end was the altar, also painted and gilded, with its twisted

columns and its screens on which appeared the Virgin and Ste. Anne, and

the beheading of St. John the Baptist--the whole of a gaudy and somewhat

barbaric splendour. And as sleepiness grew upon her, the child must have

often seen a mystical vision as it were of those crudely coloured designs

rising before her--have seen the blood flowing from St. John's severed

head, have seen the aureolas shining, the Virgin ever returning and

gazing at her with her blue, living eyes, and looking as though she were

on the point of opening her vermilion lips in order to speak to her. For

some months Bernadette spent her evenings in this wise, half asleep in

front of that sumptuous, vaguely defined altar, in the incipiency of a

divine dream which she carried away with her, and finished in bed,

slumbering peacefully under the watchful care of her guardian angel.

And it was also in that old church, so humble yet so impregnated with

ardent faith, that Bernadette began to learn her catechism. She would

soon be fourteen now, and must think of her first communion. Her

foster-mother, who had the reputation of being avaricious, did not send

her to school, but employed her in or about the house from morning till

evening. M. Barbet, the schoolmaster, never saw her at his classes,

though one day, when he gave the catechism lesson, in the place of Abbe

Ader who was indisposed, he remarked her on account of her piety and

modesty. The village priest was very fond of Bernadette and often spoke

of her to the schoolmaster, saying that he could never look at her

without thinking of the children of La Salette, since they must have been

good, candid, and pious as she was, for the Blessed Virgin to have

appeared to them.* On another occasion whilst the two men were walking

one morning near the village, and saw Bernadette disappear with her

little flock under some spreading trees in the distance, the Abbe

repeatedly turned round to look for her, and again remarked "I cannot

account for it, but every time I meet that child it seems to me as if I

saw Melanie, the young shepherdess, little Maximin's companion." He was

certainly beset by this singular idea, which became, so to say, a

prediction. Moreover, had he not one day after catechism, or one evening,

when the villagers were gathered in the church, related that marvellous

story which was already twelve years old, that story of the Lady in the

dazzling robes who walked upon the grass without even making it bend, the

Blessed Virgin who showed herself to Melanie and Maximin on the banks of

a stream in the mountains, and confided to them a great secret and

announced the anger of her Son? Ever since that day a source had sprung

up from the tears which she had shed, a source which cured all ailments,

whilst the secret, inscribed on parchment fastened with three seals,

slumbered at Rome! And Bernadette, no doubt, with her dreamy, silent air,

had listened passionately to that wonderful tale and carried it off with

her into the desert of foliage where she spent her days, so that she

might live it over again as she walked along behind her lambs with her

rosary, slipping bead by bead between her slender fingers.

* It was on September 19, 1846, that the Virgin is said to have

appeared in the ravine of La Sezia, adjacent to the valley of La

Salette, between Corps and Eutraigues, in the department of the

Isere. The visionaries were Melanie Mathieu, a girl of fourteen,

and Maximin Giraud, a boy of twelve. The local clergy speedily

endorsed the story of the miracle, and thousands of people still

go every year in pilgrimage to a church overlooking the valley,

and bathe and drink at a so-called miraculous source. Two priests

of Grenoble, however, Abbe Deleon and Abbe Cartellier, accused a

Mlle. de Lamerliere of having concocted the miracle, and when she

took proceedings against them for libel she lost her case.--Trans.

Thus her childhood ran its course at Bartres. That which delighted one in

this Bernadette, so poor-blooded, so slight of build, was her ecstatic

eyes, beautiful visionary eyes, from which dreams soared aloft like birds

winging their flight in a pure limpid sky. Her mouth was large, with lips

somewhat thick, expressive of kindliness; her square-shaped head had a

straight brow, and was covered with thick black hair, whilst her face

would have seemed rather common but for its charming expression of gentle

obstinacy. Those who did not gaze into her eyes, however, gave her no

thought. To them she was but an ordinary child, a poor thing of the

roads, a girl of reluctant growth, timidly humble in her ways. Assuredly

it was in her glance that Abbe Ader had with agitation detected the

stifling ailment which filled her puny, girlish form with suffering--that

ailment born of the greeny solitude in which she had grown up, the

gentleness of her bleating lambs, the Angelic Salutation which she had

carried with her, hither and thither, under the sky, repeating and

repeating it to the point of hallucination, the prodigious stories, too,

which she had heard folks tell at her foster-mother's, the long evenings

spent before the living altar-screens in the church, and all the

atmosphere of primitive faith which she had breathed in that far-away

rural region, hemmed in by mountains.

At last, on one seventh of January, Bernadette had just reached her

fourteenth birthday, when her parents, finding that she learnt nothing at

Bartres, resolved to bring her back to Lourdes for good, in order that

she might diligently study her catechism, and in this wise seriously

prepare herself for her first communion. And so it happened that she had

already been at Lourdes some fifteen or twenty days, when on February 11,

a Thursday, cold and somewhat cloudy--

But Pierre could carry his narrative no further, for Sister Hyacinthe had

risen to her feet and was vigorously clapping her hands. "My children,"

she exclaimed, "it is past nine o'clock. Silence! silence!"

The train had indeed just passed Lamothe, and was rolling with a dull

rumble across a sea of darkness--the endless plains of the Landes which

the night submerged. For ten minutes already not a sound ought to have

been heard in the carriage, one and all ought to have been sleeping or

suffering uncomplainingly. However, a mutiny broke out.

"Oh! Sister!" exclaimed Marie, whose eyes were sparkling, "allow us just

another short quarter of an hour! We have got to the most interesting

part."

Ten, twenty voices took up the cry: "Oh yes, Sister, please do let us

have another short quarter of an hour!"

They all wished to hear the continuation, burning with as much curiosity

as though they had not known the story, so captivated were they by the

touches of compassionate human feeling which Pierre introduced into his

narrative. Their glances never left him, all their heads were stretched

towards him, fantastically illumined by the flickering light of the

lamps. And it was not only the sick who displayed this interest; the ten

women occupying the compartment at the far end of the carriage had also

become impassioned, and, happy at not missing a single word, turned their

poor ugly faces now beautified by naive faith.

"No, I cannot!" Sister Hyacinthe at first declared; "the rules are very

strict--you must be silent."

However, she weakened, she herself feeling so interested in the tale that

she could detect her heart beating under her stomacher. Then Marie again

repeated her request in an entreating tone; whilst her father, M. de

Guersaint, who had listened like one hugely amused, declared that they

would all fall ill if the story were not continued. And thereupon, seeing

Madame de Jonquiere smile with an indulgent air, Sister Hyacinthe ended

by consenting.

"Well, then," said she, "I will allow you another short quarter of an

hour; but only a short quarter of an hour, mind. That is understood, is

it not? For I should otherwise be in fault."

Pierre had waited quietly without attempting to intervene. And he resumed

his narrative in the same penetrating voice as before, a voice in which

his own doubts were softened by pity for those who suffer and who hope.

The scene of the story was now transferred to Lourdes, to the Rue des

Petits Fosses, a narrow, tortuous, mournful street taking a downward

course between humble houses and roughly plastered dead walls. The

Soubirous family occupied a single room on the ground floor of one of

these sorry habitations, a room at the end of a dark passage, in which

seven persons were huddled together, the father, the mother, and five

children. You could scarcely see in the chamber; from the tiny, damp

inner courtyard of the house there came but a greenish light. And in that

room they slept, all of a heap; and there also they ate, when they had

bread. For some time past, the father, a miller by trade, could only with

difficulty obtain work as a journeyman. And it was from that dark hole,

that lowly wretchedness, that Bernadette, the elder girl, with Marie, her

sister, and Jeanne, a little friend of the neighbourhood, went out to

pick up dead wood, on the cold February Thursday already spoken of.

Then the beautiful tale was unfolded at length; how the three girls

followed the bank of the Gave from the other side of the castle, and how

they ended by finding themselves on the Ile du Chalet in front of the

rock of Massabielle, from which they were only separated by the narrow

stream diverted from the Gave, and used for working the mill of Savy. It

was a wild spot, whither the common herdsman often brought the pigs of

the neighbourhood, which, when showers suddenly came on, would take

shelter under this rock of Massabielle, at whose base there was a kind of

grotto of no great depth, blocked at the entrance by eglantine and