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man of somewhat blunt ways, but full of infinite kindness, rectitude, and

energy whenever he found himself in what he thought the right path. On

the first occasion when Bernadette visited him, he received this child

who had been brought up at Bartres and had not yet been seen at

Catechism, almost as sternly as the Commissary of Police had done; in

fact, he refused to believe her story, and with some irony told her to

entreat the Lady to begin by making the briars blossom beneath her feet,

which, by the way, the Lady never did. And if the Abbe ended by taking

the child under his protection like a good pastor who defends his flock,

it was simply through the advent of persecution and the talk of

imprisoning this puny child, whose clear eyes shone so frankly, and who

clung with such modest, gentle stubbornness to her original tale.

Besides, why should he have continued denying the miracle after merely

doubting it like a prudent priest who had no desire to see religion mixed

up in any suspicious affair? Holy Writ is full of prodigies, all dogma is

based on the mysterious; and that being so, there was nothing to prevent

him, a priest, from believing that the Virgin had really entrusted

Bernadette with a pious message for him, an injunction to build a church

whither the faithful would repair in procession. Thus it was that he

began loving and defending Bernadette for her charm's sake, whilst still

refraining from active interference, awaiting as he did the decision of

his Bishop.

This Bishop, Monseigneur Laurence, seemed to have shut himself up in his

episcopal residence at Tarbes, locking himself within it and preserving

absolute silence as though there were nothing occurring at Lourdes of a

nature to interest him. He had given strict instructions to his clergy,

and so far not a priest had appeared among the vast crowds of people who

spent their days before the Grotto. He waited, and even allowed the

Prefect to state in his administrative circulars that the civil and the

religious authorities were acting in concert. In reality, he cannot have

believed in the apparitions of the Grotto of Massabielle, which he

doubtless considered to be the mere hallucinations of a sick child. This

affair, which was revolutionising the region, was of sufficient

importance for him to have studied it day by day, and the manner in which

he disregarded it for so long a time shows how little inclined he was to

admit the truth of the alleged miracles, and how greatly he desired to

avoid compromising the Church in a matter which seemed destined to end

badly. With all his piety, Monseigneur Laurence had a cool, practical

intellect, which enabled him to govern his diocese with great good sense.

Impatient and ardent people nicknamed him Saint Thomas at the time, on

account of the manner in which his doubts persisted until events at last

forced his hand. Indeed, he turned a deaf ear to all the stories that

were being related, firmly resolved as he was that he would only listen

to them if it should appear certain that religion had nothing to lose.

However, the persecutions were about to become more pronounced. The

Minister of Worship in Paris, who had been informed of what was going on,

required that a stop should be put to all disorders, and so the Prefect

caused the approaches to the Grotto to be occupied by the military. The

Grotto had already been decorated with vases of flowers offered by the

zeal of the faithful and the gratitude of sufferers who had been healed.

Money, moreover, was thrown into it; gifts to the Blessed Virgin

abounded. Rudimentary improvements, too, were carried out in a

spontaneous way; some quarrymen cut a kind of reservoir to receive the

miraculous water, and others removed the large blocks of stone, and

traced a path in the hillside. However, in presence of the swelling

torrents of people, the Prefect, after renouncing his idea of arresting

Bernadette, took the serious resolution of preventing all access to the

Grotto by placing a strong palisade in front of it. Some regrettable

incidents had lately occurred; various children pretended that they had

seen the devil, some of them being guilty of simulation in this respect,

whilst others had given way to real attacks of hysteria, in the

contagious nervous unhinging which was so prevalent. But what a terrible

business did the removal of the offerings from the Grotto prove! It was

only towards evening that the Commissary was able to find a girl willing

to let him have a cart on hire, and two hours later this girl fell from a

loft and broke one of her ribs. Likewise, a man who had lent an axe had

one of his feet crushed on the morrow by the fall of a block of stone.*

It was in the midst of jeers and hisses that the Commissary carried off

the pots of flowers, the tapers which he found burning, the coppers and

the silver hearts which lay upon the sand. People clenched their fists,

and covertly called him "thief" and "murderer." Then the posts for the

palisades were planted in the ground, and the rails were nailed to the

crossbars, no little labour being performed to shut off the Mystery, in

order to bar access to the Unknown, and put the miracles in prison. And

the civil authorities were simple enough to imagine that it was all over,

that those few bits of boarding would suffice to stay the poor people who

hungered for illusion and hope.

* Both of these accidents were interpreted as miracles.--Trans.

But as soon as the new religion was proscribed, forbidden by the law as

an offence, it began to burn with an inextinguishable flame in the depths

of every soul. Believers came to the river bank in far greater numbers,

fell upon their knees at a short distance from the Grotto, and sobbed

aloud as they gazed at the forbidden heaven. And the sick, the poor

ailing folks, who were forbidden to seek cure, rushed on the Grotto

despite all prohibitions, slipped in whenever they could find an aperture

or climbed over the palings when their strength enabled them to do so, in

the one ardent desire to steal a little of the water. What! there was a

prodigious water in that Grotto, which restored the sight to the blind,

which set the infirm erect upon their legs again, which instantaneously

healed all ailments; and there were officials cruel enough to put that

water under lock and key so that it might not cure any more poor people!

Why, it was monstrous! And a cry of hatred arose from all the humble

ones, all the disinherited ones who had as much need of the Marvellous as

of bread to live! In accordance with a municipal decree, the names of all

delinquents were to be taken by the police, and thus one soon beheld a

woeful _defile_ of old women and lame men summoned before the Justice of

the Peace for the sole offence of taking a little water from the fount of

life! They stammered and entreated, at their wit's end when a fine was

imposed upon them. And, outside, the crowd was growling; rageful

unpopularity was gathering around those magistrates who treated human

wretchedness so harshly, those pitiless masters who after taking all the

wealth of the world, would not even leave to the poor their dream of the

realms beyond, their belief that a beneficent superior power took a

maternal interest in them, and was ready to endow them with peace of soul

and health of body. One day a whole band of poverty-stricken and ailing

folks went to the Mayor, knelt down in his courtyard, and implored him

with sobs to allow the Grotto to be reopened; and the words they spoke

were so pitiful that all who heard them wept. A mother showed her child

who was half-dead; would they let the little one die like that in her

arms when there was a source yonder which had saved the children of other

mothers? A blind man called attention to his dim eyes; a pale, scrofulous

youth displayed the sores on his legs; a paralytic woman sought to join

her woeful twisted hands: did the authorities wish to see them all

perish, did they refuse them the last divine chance of life, condemned

and abandoned as they were by the science of man? And equally great was

the distress of the believers, of those who were convinced that a corner

of heaven had opened amidst the night of their mournful existences, and

who were indignant that they should be deprived of the chimerical

delight, the supreme relief for their human and social sufferings, which

they found in the belief that the Blessed Virgin had indeed come down

from heaven to bring them the priceless balm of her intervention.

However, the Mayor was unable to promise anything, and the crowd withdrew

weeping, ready for rebellion, as though under the blow of some great act

of injustice, an act of idiotic cruelty towards the humble and the simple

for which Heaven would assuredly take vengeance.

The struggle went on for several months; and it was an extraordinary

spectacle which those sensible men--the Minister, the Prefect, and the

Commissary of Police--presented, all animated with the best intentions

and contending against the ever-swelling crowd of despairing ones, who

would not allow the doors of dreamland to be closed upon them, who would

not be shut off from the mystic glimpse of future happiness in which they

found consolation for their present wretchedness. The authorities

required order, the respect of a discreet religion, the triumph of

reason; whereas the need of happiness carried the people off into an

enthusiastic desire for cure both in this world and in the next. Oh! to

cease suffering, to secure equality in the comforts of life; to march on

under the protection of a just and beneficent Mother, to die only to

awaken in heaven! And necessarily the burning desire of the multitude,

the holy madness of the universal joy, was destined to sweep aside the

rigid, morose conceptions of a well-regulated society in which the

ever-recurring epidemical attacks of religious hallucination are

condemned as prejudicial to good order and healthiness of mind.

The Sainte-Honorine Ward, on hearing the story, likewise revolted. Pierre

again had to pause, for many were the stifled exclamations in which the

Commissary of Police was likened to Satan and Herod. La Grivotte had sat

up on her mattress, stammering: "Ah! the monsters! To behave like that to

the Blessed Virgin who has cured me!"

And even Madame Vetu--once more penetrated by a ray of hope amidst the

covert certainty she felt that she was going to die--grew angry at the

idea that the Grotto would not have existed had the Prefect won the day.

"There would have been no pilgrimages," she said, "we should not be here,

hundreds of us would not be cured every year."

A fit of stifling came over her, however, and Sister Hyacinthe had to

raise her to a sitting posture. Madame de Jonquiere was profiting by the

interruption to attend to a young woman afflicted with a spinal

complaint, whilst two other women, unable to remain on their beds, so

unbearable was the heat, prowled about with short, silent steps, looking

quite white in the misty darkness. And from the far end of the ward,

where all was black, there resounded a noise of painful breathing, which

had been going on without a pause, accompanying Pierre's narrative like a

rattle. Elise Rouquet alone was sleeping peacefully, still stretched upon

her back, and displaying her disfigured countenance, which was slowly

drying.

Midnight had struck a quarter of an hour previously, and Abbe Judaine

might arrive at any moment for the communion. Grace was now again

descending into Marie's heart, and she was convinced that if the Blessed

Virgin had refused to cure her it was, indeed, her own fault in having

doubted when she entered the piscina. And she, therefore, repented of her

rebellion as of a crime. Could she ever be forgiven? Her pale face sank

down among her beautiful fair hair, her eyes filled with tears, and she

looked at Pierre with an expression of anguish. "Oh! how wicked I was, my

friend," she said. "It was through hearing you relate how that Prefect

and those magistrates sinned through pride, that I understood my

transgression. One must believe, my friend; there is no happiness outside

faith and love."

Then, as Pierre wished to break off at the point which he had reached,

they all began protesting and calling for the continuation of his

narrative, so that he had to promise to go on to the triumph of the

Grotto.

Its entrance remained barred by the palisade, and you had to come

secretly at night if you wished to pray and carry off a stolen bottle of

water. Still, the fear of rioting increased, for it was rumoured that

whole villages intended to come down from the hills in order to deliver

God, as they naively expressed it. It was a _levee en masse_ of the

humble, a rush of those who hungered for the miraculous, so irresistible

in its impetuosity that mere common sense, mere considerations of public

order were to be swept away like chaff. And it was Monseigneur Laurence,

in his episcopal residence at Tarbes, who was first forced to surrender.

All his prudence, all his doubts were outflanked by the popular outburst.

For five long months he had been able to remain aloof, preventing his

clergy from following the faithful to the Grotto, and defending the

Church against the tornado of superstition which had been let loose. But

what was the use of struggling any longer? He felt the wretchedness of

the suffering people committed to his care to be so great that he

resigned himself to granting them the idolatrous religion for which he

realised them to be eager. Some prudence remaining to him, however, he

contented himself in the first instance with drawing up an _ordonnance_,

appointing a commission of inquiry, which was to investigate the

question; this implied the acceptance of the miracles after a period of

longer or shorter duration. If Monseigneur Laurence was the man of

healthy culture and cool reason that he is pictured to have been, how

great must have been his anguish on the morning when he signed that

_ordonnance_! He must have knelt in his oratory, and have begged the

Sovereign Master of the world to dictate his conduct to him. He did not