Books: The Three Cities Trilogy: Lourdes, Vol. 2

E >> Emile Zola >> The Three Cities Trilogy: Lourdes, Vol. 2

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Pierre, who knew Bernadette so well, and who felt a fraternal pity for
her memory, the fervent compassion with which one regards a human saint,
a simple, upright, charming creature tortured by her faith, allowed his
emotion to appear in his moist eyes and trembling voice. And a pause in
his narrative ensued. Marie, who had hitherto been lying there quite
stiff, with a hard expression of revolt still upon her face, opened her
clenched hands and made a vague gesture of pity. "Ah," she murmured, "the
poor child, all alone to contend against those magistrates, and so
innocent, so proud, so unshakable in her championship of the truth!"

The same compassionate sympathy was arising from all the beds in the
ward. That hospital inferno with its nocturnal wretchedness, its
pestilential atmosphere, its pallets of anguish heaped together, its
weary lady-hospitallers and Sisters flitting phantom-like hither and
thither, now seemed to be illumined by a ray of divine charity. Was not
the eternal illusion of happiness rising once more amidst tears and
unconscious falsehoods? Poor, poor Bernadette! All waxed indignant at the
thought of the persecutions which she had endured in defence of her
faith.

Then Pierre, resuming his story, related all that the child had had to
suffer. After being questioned by the Commissary she had to appear before
the judges of the local tribunal. The entire magistracy pursued her, and
endeavoured to wring a retractation from her. But the obstinacy of her
dream was stronger than the common sense of all the civil authorities put
together. Two doctors who were sent by the Prefect to make a careful
examination of the girl came, as all doctors would have done, to the
honest opinion that it was a case of nervous trouble, of which the asthma
was a sure sign, and which, in certain circumstances, might have induced
visions. This nearly led to her removal and confinement in a hospital at
Tarbes. But public exasperation was feared. A bishop had fallen on his
knees before her. Some ladies had sought to buy favours from her for
gold. Moreover she had found a refuge with the Sisters of Nevers, who
tended the aged in the town asylum, and there she made her first
communion, and was with difficulty taught to read and write. As the
Blessed Virgin seemed to have chosen her solely to work the happiness of
others, and she herself had not been cured, it was very sensibly decided
to take her to the baths of Cauterets, which were so near at hand.
However, they did her no good. And no sooner had she returned to Lourdes
than the torture of being questioned and adored by a whole people began
afresh, became aggravated, and filled her more and more with horror of
the world. Her life was over already; she would be a playful child no
more; she could never be a young girl dreaming of a husband, a young wife
kissing the cheeks of sturdy children. She had beheld the Virgin, she was
the chosen one, the martyr. If the Virgin, said believers, had confided
three secrets to her, investing her with a triple armour as it were, it
was simply in order to sustain her in her appointed course.

The clergy had for a long time remained aloof, on its own side full of
doubt and anxiety. Abby Peyramale, the parish priest of Lourdes, was a
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
believe in the apparitions; he had a loftier, more intellectual idea of
the manifestations of the Divinity. Only would he not be showing true
pity and mercy in silencing the scruples of his reason, the noble
prejudices of his faith, in presence of the necessity of granting that
bread of falsehood which poor humanity requires in order to be happy?
Doubtless, he begged the pardon of Heaven for allowing it to be mixed up
in what he regarded as childish pastime, for exposing it to ridicule in
connection with an affair in which there was only sickliness and
dementia. But his flock suffered so much, hungered so ravenously for the
marvellous, for fairy stories with which to lull the pains of life. And
thus, in tears, the Bishop at last sacrificed his respect for the dignity
of Providence to his sensitive pastoral charity for the woeful human
flock.

Then the Emperor in his turn gave way. He was at Biarritz at the time,
and was kept regularly informed of everything connected with this affair
of the apparitions, with which the entire Parisian press was also
occupying itself, for the persecutions would not have been complete if
the pens of Voltairean newspaper-men had not meddled in them. And whilst
his Minister, his Prefect, and his Commissary of Police were fighting for
common sense and public order, the Emperor preserved his wonted
silence--the deep silence of a day-dreamer which nobody ever penetrated.
Petitions arrived day by day, yet he held his tongue. Bishops came, great
personages, great ladies of his circle watched and drew him on one side,
and still he held his tongue. A truceless warfare was being waged around
him: on one side the believers and the men of fanciful minds whom the
Mysterious strongly interested; on the other the unbelievers and the
statesmen who distrusted the disturbances of the imagination;--and still
and ever he held his tongue. Then, all at once, with the sudden decision
of a naturally timid man, he spoke out. The rumour spread that he had
yielded to the entreaties of his wife Eugenie. No doubt she did
intervene, but the Emperor was more deeply influenced by a revival of his
old humanitarian dreams, his genuine compassion for the disinherited.*
Like the Bishop, he did not wish to close the portals of illusion to the
wretched by upholding the unpopular decree which forbade despairing
sufferers to go and drink life at the holy source. So he sent a telegram,
a curt order to remove the palisade, so as to allow everybody free access
to the Grotto.

* I think this view of the matter the right one, for, as all who
know the history of the Second Empire are aware, it was about
this time that the Emperor began taking great interest in the
erection of model dwellings for the working classes, and the
plantation and transformation of the sandy wastes of the
Landes.--Trans.

Then came a shout of joy and triumph. The decree annulling the previous
one was read at Lourdes to the sound of drum and trumpet. The Commissary
of Police had to come in person to superintend the removal of the
palisade. He was afterwards transferred elsewhere like the Prefect.*
People flocked to Lourdes from all parts, the new /cultus/ was organised
at the Grotto, and a cry of joy ascended: God had won the victory!
God?--alas, no! It was human wretchedness which had won the battle, human
wretchedness with its eternal need of falsehood, its hunger for the
marvellous, its everlasting hope akin to that of some condemned man who,
for salvation's sake, surrenders himself into the hands of an invisible
Omnipotence, mightier than nature, and alone capable, should it be
willing, of annulling nature's laws. And that which had also conquered
was the sovereign compassion of those pastors, the merciful Bishop and
merciful Emperor who allowed those big sick children to retain the fetich
which consoled some of them and at times even cured others.

* The Prefect was transferred to Grenoble, and curiously enough his
new jurisdiction extended over the hills and valleys of La
Salette, whither pilgrims likewise flocked to drink, pray, and
wash themselves at a miraculous fountain. Warned by experience,
however, Baron Massy (such was the Prefect's name) was careful to
avoid any further interference in religious matters.--Trans.

In the middle of November the episcopal commission came to Lourdes to
prosecute the inquiry which had been entrusted to it. It questioned
Bernadette yet once again, and studied a large number of miracles.
However, in order that the evidence might be absolute, it only registered
some thirty cases of cure. And Monseigneur Laurence declared himself
convinced. Nevertheless, he gave a final proof of his prudence, by
continuing to wait another three years before declaring in a pastoral
letter that the Blessed Virgin had in truth appeared at the Grotto of
Massabielle and that numerous miracles had subsequently taken place
there. Meantime, he had purchased the Grotto itself, with all the land
around it, from the municipality of Lourdes, on behalf of his see. Work
was then begun, modestly at first, but soon on a larger and larger scale
as money began to flow in from all parts of Christendom. The Grotto was
cleared and enclosed with an iron railing. The Gave was thrown back into
a new bed, so as to allow of spacious approaches to the shrine, with
lawns, paths, and walks. At last, too, the church which the Virgin had
asked for, the Basilica, began to rise on the summit of the rock itself.
From the very first stroke of the pick, Abbe Peyramale, the parish priest
of Lourdes, went on directing everything with even excessive zeal, for
the struggle had made him the most ardent and most sincere of all
believers in the work that was to be accomplished. With his somewhat
rough but truly fatherly nature, he had begun to adore Bernadette, making
her mission his own, and devoting himself, soul and body, to realising
the orders which he had received from Heaven through her innocent mouth.
And he exhausted himself in mighty efforts; he wished everything to be
very beautiful and very grand, worthy of the Queen of the Angels who had
deigned to visit this mountain nook. The first religious ceremony did not
take place till six years after the apparitions. A marble statue of the
Virgin was installed with great pomp on the very spot where she had
appeared. It was a magnificent day, all Lourdes was gay with flags, and
every bell rang joyously. Five years later, in 1869, the first mass was
celebrated in the crypt of the Basilica, whose spire was not yet
finished. Meantime, gifts flowed in without a pause, a river of gold was
streaming towards the Grotto, a whole town was about to spring up from
the soil. It was the new religion completing its foundations. The desire
to be healed did heal; the thirst for a miracle worked the miracle. A
Deity of pity and hope was evolved from man's sufferings, from that
longing for falsehood and relief which, in every age of humanity, has
created the marvellous palaces of the realms beyond, where an almighty
Power renders justice and distributes eternal happiness.

And thus the ailing ones of the Sainte-Honorine Ward only beheld in the
victory of the Grotto the triumph of their hopes of cure. Along the rows
of beds there was a quiver of joy when, with his heart stirred by all
those poor faces turned towards him, eager for certainty, Pierre
repeated: "God had conquered. Since that day the miracles have never
ceased, and it is the most humble who are the most frequently relieved."

Then he laid down the little book. Abbe Judaine was coming in, and the
Sacrament was about to be administered. Marie, however, again penetrated
by the fever of faith, her hands burning, leant towards Pierre. "Oh, my
friend!" said she, "I pray you hear me confess my fault and absolve me. I
have blasphemed, and have been guilty of mortal sin. If you do not
succour me, I shall be unable to receive the Blessed Sacrament, and yet I
so greatly need to be consoled and strengthened."

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