Books: The Three Cities Trilogy: Lourdes, Vol. 5
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Emile Zola >> The Three Cities Trilogy: Lourdes, Vol. 5
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* Song of Solomon iv. 12.
And then came the last agony, then came death.
On Friday, March 28, 1879, it was thought that she would not last the
night. She had a despairing longing for the tomb, in order that she might
suffer no more, and live again in heaven. And thus she obstinately
refused to receive extreme unction, saying that twice already it had
cured her. She wished, in short, that God would let her die, for it was
more than she could bear; it would have been unreasonable to require that
she should suffer longer. Yet she ended by consenting to receive the
sacraments, and her last agony was thereby prolonged for nearly three
weeks. The priest who attended her frequently said: "My daughter, you
must make the sacrifice of your life"; and one day, quite out of
patience, she sharply answered him: "But, Father, it is no sacrifice." A
terrible saying, that also, for it implied disgust at /being/, furious
contempt for existence, and an immediate ending of her humanity, had she
had the power to suppress herself by a gesture. It is true that the poor
girl had nothing to regret, that she had been compelled to banish
everything from her life, health, joy, and love, so that she might leave
it as one casts off a soiled, worn, tattered garment. And she was right;
she condemned her useless, cruel life when she said: "My passion will
finish only at my death; it will not cease until I enter into eternity."
And this idea of her passion pursued her, attaching her more closely to
the cross with her Divine Master. She had induced them to give her a
large crucifix; she pressed it vehemently against her poor maidenly
breast, exclaiming that she would like to thrust it into her bosom and
leave it there. Towards the end, her strength completely forsook her, and
she could no longer grasp the crucifix with her trembling hands. "Let it
be tightly tied to me," she prayed, "that I may feel it until my last
breath!" The Redeemer upon that crucifix was the only spouse that she was
destined to know; His bleeding kiss was to be the only one bestowed upon
her womanhood, diverted from nature's course. The nuns took cords, passed
them under her aching back, and fastened the crucifix so roughly to her
bosom that it did indeed penetrate it.
At last death took pity upon her. On Easter Monday she was seized with a
great fit of shivering. Hallucinations perturbed her, she trembled with
fright, she beheld the devil jeering and prowling around her. "Be off, be
off, Satan!" she gasped; "do not touch me, do not carry me away!" And
amidst her delirium she related that the fiend had sought to throw
himself upon her, that she had felt his mouth scorching her with all the
flames of hell. The devil in a life so pure, in a soul without sin! what
for, O Lord! and again I ask it, why this relentless suffering, intense
to the very last, why this nightmare-like ending, this death troubled
with such frightful fancies, after so beautiful a life of candour,
purity, and innocence? Could she not fall asleep serenely in the
peacefulness of her chaste soul? But doubtless so long as breath remained
in her body it was necessary to leave her the hatred and dread of life,
which is the devil. It was life which menaced her, and it was life which
she cast out, in the same way that she denied life when she reserved to
the Celestial Bridegroom her tortured, crucified womanhood. That dogma of
the Immaculate Conception, which her dream had come to strengthen, was a
blow dealt by the Church to woman, both wife and mother. To decree that
woman is only worthy of worship on condition that she be a virgin, to
imagine that virgin to be herself born without sin, is not this an insult
to Nature, the condemnation of life, the denial of womanhood, whose true
greatness consists in perpetuating life? "Be off, be off, Satan! let me
die without fulfilling Nature's law." And she drove the sunshine from the
room and the free air that entered by the window, the air that was sweet
with the scent of flowers, laden with all the floating germs which
transmit love throughout the whole vast world.
On the Wednesday after Easter (April 16th), the death agony commenced. It
is related that on the morning of that day one of Bernadette's
companions, a nun attacked with a mortal illness and lying in the
infirmary in an adjoining bed, was suddenly healed upon drinking a glass
of Lourdes water. But she, the privileged one, had drunk of it in vain.
God at last granted her the signal favour which she desired by sending
her into the good sound sleep of the earth, in which there is no more
suffering. She asked pardon of everyone. Her passion was consummated;
like the Saviour, she had the nails and the crown of thorns, the scourged
limbs, the pierced side. Like Him she raised her eyes to heaven, extended
her arms in the form of a cross, and uttered a loud cry: "My God!" And,
like Him, she said, towards three o'clock: "I thirst." She moistened her
lips in the glass, then bowed her head and expired.
Thus, very glorious and very holy, died the Visionary of Lourdes,
Bernadette Soubirous, Sister Marie-Bernard, one of the Sisters of Charity
of Nevers. During three days her body remained exposed to view, and vast
crowds passed before it; a whole people hastened to the convent, an
interminable procession of devotees hungering after hope, who rubbed
medals, chaplets, pictures, and missals against the dead woman's dress,
to obtain from her one more favour, a fetish bringing happiness. Even in
death her dream of solitude was denied her: a mob of the wretched ones of
this world rushed to the spot, drinking in illusion around her coffin.
And it was noticed that her left eye, the eye which at the time of the
apparitions had been nearest to the Blessed Virgin, remained obstinately
open. Then a last miracle amazed the convent: the body underwent no
change, but was interred on the third day, still supple, warm, with red
lips, and a very white skin, rejuvenated as it were, and smelling sweet.
And to-day Bernadette Soubirous, exiled from Lourdes, obscurely sleeps
her last sleep at Saint Gildard, beneath a stone slab in a little chapel,
amidst the shade and silence of the old trees of the garden, whilst
yonder the Grotto shines resplendently in all its triumph.
Pierre ceased speaking; the beautiful, marvellous story was ended. And
yet the whole carriage was still listening, deeply impressed by that
death, at once so tragic and so touching. Compassionate tears fell from
Marie's eyes, while the others, Elise Rouquet, La Grivotte herself, now
calmer, clasped their hands and prayed to her who was in heaven to
intercede with the Divinity to complete their cure. M. Sabathier made a
big sign of the cross, and then ate a cake which his wife had bought him
at Poitiers.
M. de Guersaint, whom sad things always upset, had fallen asleep again in
the middle of the story. And there was only Madame Vincent, with her face
buried in her pillow, who had not stirred, like a deaf and blind
creature, determined to see and hear nothing more.
Meanwhile the train rolled, still rolled along. Madame de Jonquiere,
after putting her head out of the window, informed them that they were
approaching Etampes. And, when they had left that station behind them,
Sister Hyacinthe gave the signal, and they recited the third chaplet of
the Rosary, the five glorious mysteries--the Resurrection of Our Lord,
the Ascension of Our Lord, the Mission of the Holy Ghost, the Assumption
of the Most Blessed Virgin, and the Crowning of the Most Blessed Virgin.
And afterwards they sang the canticle:
"O Virgin, in thy help I put my trust."
Then Pierre fell into a deep reverie. His glance had turned towards the
now sunlit landscape, the continual flight of which seemed to lull his
thoughts. The noise of the wheels was making him dizzy, and he ended by
no longer recognising the familiar horizon of this vast suburban expanse
with which he had once been acquainted. They still had to pass Bretigny
and Juvisy, and then, in an hour and a half at the utmost, they would at
last be at Paris. So the great journey was finished! the inquiry, which
he had so much desired to make, the experiment which he had attempted
with so much passion, were over! He had wished to acquire certainty, to
study Bernadette's case on the spot, and see if grace would not come back
to him in a lightning flash, restoring him his faith. And now he had
settled the point--Bernadette had dreamed through the continual torments
of her flesh, and he himself would never believe again. And this forced
itself upon his mind like a brutal fact: the simple faith of the child
who kneels and prays, the primitive faith of young people, bowed down by
an awe born of their ignorance, was dead. Though thousands of pilgrims
might each year go to Lourdes, the nations were no longer with them; this
attempt to bring about the resurrection of absolute faith, the faith of
dead-and-gone centuries, without revolt or examination, was fatally
doomed to fail. History never retraces its steps, humanity cannot return
to childhood, times have too much changed, too many new inspirations have
sown new harvests for the men of to-day to become once more like the men
of olden time. It was decisive; Lourdes was only an explainable accident,
whose reactionary violence was even a proof of the extreme agony in which
belief under the antique form of Catholicism was struggling. Never again,
as in the cathedrals of the twelfth century, would the entire nation
kneel like a docile flock in the hands of the Master. To blindly,
obstinately cling to the attempt to bring that to pass would mean to dash
oneself against the impossible, to rush, perhaps, towards great moral
catastrophes.
And of his journey there already only remained to Pierre an immense
feeling of compassion. Ah! his heart was overflowing with pity; his poor
heart was returning wrung by all that he had seen. He recalled the words
of worthy Abbe Judaine; and he had seen those thousands of unhappy beings
praying, weeping, and imploring God to take pity on their suffering; and
he had wept with them, and felt within himself, like an open wound, a
sorrowful fraternal feeling for all their ailments. He could not think of
those poor people without burning with a desire to relieve them. If it
were true that the faith of the simple-minded no longer sufficed; if one
ran the risk of going astray in wishing to turn back, would it become
necessary to close the Grotto, to preach other efforts, other sufferings?
However, his compassion revolted at that thought. No, no! it would be a
crime to snatch their dream of Heaven from those poor creatures who
suffered either in body or in mind, and who only found relief in kneeling
yonder amidst the splendour of tapers and the soothing repetition of
hymns. He had not taken the murderous course of undeceiving Marie, but
had sacrificed himself in order to leave her the joy of her fancy, the
divine consolation of having been healed by the Virgin. Where was the man
hard enough, cruel enough, to prevent the lowly from believing, to rob
them of the consolation of the supernatural, the hope that God troubled
Himself about them, that He held a better life in His paradise in reserve
for them? All humanity was weeping, desperate with anguish, like some
despairing invalid, irrevocably condemned, and whom only a miracle could
save. He felt mankind to be unhappy indeed, and he shuddered with
fraternal affection in the presence of such pitiable humility, ignorance,
poverty in its rags, disease with its sores and evil odour, all the lowly
sufferers, in hospital, convent, and slums, amidst vermin and dirt, with
ugliness and imbecility written on their faces, an immense protest
against health, life, and Nature, in the triumphal name of justice,
equality, and benevolence. No, no! it would never do to drive the
wretched to despair. Lourdes must be tolerated, in the same way that you
tolerate a falsehood which makes life possible. And, as he had already
said in Bernadette's chamber, she remained the martyr, she it was who
revealed to him the only religion which still filled his heart, the
religion of human suffering. Ah! to be good and kindly, to alleviate all
ills, to lull pain, to sleep in a dream, to lie even, so that no one
might suffer any more!
The train passed at full speed through a village, and Pierre vaguely
caught sight of a church nestling amidst some large apple trees. All the
pilgrims in the carriage crossed themselves. But he was now becoming
uneasy, scruples were tingeing his reverie with anxiety. This religion of
human suffering, this redemption by pain, was not this yet another lure,
a continual aggravation of pain and misery? It is cowardly and dangerous
to allow superstition to live. To tolerate and accept it is to revive the
dark evil ages afresh. It weakens and stupefies; the sanctimoniousness
bequeathed by heredity produces humiliated, timorous generations,
decadent and docile nations, who are an easy prey to the powerful of the
earth. Whole nations are imposed upon, robbed, devoured, when they have
devoted the whole effort of their will to the mere conquest of a future
existence. Would it not, therefore, be better to cure humanity at once by
boldly closing the miraculous Grottos whither it goes to weep, and thus
restore to it the courage to live the real life, even in the midst of
tears? And it was the same prayer, that incessant flood of prayer which
ascended from Lourdes, the endless supplication in which he had been
immersed and softened: was it not after all but puerile lullaby, a
debasement of all one's energies? It benumbed the will, one's very being
became dissolved in it and acquired disgust for life and action. Of what
use could it be to will anything, do anything, when you totally resigned
yourself to the caprices of an unknown almighty power? And, in another
respect, what a strange thing was this mad desire for prodigies, this
anxiety to drive the Divinity to transgress the laws of Nature
established by Himself in His infinite wisdom! Therein evidently lay
peril and unreasonableness; at the risk even of losing illusion, that
divine comforter, only the habit of personal effort and the courage of
truth should have been developed in man, and especially in the child.
Then a great brightness arose in Pierre's mind and dazzled him. It was
Reason, protesting against the glorification of the absurd and the
deposition of common-sense. Ah! reason, it was through her that he had
suffered, through her alone that he was happy. As he had told Doctor
Chassaigne, his one consuming longing was to satisfy reason ever more and
more, although it might cost him happiness to do so. It was reason, he
now well understood it, whose continual revolt at the Grotto, at the
Basilica, throughout entire Lourdes, had prevented him from believing.
Unlike his old friend--that stricken old man, who was afflicted with such
dolorous senility, who had fallen into second childhood since the
shipwreck of his affections,--he had been unable to kill reason and
humiliate and annihilate himself. Reason remained his sovereign mistress,
and she it was who buoyed him up even amidst the obscurities and failures
of science. Whenever he met with a thing which he could not understand,
it was she who whispered to him, "There is certainly a natural
explanation which escapes me." He repeated that there could be no healthy
ideal outside the march towards the discovery of the unknown, the slow
victory of reason amidst all the wretchedness of body and mind. In the
clashing of the twofold heredity which he had derived from his father,
all brain, and his mother, all faith, he, a priest, found it possible to
ravage his life in order that he might keep his vows. He had acquired
strength enough to master his flesh, but he felt that his paternal
heredity had now definitely gained the upper hand, for henceforth the
sacrifice of his reason had become an impossibility; this he would not
renounce and would not master. No, no, even human suffering, the hallowed
suffering of the poor, ought not to prove an obstacle, enjoining the
necessity of ignorance and folly. Reason before all; in her alone lay
salvation. If at Lourdes, whilst bathed in tears, softened by the sight
of so much affliction, he had said that it was sufficient to weep and
love, he had made a dangerous mistake. Pity was but a convenient
expedient. One must live, one must act; reason must combat suffering,
unless it be desired that the latter should last forever.
However, as the train rolled on and the landscape flew by, a church once
more appeared, this time on the fringe of heaven, some votive chapel
perched upon a hill and surmounted by a lofty statue of the Virgin. And
once more all the pilgrims made the sign of the cross, and once more
Pierre's reverie strayed, a fresh stream of reflections bringing his
anguish back to him. What was this imperious need of the things beyond,
which tortured suffering humanity? Whence came it? Why should equality
and justice be desired when they did not seem to exist in impassive
nature? Man had set them in the unknown spheres of the Mysterious, in the
supernatural realms of religious paradises, and there contented his
ardent thirst for them. That unquenchable thirst for happiness had ever
consumed, and would consume him always. If the Fathers of the Grotto
drove such a glorious trade, it was simply because they made motley out
of what was divine. That thirst for the Divine, which nothing had
quenched through the long, long ages, seemed to have returned with
increased violence at the close of our century of science. Lourdes was a
resounding and undeniable proof that man could never live without the
dream of a Sovereign Divinity, re-establishing equality and re-creating
happiness by dint of miracles. When man has reached the depths of life's
misfortunes, he returns to the divine illusion, and the origin of all
religions lies there. Man, weak and bare, lacks the strength to live
through his terrestrial misery without the everlasting lie of a paradise.
To-day, thought Pierre, the experiment had been made; it seemed that
science alone could not suffice, and that one would be obliged to leave a
door open on the Mysterious.
All at once in the depths of his deeply absorbed mind the words rang out,
A new religion! The door which must be left open on the Mysterious was
indeed a new religion. To subject mankind to brutal amputation, lop off
its dream, and forcibly deprive it of the Marvellous, which it needed to
live as much as it needed bread, would possibly kill it. Would it ever
have the philosophical courage to take life as it is, and live it for its
own sake, without any idea of future rewards and penalties? It certainly
seemed that centuries must elapse before the advent of a society wise
enough to lead a life of rectitude without the moral control of some
cultus and the consolation of superhuman equality and justice. Yes, a new
religion! The call burst forth, resounded within Pierre's brain like the
call of the nations, the eager, despairing desire of the modern soul. The
consolation and hope which Catholicism had brought the world seemed
exhausted after eighteen hundred years full of so many tears, so much
blood, so much vain and barbarous agitation. It was an illusion
departing, and it was at least necessary that the illusion should be
changed. If mankind had long ago darted for refuge into the Christian
paradise, it was because that paradise then opened before it like a fresh
hope. But now a new religion, a new hope, a new paradise, yes, that was
what the world thirsted for, in the discomfort in which it was
struggling. And Father Fourcade, for his part, fully felt such to be the
case; he had not meant to imply anything else when he had given rein to
his anxiety, entreating that the people of the great towns, the dense
mass of the humble which forms the nation, might be brought to Lourdes.
One hundred thousand, two hundred thousand pilgrims at Lourdes each year,
that was, after all, but a grain of sand. It was the people, the whole
people, that was required. But the people has forever deserted the
churches, it no longer puts any soul in the Blessed Virgins which it
manufactures, and nothing nowadays could restore its lost faith. A
Catholic democracy--yes, history would then begin afresh; only were it
possible to create a new Christian people, would not the advent of a new
Saviour, the mighty breath of a new Messiah, have been needed for such a
task?
However, the words still sounded, still rang out in Pierre's mind with
the growing clamour of pealing bells. A new religion; a new religion.
Doubtless it must be a religion nearer to life, giving a larger place to
the things of the world, and taking the acquired truths into due account.
And, above all, it must be a religion which was not an appetite for
death--Bernadette living solely in order that she might die, Doctor
Chassaigne aspiring to the tomb as to the only happiness--for all that
spiritualistic abandonment was so much continuous disorganisation of the
will to live. At bottom of it was hatred to life, disgust with and
cessation of action. Every religion, it is true, is but a promise of
immortality, an embellishment of the spheres beyond, an enchanted garden
to be entered on the morrow of death. Could a new religion ever place
such a garden of eternal happiness on earth? Where was the formula, the
dogma, that would satisfy the hopes of the mankind of to-day? What belief
should be sown to blossom forth in a harvest of strength and peace? How
could one fecundate the universal doubt so that it should give birth to a
new faith? and what sort of illusion, what divine falsehood of any kind
could be made to germinate in the contemporary world, ravaged as it had
been upon all sides, broken up by a century of science?
At that moment, without any apparent transition, Pierre saw the face of
his brother Guillaume arise in the troublous depths of his mind. Still,
he was not surprised; some secret link must have brought that vision
there. Ah! how fond they had been of one another long ago, and what a
good brother that elder brother, so upright and gentle, had been!
Henceforth, also, the rupture was complete; Pierre no longer saw
Guillaume, since the latter had cloistered himself in his chemical
studies, living like a savage in a little suburban house, with a mistress
and two big dogs. Then Pierre's reverie again diverged, and he thought of
that trial in which Guillaume had been mentioned, like one suspected of
having compromising friendships amongst the most violent revolutionaries.
It was related, too, that the young man had, after long researches,
discovered the formula of a terrible explosive, one pound of which would
suffice to blow up a cathedral. And Pierre then thought of those
Anarchists who wished to renew and save the world by destroying it. They
were but dreamers, horrible dreamers; yet dreamers in the same way as
those innocent pilgrims whom he had seen kneeling at the Grotto in an
enraptured flock. If the Anarchists, if the extreme Socialists, demanded
with violence the equality of wealth, the sharing of all the enjoyments
of the world, the pilgrims on their side demanded with tears equality of
health and an equitable sharing of moral and physical peace. The latter
relied on miracles, the former appealed to brute force. At bottom,
however, it was but the same exasperated dream of fraternity and justice,
the eternal desire for happiness--neither poor nor sick left, but bliss
for one and all. And, in fact, had not the primitive Christians been
terrible revolutionaries for the pagan world, which they threatened, and
did, indeed, destroy? They who were persecuted, whom the others sought to
exterminate, are to-day inoffensive, because they have become the Past.
The frightful Future is ever the man who dreams of a future society; even
as to-day it is the madman so wildly bent on social renovation that he
harbours the great black dream of purifying everything by the flame of
conflagrations. This seemed monstrous to Pierre. Yet, who could tell?
Therein, perchance, lay the rejuvenated world of to-morrow.
Astray, full of doubts, he nevertheless, in his horror of violence, made
common cause with old society now reduced to defend itself, unable though
he was to say whence would come the new Messiah of Gentleness, in whose
hands he would have liked to place poor ailing mankind. A new religion,
yes, a new religion. But it is not easy to invent one, and he knew not to
what conclusion to come between the ancient faith, which was dead, and
the young faith of to-morrow, as yet unborn. For his part, in his
desolation, he was only sure of keeping his vow, like an unbelieving
priest watching over the belief of others, chastely and honestly
discharging his duties, with the proud sadness that he had been unable to
renounce his reason as he had renounced his flesh. And for the rest, he
would wait.
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