."

"It is marvellous," murmured M. de Guersaint in his delight.

"Would you like another example, monsieur? I can give you a famous one,
that of Francois Macary, the carpenter of Lavaur. During eighteen years
he had suffered from a deep varicose ulcer, with considerable enlargement
of the tissues in the mesial part of the left leg. He had reached such a
point that he could no longer move, and science decreed that he would
forever remain infirm. Well, one evening he shuts himself up with a
bottle of Lourdes water. He takes off his bandages, washes both his legs,
and drinks what little water then remains in the bottle. Then he goes to
bed and falls asleep; and when he awakes, he feels his legs and looks at
them. There is nothing left; the varicose enlargement, the ulcers, have
all disappeared. The skin of his knee, monsieur, had become as smooth, as
fresh as it had been when he was twenty."

This time there was an explosion of surprise and admiration. The patients
and the pilgrims were entering into the enchanted land of miracles, where
impossibilities are accomplished at each bend of the pathways, where one
marches on at ease from prodigy to prodigy. And each had his or her story
to tell, burning with a desire to contribute a fresh proof, to fortify
faith and hope by yet another example.

That silent creature, Madame Maze, was so transported that she spoke the
first. "I have a friend," said she, "who knew the Widow Rizan, that lady
whose cure also created so great a stir. For four-and-twenty years her
left side had been entirely paralysed. Her stomach was unable to retain
any solid food, and she had become an inert bag of bones which had to be
turned over in bed, The friction of the sheets, too, had ended by rubbing
her skin away in parts. Well, she was so low one evening that the doctor
announced that she would die during the night. An hour later, however,
she emerged from her torpor and asked her daughter in a faint voice to go
and fetch her a glass of Lourdes water from a neighbour's. But she was
only able to obtain this glass of water on the following morning; and she
cried out to her daughter: 'Oh! it is life that I am drinking--rub my
face with it, rub my arm and my leg, rub my whole body with it!' And when
her daughter obeyed her, she gradually saw the huge swelling subside, and
the paralysed, tumefied limbs recover their natural suppleness and
appearance. Nor was that all, for Madame Rizan cried out that she w