their cases reality was too
abominable, and an immense need of illusion and falsehood sprang up
within them. Oh! to believe that there is a supreme Justiciar somewhere,
one who rights the apparent wrongs of things and beings; to believe that
there is a Redeemer, a consoler who is the real master, who can carry the
torrents back to their source, who can restore youth to the aged, and
life to the dead! And when you are covered with sores, when your limbs
are twisted, when your stomach is swollen by tumours, when your lungs are
destroyed by disease, to be able to say that all this is of no
consequence, that everything may disappear and be renewed at a sign from
the Blessed Virgin, that it is sufficient that you should pray to her,
touch her heart, and obtain the favour of being chosen by her. And then
what a heavenly fount of hope appeared with the prodigious flow of those
beautiful stories of cure, those adorable fairy tales which lulled and
intoxicated the feverish imaginations of the sick and the infirm. Since
little Sophie Couteau, with her white, sound foot, had climbed into that
carriage, opening to the gaze of those within it the limitless heavens of
the Divine and the Supernatural, how well one could understand the breath
of resurrection that was passing over the world, slowly raising those who
despaired the most from their beds of misery, and making their eyes shine
since life was itself a possibility for them, and they were, perhaps,
about to begin it afresh.

Yes, 't was indeed that. If that woeful train was rolling, rolling on, if
that carriage was full, if the other carriages were full also, if France
and the world, from the uttermost limits of the earth, were crossed by
similar trains, if crowds of three hundred thousand believers, bringing
thousands of sick along with them, were ever setting out, from one end of
the year to the other, it was because the Grotto yonder was shining forth
in its glory like a beacon of hope and illusion, like a sign of the
revolt and triumph of the Impossible over inexorable materiality. Never
had a more impassionating romance been devised to exalt the souls of men
above the stern laws of life. To dream that dream, this was the great,
the ineffable happiness. If the Fathers of the Assumption had seen the
success of their pilgrimages increase and spread from year to year, it
was because they sold to all the flocking peoples the bread of
consolation and illusion, the delicious brea