, the
glassy slope of perpetual ice and snow; to walk on, a scanty growth of
grass moth-eaten by sand. In two words, to sum up the scene, it was
nature's scab, the leprosy of the earth.

"From the artistic point of view, on this microscopic grand parade,
close to the spring whose waters are caught in pipes with taps, three
bronze statues stand in different spots. One, a Virgin, in the most
preposterous garments, her headgear a sort of pastry-mould, a Mohican's
bonnet, is on her knees weeping, with her face hidden in her hands. Then
the same Woman, standing up, her hands ecclesiastically shrouded in her
sleeves, looks at the two children to whom she is speaking; Maximin,
with hair curled like a poodle, twirling a cap like a raised pie, in his
hand; Melanie buried in a cap with deep frills and accompanied by a dog
like a paper-weight--all in bronze. Finally the same Person, once more
alone, standing on tip-toe, her eyes raised to heaven with a
melodramatic expression.

"Never has the frightful appetite for the hideous that disgraces the
Church in our day been so resolutely displayed as on this spot; and if
the soul suffered in the presence of the obtrusive outrage of this
degrading work--perpetrated by one Barreme of Angers and cast in the
steam foundries of Le Creusot--the body too had something to endure on
this plateau under the crushing mass of hills that shut in the view.

"And yet it was hither that thousands of sick creatures had had
themselves hauled up to face the cruel climate, where in summer the sun
burns you to a cinder while, two yards away, in the shade of the church,
you are frozen.

"The first and greatest miracle accomplished at La Salette was that of
bringing such an invasion to this precipitous spot in the Alps, for
everything combines to forbid it.

"But crowds came there year after year, till Lourdes took possession of
them; for it is since the apparition of the Virgin there that La Salette
has fallen into disrepute.

"Twelve years after the vision at La Salette, the Virgin showed herself
again, not in Dauphine this time, but in the depths of Gascony. After
the Mother of Tears, Our Lady of Seven Dolours, it was Our Lady of
Smiles, of the Immaculate Conception, the Sovereign Lady of Joy in
Glory, who appeared; and here again it was to a shepherdess that she
revealed the existence of a spring that healed diseases.

"And here it is that consternation begins. Lourdes may be described as
the exac