te intelligible, since from the point of view of appreciating art
the Catholic public is still a hundred feet beneath the profane public.
And our Lord did the thing well; he selected Henri Lasserre.

"Consequently the mine exploded as required, rending souls and bringing
crowds out on to the road to Lourdes.

"Years went by. The fame of the sanctuary is an established fact.
Indisputable cures are effected by supernatural means and certified by
clinical authorities, whose good faith and scientific skill are above
suspicion. Lourdes has its fill; and yet, little by little, in the long
run, though pilgrims do not cease to flow thither, the commotion about
the Grotto is diminishing. It is dying out, if not in the religious
world, at any rate in the wider world of the careless or the doubting,
who must be convinced. And our Lord thinks it desirable to revive
attention to the benefits dispensed by His Mother.

"Lasserre was not such an instrument as could renew the half-exhausted
vogue enjoyed by Lourdes. The public was soaked in his book; it had
swallowed it in every vehicle and in every form; the end was achieved;
this budding-knife of miracles was a tool that might now be laid aside.

"What was now wanted was a book entirely unlike his; a book that would
influence the vaster public, whom his homely prosiness would never
reach. Lourdes must make its way through denser and less malleable
strata, to a public of higher class, and harder to please. It was
requisite, therefore, that this new book should be written by a man of
talent, whose style nevertheless should not be so transcendental as to
scare folks. And it was an advantage that the writer should be very well
known, so that his enormous editions might counterpoise those of
Lasserre.

"Now in all the realm of literature there was but one man who could
fulfil these imperative conditions: Emile Zola. In vain should we seek
another. He alone with his battering push, his enormous sale, his
blatant advertisement, could launch Lourdes once more.

"It mattered little that he would deny supernatural agency and endeavour
to explain inexplicable cures by the meanest hypotheses; it mattered
little that he mixed mortar of the medical muck of a Charcot to make his
wretched theory hold together; the great thing was that noisy debates
should arise about the book of which more than a hundred and fifty
thousand copies proclaimed the name of Lourdes throughout the world.

"And then