aris with her passions, her battles, her ever-growling
thunder, her ardent life ever engendering the life of to-morrow. And the
white train, the woeful train of every misery and every dolour, was
returning into it all at full speed, sounding in higher and higher
strains the piercing flourishes of its whistle-calls. The five hundred
pilgrims, the three hundred patients, were about to disappear in the vast
city, fall again upon the hard pavement of life after the prodigious
dream in which they had just indulged, until the day should come when
their need of the consolation of a fresh dream would irresistibly impel
them to start once more on the everlasting pilgrimage to mystery and
forgetfulness.

Ah! unhappy mankind, poor ailing humanity, hungering for illusion, and in
the weariness of this waning century distracted and sore from having too
greedily acquired science; it fancies itself abandoned by the physicians
of both the mind and the body, and, in great danger of succumbing to
incurable disease, retraces its steps and asks the miracle of its cure of
the mystical Lourdes of a past forever dead! Yonder, however, Bernadette,
the new Messiah of suffering, so touching in her human reality,
constitutes the terrible lesson, the sacrifice cut off from the world,
the victim condemned to abandonment, solitude, and death, smitten with
the penalty of being neither woman, nor wife, nor mother, because she
beheld the Blessed Virgin.

THE END

*****

ROME

FROM "THE THREE CITIES"

By Emile Zola

Translated By Ernest A. Vizetelly

PREFACE

IN submitting to the English-speaking public this second volume of M.
Zola's trilogy "Lourdes, Rome, Paris," I have no prefatory remarks to
offer on behalf of the author, whose views on Rome, its past, present,
and future, will be found fully expounded in the following pages. That a
book of this character will, like its forerunner "Lourdes," provoke
considerable controversy is certain, but comment or rejoinder may well be
postponed until that controversy has arisen. At present then I only
desire to say, that in spite of the great labour which I have bestowed on
this translation, I am sensible of its shortcomings, and in a work of
such length, such intricacy, and such a wide range of subject, it will
not be surprising if some slips are discovered. Any errors which may be
pointed out to me, however, shall be rectified in subsequent editions. I