ith his beautiful, marvellous story, so soothing
to the wretched, he evoked for himself a vision of that pitiable, lovable
Bernadette, whose sufferings had flowered so wonderfully. As a doctor had
roughly expressed it, this girl of fourteen, at a critical period of her
life, already ravaged, too, by asthma, was, after all, simply an
exceptional victim of hysteria, afflicted with a degenerate heredity and
lapsing into infancy. If there were no violent crises in her case, if
there were no stiffening of the muscles during her attacks, if she
retained a precise recollection of her dreams, the reason was that her
case was peculiar to herself, and she added, so to say, a new and very
curious form to all the forms of hysteria known at the time. Miracles
only begin when things cannot be explained; and science, so far, knows
and can explain so little, so infinitely do the phenomena of disease vary
according to the nature of the patient! But how many shepherdesses there
had been before Bernadette who had seen the Virgin in a similar way,
amidst all the same childish nonsense! Was it not always the same story,
the Lady clad in light, the secret confided, the spring bursting forth,
the mission which had to be fulfilled, the miracles whose enchantments
would convert the masses? And was not the personal appearance of the
Virgin always in accordance with a poor child's dreams--akin to some
coloured figure in a missal, an ideal compounded of traditional beauty,
gentleness, and politeness. And the same dreams showed themselves in the
naivete of the means which were to be employed and of the object which
was to be attained--the deliverance of nations, the building of churches,
the processional pilgrimages of the faithful! Then, too, all the words
which fell from Heaven resembled one another, calls for penitence,
promises of help; and in this respect, in Bernadette's case the only new
feature was that most extraordinary declaration: "I am the Immaculate
Conception," which burst forth--very usefully--as the recognition by the
Blessed Virgin herself of the dogma promulgated by the Court of Rome but
three years previously! It was not the Immaculate Virgin who appeared:
no, it was the Immaculate Conception, the abstraction itself, the thing,
the dogma, so that one might well ask oneself if really the Virgin had
spoken in such a fashion. As for the other words, it was possible that
Bernadette had heard them somewhere and stored them up in some
u