After its departure, I
stayed on ten or twelve days, working up the subject in every detail. My
book is the story of such a national pilgrimage, and is, accordingly, the
story of five days. It is divided into five parts, each of which parts is
limited to one day.

"There are from ninety to one hundred characters in the story: sick
persons, pilgrims, priests, nuns, hospitallers, nurses, and peasants; and
the book shows Lourdes under every aspect. There are the piscinas, the
processions, the Grotto, the churches at night, the people in the
streets. It is, in one word, Lourdes in its entirety. In this canvas is
worked out a very delicate central intrigue, as in 'Dr. Pascal,' and
around this are many little stories or subsidiary plots. There is the
story of the sick person who gets well, of the sick person who is not
cured, and so on. The philosophical idea which pervades the whole book is
the idea of human suffering, the exhibition of the desperate and
despairing sufferers who, abandoned by science and by man, address
themselves to a higher Power in the hope of relief; as where parents have
a dearly loved daughter dying of consumption, who has been given up, and
for whom nothing remains but death. A sudden hope, however, breaks in
upon them: 'supposing that after all there should be a Power greater than
that of man, higher than that of science.' They will haste to try this
last chance of safety. It is the instinctive hankering after the lie
which creates human credulity.

"I will admit that I came across some instances of real cure. Many cases
of nervous disorders have undoubtedly been cured, and there have also
been other cures which may, perhaps be attributed to errors of diagnosis
on the part of doctors who attended the patients so cured. Often a
patient is described by his doctor as suffering from consumption. He goes
to Lourdes, and is cured. However, the probability is that the doctor
made a mistake. In my own case I was at one time suffering from a violent
pain in my chest, which presented all the symptoms of _angina pectoris_,
a mortal malady. It was nothing of the sort. Indigestion, doubtless, and,
as such, curable. Remember that most of the sick persons who go to
Lourdes come from the country, and that the country doctors are not
usually men of either great skill or great experience. But all doctors
mistake symptoms. Put three doctors together to discuss a case, and in
nine cases out of ten they will disagree i