whether she was sleeping, or with eyelids simply closed
was living the everlasting miracle over again. Some of the sufferers were
dreaming aloud, giving vent to bursts of laughter which unconscious moans
interrupted. Perhaps they beheld the Archangels opening their flesh to
wrest their diseases from them. Others, restless with insomnia, turned
over and over, stifling their sobs and gazing fixedly into the darkness.
And, with a shudder born of all the mystery he had evoked, Pierre,
distracted, no longer master of himself in that delirious sphere of
fraternal suffering, ended by hating his very mind, and, drawn into close
communion with all those humble folks, sought to believe like them. What
could be the use of that physiological inquiry into Bernadette's case, so
full of gaps and intricacies? Why should he not accept her as a messenger
from the spheres beyond, as one of the elect chosen for the divine
mystery? Doctors were but ignorant men with rough and brutal hands, and
it would be so delightful to fall asleep in childlike faith, in the
enchanted gardens of the impossible. And for a moment indeed he
surrendered himself, experiencing a delightful feeling of comfort, no
longer seeking to explain anything, but accepting the Visionary with her
sumptuous _cortege_ of miracles, and relying on God to think and
determine for him. Then he looked out through the window, which they did
not dare to open on account of the consumptive patients, and beheld the
immeasurable night which enwrapped the country across which the train was
fleeing. The storm must have burst forth there; the sky was now of an
admirable nocturnal purity, as though cleansed by the masses of fallen
water. Large stars shone out in the dark velvet, alone illumining, with
their mysterious gleams, the silent, refreshed fields, which incessantly
displayed only the black solitude of slumber. And across the Landes,
through the valleys, between the hills, that carriage of wretchedness and
suffering rolled on and on, over-heated, pestilential, rueful, and
wailing, amidst the serenity of the august night, so lovely and so mild.

They had passed Riscle at one in the morning. Between the jolting, the
painful, the hallucinatory silence still continued. At two o'clock, as
they reached Vic-de-Bigorre, low moans were heard; the bad state of the
line, with the unbearable spreading tendency of the train's motion, was
sorely shaking the patients. It was only at Tarbes, at half-pa