d adversary
of fanaticism which gives birth to disorder and religious perversion.
Under his orders at Lourdes there was a Commissary of Police, a man of
great intelligence and shrewdness, who had hitherto discharged his
functions in a very proper way, and who, legitimately enough, beheld in
this affair of the apparitions an opportunity to put his gift of
sagacious skill to the proof. So the struggle began, and it was this
Commissary who, on the first Sunday in Lent, at the time of the first
apparitions, summoned Bernadette to his office in order that he might
question her. He showed himself affectionate, then angry, then
threatening, but all in vain; the answers which the girl gave him were
ever the same. The story which she related, with its slowly accumulated
details, had little by little irrevocably implanted itself in her
infantile mind. And it was no lie on the part of this poor suffering
creature, this exceptional victim of hysteria, but an unconscious
haunting, a radical lack of will-power to free herself from her original
hallucination. She knew not how to exert any such will, she could not,
she would not exert it. Ah! the poor child, the dear child, so amiable
and so gentle, so incapable of any evil thought, from that time forward
lost to life, crucified by her fixed idea, whence one could only have
extricated her by changing her environment, by restoring her to the open
air, in some land of daylight and human affection. But she was the chosen
one, she had beheld the Virgin, she would suffer from it her whole life
long and die from it at last!

Pierre, who knew Bernadette so well, and who felt a fraternal pity for
her memory, the fervent compassion with which one regards a human saint,
a simple, upright, charming creature tortured by her faith, allowed his
emotion to appear in his moist eyes and trembling voice. And a pause in
his narrative ensued. Marie, who had hitherto been lying there quite
stiff, with a hard expression of revolt still upon her face, opened her
clenched hands and made a vague gesture of pity. "Ah," she murmured, "the
poor child, all alone to contend against those magistrates, and so
innocent, so proud, so unshakable in her championship of the truth!"

The same compassionate sympathy was arising from all the beds in the
ward. That hospital inferno with its nocturnal wretchedness, its
pestilential atmosphere, its pallets of anguish heaped together, its
weary lady-hospitallers and Sisters fli