to be reopened; and the words they spoke
were so pitiful that all who heard them wept. A mother showed her child
who was half-dead; would they let the little one die like that in her
arms when there was a source yonder which had saved the children of other
mothers? A blind man called attention to his dim eyes; a pale, scrofulous
youth displayed the sores on his legs; a paralytic woman sought to join
her woeful twisted hands: did the authorities wish to see them all
perish, did they refuse them the last divine chance of life, condemned
and abandoned as they were by the science of man? And equally great was
the distress of the believers, of those who were convinced that a corner
of heaven had opened amidst the night of their mournful existences, and
who were indignant that they should be deprived of the chimerical
delight, the supreme relief for their human and social sufferings, which
they found in the belief that the Blessed Virgin had indeed come down
from heaven to bring them the priceless balm of her intervention.
However, the Mayor was unable to promise anything, and the crowd withdrew
weeping, ready for rebellion, as though under the blow of some great act
of injustice, an act of idiotic cruelty towards the humble and the simple
for which Heaven would assuredly take vengeance.

The struggle went on for several months; and it was an extraordinary
spectacle which those sensible men--the Minister, the Prefect, and the
Commissary of Police--presented, all animated with the best intentions
and contending against the ever-swelling crowd of despairing ones, who
would not allow the doors of dreamland to be closed upon them, who would
not be shut off from the mystic glimpse of future happiness in which they
found consolation for their present wretchedness. The authorities
required order, the respect of a discreet religion, the triumph of
reason; whereas the need of happiness carried the people off into an
enthusiastic desire for cure both in this world and in the next. Oh! to
cease suffering, to secure equality in the comforts of life; to march on
under the protection of a just and beneficent Mother, to die only to
awaken in heaven! And necessarily the burning desire of the multitude,
the holy madness of the universal joy, was destined to sweep aside the
rigid, morose conceptions of a well-regulated society in which the
ever-recurring epidemical attacks of religious hallucination are
condemned as prejudicial to good order a