be spoken of with the same energy as "the little seer" of Le Pontinet, as the child of degenerated parents, weighted with the burden of bad heredity.108 But it is a matter only of degree. Bernadette's parentage was not of the best omen; in her person she was, if not a degenerate, yet certainly a defective. It is of such that the Virgin appar- ently avails herself in her visions.109 Nor does the vision itself reassure us. "The figure seen was one which, by the admission, we believe, of the Catholic clergy themselves, has been often reported as seen, mainly by young girls, under circumstances when no objective value whatever could be attributed to the apparition." n0 The communica- tions made by the heavenly visitant, one would prefer to believe the dreams of the defective child. "As the times, so the saints," remarks Heinrich Giinter,111 with a very obvious meaning; and it may be added with an equally direct meaning: As the saints so the messages. Doctor Boissarie, it is true, seeks to forestall criticism by boldly affirming that the message given to Bernadette was lofty beyond the possibility of her invention:112 "The name of the Virgin, the words which she uttered — all is out of pro- portion to the percipient's intelligence. Remembering the formal principle, admitted by all authorities, 'A hallucina- tion is never more than a reminiscence of a sensation al- ready perceived,' it is evident that the intelligence and the memory of Bernadette could never have received the image or heard the echo of what she received and heard at the grotto." To which the Messrs. Myers very properly re- spond:113 "Doctor Boissarie does not tell us whether it is the divine command to kiss the earth for sinners, or the divine command to eat grass, which is beyond the intelli- gence of a simple child. He dwells only on the phrase, ' I am the Immaculate Conception' ; and we may indeed admit that this particular mode of reproducing the probably often- heard statement that the Virgin was conceived without sin does indicate a mind which is either supra or infra
106 COUNTERFEIT MIRACLES
grammaticam." The plain fact is that the communica- tions attributed to the Virgin are silly with the silliness of a backward child, repeating, without in the least compre- hending their meaning, phrases with which the air was palpitant; it was in 1854 that the dogma of the Immacu- late Conception of Mary was proclaimed in circumstances which shook the whole Catholic world with emotional tremors, some waves of which could not have failed to reach even Bernadette. The immense success of Lourdes as a place of pilgrimage has been achieved in spite of the meanness of its origin, and is to be attributed to the skill with which it has been exploited. Under this exploita- tion, it has distanced all its rivals, superseded all its pred- ecessors, and has ended by becoming the greatest healing shrine in the world, counting the pilgrims who annually resort to it by the hundreds of thousands, and now even, so we are told, by the million.114
We cannot doubt that it is a true picture of Lourdes in its total manifestation, which is given by Emile Zola in his great novel.115 He describes the colossal national pil- grimage which gathers there each August in an epic of human suffering. Looked at thus, it is a most moving spectacle. "It is difficult to remain strictly philosophical," writes an English physician after witnessing the scene;116 "impossible to be coarsely sceptical in that strange assem- bly. Hard indeed would be the heart of any medical man which could remain unmoved by the sight which met my eyes that day. At no other spot in the wide world could the faculty behold at a glance so many of its failures. . . . Out of the thousands of pilgrims I could detect but few who were evidently of the poorest class; for the most part they were of the upper middle classes or, at least, well-to-do. . . . Surely so much misery has at no other spot been focussed in so small a space." It is, indeed, an " army of incurables " which gathers every year to Lourdes, driven to their last recourse. But of course not all the enormous masses of
THE CURES AT LOURDES 107