pilgrims are seeking healing. Lourdes does not register her failures; the proportion of her pilgrims who are seeking healing, the proportion of those seeking healing who are healed, can only be guessed. The late Monsignor R. H. Benson, speaking of the great masses of the national pil- grimage, says, no doubt somewhat loosely:117 "Hardly one in a thousand of these come to be cured of any sickness." During the twenty years from 1888 to 1907, inclusive, the whole number of cures recorded was 2,665,118 which yields a yearly average of about 133. 119 It is generally under- stood that about 90 per cent of those seeking cure go away unbenefited,120 and this would lead us to suppose that be- tween 1300 and 1400 seek healing at Lourdes annually. Georges Bertrin tells us121 that up to 1908 — the fiftieth anniversary of the vision — some 10,000,000 of pilgrims had visited Lourdes, and that the whole number of cures, "whether partial or complete," registered during that time was 3,962. He thinks that nearly as many more may have been wrought but not registered ; let us say, then, that there may have been some 8,000 cures in all during this half- century — "whether partial or complete." Absolutely this is a great number; but proportionately to the numbers of pilgrims, not very large: about one cure being registered to every 2,500 visitors, not more than one cure to every 1,250 visitors being even conjecturable. How many fail- ures stand over against these 4,000 to 8,000 cures we have no means of estimating; but if the proportion of 90 per cent seeking cure be right, they would mount to the great number of some 50,000. The heart sinks when it contem- plates this enormous mass of disappointment and despair 122 There are certain other circumstances connected with the cures of Lourdes, which, on the supposition of their miraculousness, evoke some surprise. The Bureau of Constatation exhibits at times a certain shyness of expect- ing too much of a miracle — a shyness quite absent, it is true, on other occasions, when, as it appears, anything
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could be expected. We read,123 for example, of a case of apparent hip-disease, and it was said that one leg had been seven centimetres shorter than the other; while now, after the cure, "the legs were of an exactly equal length." The cure was not admitted to registry, but was referred back for further investigation. "The doctors shook their heads considerably over the seven centimetres"; "seven centi- metres was almost too large a measure to be believed." Why — if it was a miracle ? And, after all, would the pro- longation of a leg by seven centimetres be any more mirac- ulous than the prolongation of it by six — or by one ? Stress is sometimes laid on the instantaneousness124 of the cures as proof of their miraculousness. But they are not all instantaneous. We read repeatedly in the records of slow and gradual cures: "At the second bath she began to im- prove"; "at the fourth bath the cure was complete."125 Indeed the cures are not always ever completed. Gabriel Gargam, for example, one of Bertrin's crucial cases, he tells us,126 "bears a slight trace of his old infirmity as the guarantee of its erstwhile existence. He feels a certain weakness in his back at the spot where Doctor Tessier sup- posed that a vertebra was pressing on the medulla." Sim- ilarly in the case of Madame Rouchel, a case of facial lupus, and another of Bertrin's crucial cases, "a slight ulceration of the inside of the upper lip," he says,127 "remained after the cure." These cases are not exceptional: Bertrin in- forms us128 that it is quite common for traces of the in- firmity to remain. He even discovers the rationale of this. It keeps the cured person in grateful memory of the benefit received.129 And it is even a valuable proof that the cure is truly miraculous. For, do you not see?130 "had the dis- ease been nervous and functional, and not organic, every- thing would have disappeared; all the functions being re- paired, the disease would not have left any special trace." This reasoning is matched by that into which Bertrin is betrayed when made by the physicians of Metz — Madame
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Rouchel's home — really to face the question whether she had been cured at all. They pointed out that the lip was imperfectly healed. Bertrin cries out131 that the "ques- tion was not whether a slight inflammation of the lip re- mained, but whether the two perforations which had existed in the cheek and roof of the mouth before going to Lourdes had been suddenly closed on Saturday, September 6." The physicians point out inexorably that this is to reverse the value of the symptoms and to mistake the nature of their producing causes, and record the two findings: (i) that the lupus was not healed ; (2) that the closing of the two fistulas in twelve days was not extraordinary. This celebrated case thus passes into the category of a scandal.132