The Cathedral | Page 4

silver, hisses and tosses, foams and leaps, and can in an instant
swallow up villages and dams.
"It is hideous," thought Durtal. "That bilious flood must carry fevers
with it; it is accursed and rotten with its soapy foam-flakes, its metallic
hues, its scrap of rainbow-colour stranded in the mud."
Durtal now thought over all these details; as he closed his eyes he could
see the Drac and La Salette.
"Ah!" thought he, "they may well be proud of the pilgrims who venture
to those desolate regions to pray where the vision actually appeared, for
when once they are there they are packed on a little plot of ground no
bigger than the Place Saint Sulpice, hemmed in on one side by a church
of rough stone daubed with cement of the colour of Valbonnais
mustard, and on the other by a graveyard. The horizon is a circle of
cones, of dry scoriæ, like pumice, or covered with short grass; above
them, the glassy slope of perpetual ice and snow; to walk on, a scanty
growth of grass moth-eaten by sand. In two words, to sum up the scene,
it was nature's scab, the leprosy of the earth.
"From the artistic point of view, on this microscopic grand parade,
close to the spring whose waters are caught in pipes with taps, three
bronze statues stand in different spots. One, a Virgin, in the most
preposterous garments, her headgear a sort of pastry-mould, a
Mohican's bonnet, is on her knees weeping, with her face hidden in her

hands. Then the same Woman, standing up, her hands ecclesiastically
shrouded in her sleeves, looks at the two children to whom she is
speaking; Maximin, with hair curled like a poodle, twirling a cap like a
raised pie, in his hand; Mélanie buried in a cap with deep frills and
accompanied by a dog like a paper-weight--all in bronze. Finally the
same Person, once more alone, standing on tip-toe, her eyes raised to
heaven with a melodramatic expression.
"Never has the frightful appetite for the hideous that disgraces the
Church in our day been so resolutely displayed as on this spot; and if
the soul suffered in the presence of the obtrusive outrage of this
degrading work--perpetrated by one Barrême of Angers and cast in the
steam foundries of Le Creusot--the body too had something to endure
on this plateau under the crushing mass of hills that shut in the view.
"And yet it was hither that thousands of sick creatures had had
themselves hauled up to face the cruel climate, where in summer the
sun burns you to a cinder while, two yards away, in the shade of the
church, you are frozen.
"The first and greatest miracle accomplished at La Salette was that of
bringing such an invasion to this precipitous spot in the Alps, for
everything combines to forbid it.
"But crowds came there year after year, till Lourdes took possession of
them; for it is since the apparition of the Virgin there that La Salette has
fallen into disrepute.
"Twelve years after the vision at La Salette, the Virgin showed herself
again, not in Dauphiné this time, but in the depths of Gascony. After
the Mother of Tears, Our Lady of Seven Dolours, it was Our Lady of
Smiles, of the Immaculate Conception, the Sovereign Lady of Joy in
Glory, who appeared; and here again it was to a shepherdess that she
revealed the existence of a spring that healed diseases.
"And here it is that consternation begins. Lourdes may be described as
the exact opposite to La Salette; the scenery is magnificent, the hills in
the foreground are covered with verdure, the tamed mountains permit

access to their heights; on all sides there are shady avenues, fine trees,
living waters, gentle slopes, broad roads devoid of danger and
accessible to all; instead of a wilderness, a town, where every
requirement of the sick is provided for. Lourdes may be reached
without adventures in warrens of vermin, without enduring nights in
country inns, or days of jolting in wretched vehicles, without creeping
along the face of a precipice; and the traveller is at his destination when
he gets out of the train.
"This town then was so admirably chosen for the resort of crowds, that
it did not seem necessary that Providence should intervene with such
strong measures to attract them.
"But God, who forced La Salette on the world without availing Himself
of the means of fashionable notoriety, now changed His tactics; with
Lourdes, advertisement appeared on the scene.
"This it is that confounds the mind: Jesus condescending to make use of
the wretched arts of human commerce; adopting the repulsive tricks
which we employ to float a manufacture or a business.
"And we wonder whether this may not be the