The Three Cities Trilogy: Lourdes | Page 3

on the hard seats of a
third-class carriage, were just finishing the "Ave maris Stella," which
they had begun to chant on leaving the terminus of the Orleans line,

when Marie, slightly raised on her couch of misery and restless with
feverish impatience, caught sight of the Paris fortifications through the
window of the moving train.
"Ah, the fortifications!" she exclaimed, in a tone which was joyous
despite her suffering. "Here we are, out of Paris; we are off at last!"
Her delight drew a smile from her father, M. de Guersaint, who sat in
front of her, whilst Abbe Pierre Froment, who was looking at her with
fraternal affection, was so carried away by his compassionate anxiety
as to say aloud: "And now we are in for it till to-morrow morning. We
shall only reach Lourdes at three-forty. We have more than
two-and-twenty hours' journey before us."
It was half-past five, the sun had risen, radiant in the pure sky of a
delightful morning. It was a Friday, the 19th of August. On the horizon,
however, some small, heavy clouds already presaged a terrible day of
stormy heat. And the oblique sunrays were enfilading the
compartments of the railway carriage, filling them with dancing,
golden dust.
"Yes, two-and-twenty hours," murmured Marie, relapsing into a state
of anguish. "/Mon Dieu/! what a long time we must still wait!"
Then her father helped her to lie down again in the narrow box, a kind
of wooden gutter, in which she had been living for seven years past.
Making an exception in her favour, the railway officials had consented
to take as luggage the two pairs of wheels which could be removed
from the box, or fitted to it whenever it became necessary to transport
her from place to place. Packed between the sides of this movable
coffin, she occupied the room of three passengers on the carriage seat;
and for a moment she lay there with eyes closed. Although she was
three-and-twenty; her ashen, emaciated face was still delicately
infantile, charming despite everything, in the midst of her marvellous
fair hair, the hair of a queen, which illness had respected. Clad with the
utmost simplicity in a gown of thin woollen stuff, she wore, hanging
from her neck, the card bearing her name and number, which entitled
her to /hospitalisation/, or free treatment. She herself had insisted on
making the journey in this humble fashion, not wishing to be a source
of expense to her relatives, who little by little had fallen into very
straitened circumstances. And thus it was that she found herself in a
third-class carriage of the "white train," the train which carried the

greatest sufferers, the most woeful of the fourteen trains going to
Lourdes that day, the one in which, in addition to five hundred healthy
pilgrims, nearly three hundred unfortunate wretches, weak to the point
of exhaustion, racked by suffering, were heaped together, and borne at
express speed from one to the other end of France.
Sorry that he had saddened her, Pierre continued to gaze at her with the
air of a compassionate elder brother. He had just completed his thirtieth
year, and was pale and slight, with a broad forehead. After busying
himself with all the arrangements for the journey, he had been desirous
of accompanying her, and, having obtained admission among the
Hospitallers of Our Lady of Salvation as an auxiliary member, wore on
his cassock the red, orange-tipped cross of a bearer. M. de Guersaint on
his side had simply pinned the little scarlet cross of the pilgrimage on
his grey cloth jacket. The idea of travelling appeared to delight him;
although he was over fifty he still looked young, and, with his eyes
ever wandering over the landscape, he seemed unable to keep his head
still--a bird-like head it was, with an expression of good nature and
absent-mindedness.
However, in spite of the violent shaking of the train, which constantly
drew sighs from Marie, Sister Hyacinthe had risen to her feet in the
adjoining compartment. She noticed that the sun's rays were streaming
in the girl's face.
"Pull down the blind, Monsieur l'Abbe," she said to Pierre. "Come,
come, we must install ourselves properly, and set our little household in
order."
Clad in the black robe of a Sister of the Assumption, enlivened by a
white coif, a white wimple, and a large white apron, Sister Hyacinthe
smiled, the picture of courageous activity. Her youth bloomed upon her
small, fresh lips, and in the depths of her beautiful blue eyes, whose
expression was ever gentle. She was not pretty, perhaps, still she was
charming, slender, and tall, the bib of her apron covering her flat chest
like that of a young man; one of good heart, displaying a snowy
complexion, and overflowing