The Three Cities Trilogy: Lourdes | Page 5

feet, was a blonde of slender build and /bourgeoise/
appearance, some thirty and odd years of age, and faded before she had
grown old. She shrank back, scarcely occupying any room, wearing a
dark dress, and showing colourless hair, and a long grief-stricken face
which expressed unlimited self-abandonment, infinite sadness. The
woman in front of her, she who sat on the same seat as Pierre, was of
the same age, but belonged to the working classes. She wore a black
cap and displayed a face ravaged by wretchedness and anxiety, whilst
on her lap she held a little girl of seven, who was so pale, so wasted by

illness, that she scarcely seemed four. With her nose contracted, her
eyelids lowered and showing blue in her waxen face, the child was
unable to speak, unable to give utterance to more than a low plaint, a
gentle moan, which rent the heart of her mother, leaning over her, each
time that she heard it.
"Would she eat a few grapes?" timidly asked the lady, who had hitherto
preserved silence. "I have some in my basket."
"Thank you, madame," replied the woman, "she only takes milk, and
sometimes not even that willingly. I took care to bring a bottleful with
me."
Then, giving way to the desire which possesses the wretched to confide
their woes to others, she began to relate her story. Her name was
Vincent, and her husband, a gilder by trade, had been carried off by
consumption. Left alone with her little Rose, who was the passion of
her heart, she had worked by day and night at her calling as a
dressmaker in order to bring the child up. But disease had come, and
for fourteen months now she had had her in her arms like that, growing
more and more woeful and wasted until reduced almost to nothingness.
She, the mother, who never went to mass, entered a church, impelled
by despair to pray for her daughter's cure; and there she had heard a
voice which had told her to take the little one to Lourdes, where the
Blessed Virgin would have pity on her. Acquainted with nobody, not
knowing even how the pilgrimages were organised, she had had but
one idea--to work, save up the money necessary for the journey, take a
ticket, and start off with the thirty sous remaining to her, destitute of all
supplies save a bottle of milk for the child, not having even thought of
purchasing a crust of bread for herself.
"What is the poor little thing suffering from?" resumed the lady.
"Oh, it must be consumption of the bowels, madame! But the doctors
have names they give it. At first she only had slight pains in the
stomach. Then her stomach began to swell and she suffered, oh, so
dreadfully! it made one cry to see her. Her stomach has gone down now,
only she's worn out; she has got so thin that she has no legs left her, and
she's wasting away with continual sweating."
Then, as Rose, raising her eyelids, began to moan, her mother leant
over her, distracted and turning pale. "What is the matter, my jewel, my
treasure?" she asked. "Are you thirsty?"

But the little girl was already closing her dim eyes of a hazy sky-blue
hue, and did not even answer, but relapsed into her torpor, quite white
in the white frock she wore--a last coquetry on the part of her mother,
who had gone to this useless expense in the hope that the Virgin would
be more compassionate and gentle to a little sufferer who was well
dressed, so immaculately white.
There was an interval of silence, and then Madame Vincent inquired:
"And you, madame, it's for yourself no doubt that you are going to
Lourdes? One can see very well that you are ill."
But the lady, with a frightened look, shrank woefully into her corner,
murmuring: "No, no, I am not ill. Would to God that I were! I should
suffer less."
Her name was Madame Maze, and her heart was full of an incurable
grief. After a love marriage to a big, gay fellow with ripe, red lips, she
had found herself deserted at the end of a twelvemonth's honeymoon.
Ever travelling, following the profession of a jeweller's bagman, her
husband, who earned a deal of money, would disappear for six months
at a stretch, deceive her from one frontier to the other of France, at
times even carrying creatures about with him. And she worshipped him;
she suffered so frightfully from it all that she had sought a remedy in
religion, and had at last made up her mind to repair to Lourdes, in order
to pray the Virgin to restore her husband to her and make him amend
his