hey were easy, for they knew her, so gentle
and so humble in her fear of becoming divine, in her ignorance of the
colossal machine which she had put in motion, and the working of which
would have made her recoil with affright had she understood it. No, no!
that was no longer her land, that place of crowds, of violence and
trafficking. She would have suffered too much there, she would have been
out of her element, bewildered, ashamed. And so, when pilgrims bound
thither asked her with a smile, "Will you come with us?" she shivered
slightly, and then hastily replied, "No, no! but how I should like to,
were I a little bird!"

Her reverie alone was that little travelling bird, with rapid flight and
noiseless wings, which continually went on pilgrimage to the Grotto. In
her dreams, indeed, she must have continually lived at Lourdes, though in
the flesh she had not even gone there for either her father's or her
mother's funeral. Yet she loved her kin; she was anxious to procure work
for her relations who had remained poor, and she had insisted on seeing
her eldest brother, who, coming to Nevers to complain, had been refused
admission to the convent. However, he found her weary and resigned, and
she did not ask him a single question about New Lourdes, as though that
rising town were no longer her own. The year of the crowning of the
Virgin, a priest whom she had deputed to pray for her before the Grotto
came back and told her of the never-to-be forgotten wonders of the
ceremony, the hundred thousand pilgrims who had flocked to it, and the
five-and-thirty bishops in golden vestments who had assembled in the
resplendent Basilica. Whilst listening, she trembled with her customary
little quiver of desire and anxiety. And when the priest exclaimed, "Ah!
if you had only seen that pomp!" she answered: "Me! I was much better
here in my little corner in the infirmary." They had robbed her of her
glory; her work shone forth resplendently amidst a continuous hosanna,
and she only tasted joy in forgetfulness, in the gloom of the cloister,
where the opulent farmers of the Grotto forgot her. It was never the
re-echoing solemnities that prompted her mysterious journeys; the little
bird of her soul only winged its lonesome flight to Lourdes on days of
solitude, in the peaceful hours when no one could there disturb its
devotions. It was before the wild primitive Grotto that she returned to
kneel, amongst the bushy eglantine, as in the days when