e ever engendering the life of to-morrow. And the
white train, the woeful train of every misery and every dolour, was
returning into it all at full speed, sounding in higher and higher
strains the piercing flourishes of its whistle-calls. The five hundred
pilgrims, the three hundred patients, were about to disappear in the vast
city, fall again upon the hard pavement of life after the prodigious
dream in which they had just indulged, until the day should come when
their need of the consolation of a fresh dream would irresistibly impel
them to start once more on the everlasting pilgrimage to mystery and
forgetfulness.

Ah! unhappy mankind, poor ailing humanity, hungering for illusion, and in
the weariness of this waning century distracted and sore from having too
greedily acquired science; it fancies itself abandoned by the physicians
of both the mind and the body, and, in great danger of succumbing to
incurable disease, retraces its steps and asks the miracle of its cure of
the mystical Lourdes of a past forever dead! Yonder, however, Bernadette,
the new Messiah of suffering, so touching in her human reality,
constitutes the terrible lesson, the sacrifice cut off from the world,
the victim condemned to abandonment, solitude, and death, smitten with
the penalty of being neither woman, nor wife, nor mother, because she
beheld the Blessed Virgin.

THE END

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Lourdes, by Emile Zola

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOURDES ***

***** This file should be named 8516.txt or 8516.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
http://www.gutenberg.org/8/5/1/8516/

Produced by David Widger and Dagny

Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
will be renamed.

Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules,
set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you
do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complyi