practical
intellect, which enabled him to govern his diocese with great good sense.
Impatient and ardent people nicknamed him Saint Thomas at the time, on
account of the manner in which his doubts persisted until events at last
forced his hand. Indeed, he turned a deaf ear to all the stories that
were being related, firmly resolved as he was that he would only listen
to them if it should appear certain that religion had nothing to lose.

However, the persecutions were about to become more pronounced. The
Minister of Worship in Paris, who had been informed of what was going on,
required that a stop should be put to all disorders, and so the Prefect
caused the approaches to the Grotto to be occupied by the military. The
Grotto had already been decorated with vases of flowers offered by the
zeal of the faithful and the gratitude of sufferers who had been healed.
Money, moreover, was thrown into it; gifts to the Blessed Virgin
abounded. Rudimentary improvements, too, were carried out in a
spontaneous way; some quarrymen cut a kind of reservoir to receive the
miraculous water, and others removed the large blocks of stone, and
traced a path in the hillside. However, in presence of the swelling
torrents of people, the Prefect, after renouncing his idea of arresting
Bernadette, took the serious resolution of preventing all access to the
Grotto by placing a strong palisade in front of it. Some regrettable
incidents had lately occurred; various children pretended that they had
seen the devil, some of them being guilty of simulation in this respect,
whilst others had given way to real attacks of hysteria, in the
contagious nervous unhinging which was so prevalent. But what a terrible
business did the removal of the offerings from the Grotto prove! It was
only towards evening that the Commissary was able to find a girl willing
to let him have a cart on hire, and two hours later this girl fell from a
loft and broke one of her ribs. Likewise, a man who had lent an axe had
one of his feet crushed on the morrow by the fall of a block of stone.*
It was in the midst of jeers and hisses that the Commissary carried off
the pots of flowers, the tapers which he found burning, the coppers and
the silver hearts which lay upon the sand. People clenched their fists,
and covertly called him "thief" and "murderer." Then the posts for the
palisades were planted in the ground, and the rails were nailed to the
crossbars, no little labour being perfor