a massive stone pile resembling a fortress. The
windows were closed, and the whole edifice looked lifeless. Yet
everything at Lourdes came from it, and to it also everything returned.
It seemed, in fact, to the young priest that he could hear the silent,
formidable rake-stroke which extended over the entire valley, which
caught hold of all who had come to the spot, and placed both the gold and
the blood of the throng in the clutches of those reverend Fathers!
However, Gerard just then resumed in a low voice "But come, they do show
themselves, for here is the reverend superior, Father Capdebarthe
himself."

An ecclesiastic was indeed just passing, a man with the appearance of a
peasant, a knotty frame, and a large head which looked as though carved
with a billhook. His opaque eyes were quite expressionless, and his face,
with its worn features, had retained a loamy tint, a gloomy, russet
reflection of the earth. Monseigneur Laurence had really made a politic
selection in confiding the organisation and management of the Grotto to
those Garaison missionaries, who were so tenacious and covetous, for the
most part sons of mountain peasants and passionately attached to the
soil.

However, the little party now slowly retraced its steps by way of the
Plateau de la Merlasse, the broad boulevard which skirts the inclined way
on the left hand and leads to the Avenue de la Grotte. It was already
past one o'clock, but people were still eating their _dejeuners_ from one
to the other end of the overflowing town. Many of the fifty thousand
pilgrims and sight-seers collected within it had not yet been able to sit
down and eat; and Pierre, who had left the _table d'hote_ still crowded,
who had just seen the hospitallers squeezing together so gaily at the
"ordinary," found more and more tables at each step he took. On all sides
people were eating, eating without a pause. Hereabouts, however, in the
open air, on either side of the broad road, the hungry ones were humble
folk who had rushed upon the tables set up on either footway--tables
formed of a couple of long boards, flanked by two forms, and shaded from
the sun by narrow linen awnings. Broth and coffee were sold at these
places at a penny a cup. The little loaves heaped up in high baskets also
cost a penny apiece. Hanging from the poles which upheld the awnings were
sausages, chitterlings, and hams. Some of the open-air _restaurateurs_
were frying potatoes, and others were concocti