, feeling extremely
sad.

It was only in the street that Doctor Chassaigne seemed to awaken. He
gave a slight shudder and hastened his steps, saying: "It is not
finished, my dear child; follow me. We are now going to look at the other
great iniquity." He referred to Abbe Peyramale and his church.

They crossed the Place du Porche and turned into the Rue Saint Pierre; a
few minutes would suffice them. But their conversation had again fallen
on the Fathers of the Grotto, on the terrible, merciless war waged by
Father Sempe against the former Cure of Lourdes. The latter had been
vanquished, and had died in consequence, overcome by feelings of
frightful bitterness; and, after thus killing him by grief, they had
completed the destruction of his church, which he had left unfinished,
without a roof, open to the wind and to the rain. With what a glorious
dream had that monumental edifice filled the last year of the Cure's
life! Since he had been dispossessed of the Grotto, driven from the work
of Our Lady of Lourdes, of which he, with Bernadette, had been the first
artisan, his church had become his revenge, his protestation, his own
share of the glory, the House of the Lord where he would triumph in his
sacred vestments, and whence he would conduct endless processions in
compliance with the formal desire of the Blessed Virgin. Man of authority
and domination as he was at bottom, a pastor of the multitude, a builder
of temples, he experienced a restless delight in hurrying on the work,
with the lack of foresight of an eager man who did not allow indebtedness
to trouble him, but was perfectly contented so long as he always had a
swarm of workmen busy on the scaffoldings. And thus he saw his church
rise up, and pictured it finished, one bright summer morning, all new in
the rising sun.

Ah! that vision constantly evoked gave him courage for the struggle,
amidst the underhand, murderous designs by which he felt himself to be
enveloped. His church, towering above the vast square, at last rose in
all its colossal majesty. He had decided that it should be in the
Romanesque style, very large, very simple, its nave nearly three hundred
feet long, its steeple four hundred and sixty feet high. It shone out
resplendently in the clear sunlight, freed on the previous day of the
last scaffolding, and looking quite smart in its newness, with its broad
courses of stone disposed with perfect regularity. And, in thought, he
sauntered around i