anything for the least of the miracles
they denied. For well-nigh fifty years they worked away, embellishing
with fables and anecdotes their Legend of the Sacred Heart, the story
of Mary Alacoque. For twenty-five or thirty years they had been trying
to convince the world that their helpmate, James II. of England, not
content with healing the king's evil (in his character of King of
France), amused himself after his death in making the dumb to speak,
the lame to walk straight, and the squint-eyed to see properly. They
who were cured squinted worse than ever. As for the dumb, it so
chanced that she who played this part was a manifest rogue, caught in
the very act of stealing. She roamed the provinces: at every chapel of
any renowned saint she was healed by a miracle and received alms, and
then began her work again elsewhere.

For getting wonders wrought the South was a better country. There
might be found a plenty of nervous women, easy to excite, the very
ones to make into somnambulists, subjects of miracle, bearers of
mystic marks, and so forth.

At Marseilles the Jesuits had on their side a bishop, Belzunce, a
bold, hearty sort of man, renowned in the memorable plague,[107] but
credulous and narrow-minded withal; under whose countenance many a
bold venture might be made. Beside him they had placed a Jesuit of
Franche-Comte, not wanting in mind, whose austere outside did not
prevent his preaching pleasantly, in an ornate and rather worldly
style, such as the ladies loved. A true Jesuit, he made his way by two
different methods, now by feminine intrigue, anon by his holy
utterances. Girard had on his side neither years nor figure; he was a
man of forty-seven, tall, withered, weak-looking, of dirty aspect, and
given to spitting without end.[108] He had long been a tutor, even
till he was thirty-seven; and he preserved some of his college tastes.
For the last ten years, namely, ever since the great plague, he had
been confessor to the nuns. With them he had fared well, winning over
them a high degree of power by enforcing a method seemingly quite at
variance with the Provencial temperament, by teaching the doctrine and
the discipline of a mystic death, of absolute passiveness, of entire
forgetfulness of self. The dreadful crisis through which they had just
passed had deadened their spirits, and weakened hearts already
unmanned by a kind of morbid languor. Under Girard's leading, the
Carmelites of Marseilles carried their