the
Grotto, a lighted taper in her right hand, whilst with the left she told
the beads of her rosary. She became very pale and quite beautiful,
transfigured, so to say. Her features gently ascended in her face,
lengthened into an expression of extraordinary beatitude, whilst her eyes
filled with light, and her lips parted as though she were speaking words
which could not be heard. And it was quite certain that she had no will
of her own left her, penetrated as she was by a dream, possessed by it to
such a point in the confined, exclusive sphere in which she lived, that
she continued dreaming it even when awake, and thus accepted it as the
only indisputable reality, prepared to testify to it even at the cost of
her blood, repeating it over and over again, obstinately, stubbornly
clinging to it, and never varying in the details she gave. She did not
lie, for she did not know, could not and would not desire anything apart
from it.

Forgetful of the flight of time, Pierre was now sketching a charming
picture of old Lourdes, that pious little town, slumbering at the foot of
the Pyrenees. The castle, perched on a rock at the point of intersection
of the seven valleys of Lavedan, had formerly been the key of the
mountain districts. But, in Bernadette's time, it had become a mere
dismantled, ruined pile, at the entrance of a road leading nowhere.
Modern life found its march stayed by a formidable rampart of lofty,
snow-capped peaks, and only the trans-Pyrenean railway--had it been
constructed--could have established an active circulation of social life
in that sequestered nook where human existence stagnated like dead water.
Forgotten, therefore, Lourdes remained slumbering, happy and sluggish
amidst its old-time peacefulness, with its narrow, pebble-paved streets
and its bleak houses with dressings of marble. The old roofs were still
all massed on the eastern side of the castle; the Rue de la Grotte, then
called the Rue du Bois, was but a deserted and often impassable road; no
houses stretched down to the Gave as now, and the scum-laden waters
rolled through a perfect solitude of pollard willows and tall grass. On
week-days but few people passed across the Place du Marcadal, such as
housewives hastening on errands, and petty cits airing their leisure
hours; and you had to wait till Sundays or fair days to find the
inhabitants rigged out in their best clothes and assembled on the Champ
Commun, in company with the crowd of graz