The Three Cities Trilogy: Lourdes, CompleteZola, Émile
General
The Three Cities Trilogy: Lourdes, Complete
Zola, Émile
Catholics -- Fiction; Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages -- Fiction; Clergy -- Fiction; Lourdes (France) -- Fiction
* This was one of the most notorious of the recorded cases and had
a very strange sequel subsequent to the first publication of this
work. Pierre Delannoy had been employed as a ward-assistant in one
of the large Paris hospitals from 1877 to 1881, when he came to
the conclusion that the life of an in-patient was far preferable
to the one he was leading. He, therefore, resolved to pass the
rest of his days inside different hospitals in the capacity of
invalid. He started by feigning locomotor ataxia, and for six
years deceived the highest medical experts in Paris, so curiously
did he appear to suffer. He stayed in turn in all the hospitals in
the city, being treated with every care and consideration, until
at last he met with a doctor who insisted on cauterisation and
other disagreeable remedies. Delannoy thereupon opined that the
time to be cured had arrived, and cured he became, and was
discharged. He next appeared at Lourdes, supported by crutches,
and presenting every symptom of being hopelessly crippled. With
other infirm and decrepid people he was dipped in the piscina and
so efficacious did this treatment prove that he came out another
man, threw his crutches to the ground and walked, as an onlooker
expressed it, “like a rural postman.” All Lourdes rang with the
fame of the miracle, and the Church, after starring Delannoy
round the country as a specimen of what could be done at the holy
spring, placed him in charge of a home for invalids. But this was
too much like hard work, and he soon decamped with all the money
he could lay his hands on. Returning to Paris he was admitted to
the Hospital of Ste. Anne as suffering from mental debility, but
this did not prevent him from running off one night with about
$300 belonging to a dispenser. The police were put on his track
and arrested him in May, 1895, when he tried to pass himself off
as a lunatic; but he had become by this time too well known, and
was indicted in due course. At his trial he energetically denied
that he had ever shammed, but the Court would not believe him,
and sentenced him to four years’ imprisonment with hard labour.
--Trans.
Then came all sorts of ailments. First those brought about by scrofula--a
great many more legs long incapable of service and made anew. There was
Margaret Gehier, who had suffered from coxalgia for seven-and-twenty
years, whose hip was devoured by the disease, whose left knee was
anchylosed, and who yet was suddenly able to fall upon her knees to thank
the Blessed Virgin for healing her. There was also Philomene Simonneau,
the young Vendeenne, whose left leg was perforated by three horrible
sores in the depths of which her carious bones were visible, and whose
bones, whose flesh, and whose skin were all formed afresh.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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