The Three Cities Trilogy: Lourdes, Volume 1Zola, Émile
Religion
The Three Cities Trilogy: Lourdes, Volume 1
Zola, Émile
Catholics -- Fiction; Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages -- Fiction; Clergy -- Fiction; Lourdes (France) -- Fiction
First of all there were the deaf and the dumb who suddenly heard and
spoke; such as Aurelie Bruneau, who was incurably deaf, with the drums
of both ears broken, and yet was suddenly enraptured by the celestial
music of a harmonium; such also as Louise Pourchet, who on her side had
been dumb for five-and-twenty years, and yet, whilst praying in the
Grotto, suddenly exclaimed, “Hail, Mary, full of grace!” And there were
others and yet others who were completely cured by merely letting a few
drops of water fall into their ears or upon their tongues. Then came
the procession of the blind: Father Hermann, who felt the Blessed
Virgin’s gentle hand removing the veil which covered his eyes;
Mademoiselle de Pontbriant, who was threatened with a total loss of
sight, but after a simple prayer was enabled to see better than she had
ever seen before; then a child twelve years old whose corneas resembled
marbles, but who, in three seconds, became possessed of clear, deep
eyes, bright with an angelic smile. However, there was especially an
abundance of paralytics, of lame people suddenly enabled to walk
upright, of sufferers for long years powerless to stir from their beds
of misery and to whom the voice said: “Arise and walk!” Delannoy,*
afflicted with ataxia, vainly cauterised and burnt, fifteen times an
inmate of the Paris hospitals, whence he had emerged with the
concurring diagnosis of twelve doctors, feels a strange force raising
him up as the Blessed Sacrament goes by, and he begins to follow it,
his legs strong and healthy once more. Marie Louise Delpon, a girl of
fourteen, suffering from paralysis which had stiffened her legs, drawn
back her hands, and twisted her mouth on one side, sees her limbs
loosen and the distortion of her mouth disappear as though an invisible
hand were severing the fearful bonds which had deformed her. Marie
Vachier, riveted to her arm-chair during seventeen years by paraplegia,
not only runs and flies on emerging from the piscina, but finds no
trace even of the sores with which her long-enforced immobility had
covered her body. And Georges Hanquet, attacked by softening of the
spinal marrow, passes without transition from agony to perfect health;
while Leonie Charton, likewise afflicted with softening of the medulla,
and whose vertebrae bulge out to a considerable extent, feels her hump
melting away as though by enchantment, and her legs rise and
straighten, renovated and vigorous.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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