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
Next came the dropsical ones: Madame Ancelin, the swelling of whose
feet, hands, and entire body subsided without anyone being able to tell
whither all the water had gone; Mademoiselle Montagnon, from whom, on
various occasions, nearly twenty quarts of water had been drawn, and
who, on again swelling, was entirely rid of the fluid by the
application of a bandage which had been dipped in the miraculous
source. And, in her case also, none of the water could be found, either
in her bed or on the floor. In the same way, not a complaint of the
stomach resisted, all disappeared with the first glass of water. There
was Marie Souchet, who vomited black blood, who had wasted to a
skeleton, and who devoured her food and recovered her flesh in two
days’ time! There was Marie Jarlaud, who had burnt herself internally
through drinking a glass of a metallic solution used for cleansing and
brightening kitchen utensils, and who felt the tumour which had
resulted from her injuries melt rapidly away. Moreover, every tumour
disappeared in this fashion, in the piscina, without leaving the
slightest trace behind. But that which caused yet greater wonderment
was the manner in which ulcers, cancers, all sorts of horrible, visible
sores were cicatrised as by a breath from on high. A Jew, an actor,
whose hand was devoured by an ulcer, merely had to dip it in the water
and he was cured. A very wealthy young foreigner, who had a wen as
large as a hen’s egg, on his right wrist, /beheld/ it dissolve. Rose
Duval, who, as a result of a white tumour, had a hole in her left
elbow, large enough to accommodate a walnut, was able to watch and
follow the prompt action of the new flesh in filling up this cavity!
The Widow Fromond, with a lip half decoyed by a cancerous formation,
merely had to apply the miraculous water to it as a lotion, and not
even a red mark remained. Marie Moreau, who experienced fearful
sufferings from a cancer in the breast, fell asleep, after laying on it
a linen cloth soaked in some water of Lourdes, and when she awoke, two
hours later, the pain had disappeared, and her flesh was once more
smooth and pink and fresh.
At last Sister Hyacinthe began to speak of the immediate and complete
cures of phthisis, and this was the triumph, the healing of that
terrible disease which ravages humanity, which unbelievers defied the
Blessed Virgin to cure, but which she did cure, it was said, by merely
raising her little finger. A hundred instances, more extraordinary one
than the other, pressed forward for citation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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