My excellent good Dreyfusards, anti-Dreyfusards, Baptists,
Anabaptists, pre-Monstratentians, antiquaries, sterling fellows,
foreign correspondents, home-readers, historians, Nestorians,
philosophers, Deductionists, Inductionists, Prætorians (I forgot
those), Cæsarists, Lazarists, Catholics, Protestants, Agnostics
and militant atheists, as also all you Churchmen, Nonconformists,
Particularists, very strong secularists, and even you, my
well-beloved little brethren called The Peculiar People, give ear
attentively and listen to what is to follow, and you shall learn
more of a matter that has wofully disturbed you than ever you would
get from the _Daily Mail_ or from Mynheer van Damm, or even from
Dr. Biggies’ _Walks and Talks in France_.
In an upper valley of the Dauphiné there is a village called
Lagarde. From this village, at about half-past four o’clock of a
pleasant June morning, there walked out with his herd one Jean
Rigors, a herdsman and half-wit. He had not proceeded very far
towards the pastures above the village, and the sun was barely
showing above the peak profanely called The Three Bishops, when he
had the fortune to meet the Blessed St. Loup, or Lupus, formerly
a hermit in that valley, who had died some fourteen hundred years
ago, but whose name, astonishing as it may seem to the author
of _The Justification of Fame_, is still remembered among the
populace. The Blessed Lupus admonished the peasant, recalling the
neglect into which public worship had fallen, reluctantly promised
a sign whereby it might be re-created among the faithful, and
pointed out a nasty stream of muddy water, one out of fifty that
trickled from the moss of the Alps. He then struck M. Rigors a
slight, or, as some accounts have it, a heavy, blow with his staff,
and disappeared in glory.
Jean Rigors, who could not read or write, being a man over thirty,
and having therefore forgotten the excellent free lessons provided
by the Republic in primary schools, was not a little astonished
at the apparition. Having a care to tether a certain calf whom
he knew to be light-headed, he left the rest of the herd to its
own unerring instincts, and ran back to the village to inform the
parish priest of the very remarkable occurrence of which he had
been the witness or victim. He found upon his return that the
morning Mass, from which he had been absent off and on for some
seven years, was already at the Gospel, and attended to it with
quite singular devotion, until in the space of some seventeen
minutes he was able to meet the priest in the sacristy and inform
him of what had happened.
The priest, who had heard of such miraculous appearances in other
villages, but (being a humble man, unfitted for worldly success
and idiotic in business matters) had never dared to hope that one
would be vouchsafed to his own cure, proceeded at once to the
source of the muddy streamlet, and (unhistorical as the detail
may seem to the author of _Our Old Europe, Whence and Whither_?)
neglected to reward the hind, who, indeed, did not expect pecuniary
remuneration, for these two excellent reasons:--First, that he knew
the priest to be by far the poorest man in the parish; secondly,
that he thought a revelation from the other world incommensurate
with money payments even to the extent of a five-franc piece. The
next Sunday (that is, three days afterwards) the priest, who had
previously informed his brethren throughout the Canton, preached
a sermon upon the decay of religion and the growing agnosticism
of the modern world--a theme which, as they had heard it publicly
since the Christian religion had been established by Constantine
in those parts and privately for one hundred and twenty-five years
before, his congregation received with some legitimate languor.
When, however, he came to what was the very gist of his remarks,
the benighted foreigners pricked up their ears (a physical atavism
impossible to our own more enlightened community), and Le Sieur
Rigors, who could still remember the greater part of the services
of the Church, was filled with a mixture of nervousness and pride,
while the good priest informed his hearers, in language that would
have been eloquent had he not been trained in the little seminary,
that the great St. Lupus himself had appeared to a devout member of
his parish and had pointed out to him a miraculous spring, for the
proper enshrinement of which he requested--nay, he demanded--the
contributions of the faithful.
At that one sitting the excellent hierarch received no less a sum
than 1053 francs and 67 centimes; the odd two-centimes (a coin that
has disappeared from the greater part of France) being contributed
by a road-mender, who was well paid by the State, but who was in
the custom of receiving charity from tourists; the said tourists
being under the erroneous impression that he was a beggar. He also,
by the way, would entertain the more Anglo-Saxon of these with the
folk-lore of the district, in which his fertile imagination was
never at fault.
It will seem astonishing to the author of _Village Communities in
Western Europe_ to hear of so large a sum as £40 being subscribed
by the congregation of this remote village, and it would seem
still more astonishing to him could he see the very large chapel
erected over the spring of St. Loup. I do not say that he would
understand the phenomenon, but I do say that he would become a
more perturbed and therefore a wiser man did he know the following
four facts:--(1) That the freehold value of the village and its
communal land, amounting to the sum of a poor £20,000, was not
in the possession of a landlord, but in that of these wretched
peasants. (2) That the one rich man of the neighbourhood, a retired
glove-maker, being also a fanatic, presented his subscriptions in
such a manner that they were never heard of. He had, moreover, an
abhorrence for the regulation of charity. (3) That the master mason
in the neighbouring town had in his youth been guilty of several
mortal sins, and was so weak as to imagine that a special tender
would in such a case make a kind of reparation; and (4) that the
labourers employed were too ignorant to cheat and too illiterate to
combine.
The new shrine waxed and prospered exceedingly, and on the Thursday
following its dedication an epileptic, having made use of the
water, was restored to a normal, and even commonplace, state of
mind. On the Friday a girl, who said that she had been haunted
by devils (though until then no one had heard of the matter),
declared, upon drinking a cup from the spring of St. Loup, that
she was now haunted by angels--a very much pleasanter condition
of affairs. The Sunday following, the village usurer, who called
himself Bertollin, but who was known to be a wicked foreigner from
beyond the Alps, of the true name of Bertolino, ran into the inn
like one demented, and threw down the total of his ill-gotten gains
for the benefit of the shrine. They amounted, indeed, to but a
hundred francs, but then his clientèle were close and skin-flint,
as peasant proprietors and free men generally are the world over;
and it was well known that the cobbler, who had himself borrowed a
small sum for a month, and quadrupled it in setting up lodgings
for artists, had been unable to recover from the usurer the mending
of his boots.
By this time the Bishop had got wind of the new shrine, and
wrote to the Curé of Lagarde a very strong letter, in which,
after reciting the terms of the Concordat, Clause 714 of the
Constitution and the decree of May 29th, 1854, he pointed out
that by all these and other fundamental or organic laws of the
Republic, he was master in his own diocese. He rebuked the curé
for the superstitious practice which had crept into his cure,
ordered the chapel to be used for none but ordinary purposes, and
issued a pastoral letter upon the evils of local superstitions.
This pastoral letter was read with unction and holy mirth in the
neighbouring monastery of Bernion (founded in defiance of the law
by the widow of a President of the Republic), but with sorrow and
without comment in the little church of Lagarde.
The Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Public Worship,
each in his separate way, proceeded to stamp out this survival of
the barbaric period of Europe. The first by telling the Prefect to
tell the sub-Prefect to tell the Mayor that any attempt to levy
taxes in favour of the shrine would be administratively punished:
the second by writing a sharp official note to the Bishop for
not having acted on the very day that St. Loup appeared to the
benighted herdsman. The sub-Prefect came from the horrible town of
La Rochegayere and lunched with the Mayor, who was the donor of the
new stained-glass window in the church, and they talked about the
advantages of forcing the Government to construct a road through
the valley to accommodate the now numerous pilgrims; a subject
which the sub-Prefect, who was about to be promoted, approached
with official nonchalance, but the Mayor (who owned the principal
inn) with pertinacity and fervour. They then went out, the Mayor in
his tricolour scarf to lock up the gate in front of the holy well,
the sub-Prefect to escort his young wife to the presbytery, where
she left a gift of 500 francs: the sub-Prefect thought it improper
for a lady to walk alone.
Upon the closure of the shrine a local paper (joint property of
the Bishop and a railway contractor) attacked the atheism of
the Government. A local duchess, who was ignorant of the very
terminology of religion, sent a donation of five thousand francs to
the curé; with this the excellent man built a fine approach to the
new chapel, “which,” as he sorrowfully and justly observed, “the
faithful may approach, though an atheistic Government forbids the
use of the shrine.” That same week, by an astonishing accident, the
Ministry was overturned; the Minister of the Interior was compelled
to retire into private life, and lived dependent upon his uncle (a
Canon of Rheims). The Minister of Public Worship (who had become
increasingly unpopular through the growth of anti-Semitic feeling)
took up his father’s money-lending business at Antwerp.
Next week the lock and seals were discovered to have been in some
inexplicable way removed from the gate of the well and (by Article
893 of the Administrative Code) before they could be replaced an
action was necessary at the assize-town of Grenoble. This action
(by the Order of 1875 on Law Terms) could not take place for six
months; and in that interval an astonishing number of things
happened at Lagarde.
An old Sapper General, who had devised the special obturator for
light quick-firing guns, and who was attached to the most backward
superstitions, came in full uniform to the Chapel and gave the
shrine 10,000 francs: a mysteriously large endowment, as this sum
was nearly half his income, and he had suffered imprisonment in
youth for his Republican opinions. He said it was for the good
of his soul, but the editor of the _Horreur_ knew better, and
denounced him. He was promptly retired upon a pension about a third
greater than that to which he was legally entitled, and received
by special secret messenger from the Minister of War an earnest
request to furnish a memorandum on the fortifications of the Isère
and to consider himself inspector, upon mobilisation, of that
important line of defence.
Two monks, who had walked all the way from Spain, settled in a
house near the well. A pilgrim, who had also evidently come from a
prodigious distance on foot, but gave false information as to his
movements, was arrested by the police and subsequently released.
The arrest was telegraphed to the _Times_ and much commented upon,
but the suicide of a prominent London solicitor and other important
news prevented any mention of his release.
A writer of great eminence, who had been a leading sceptic all his
life, stayed at Lagarde for a month and became a raving devotee.
His publishers (MM. Hermann Khan) punished him by refusing to
receive his book upon the subject; but by some occult influence,
probably that of the Jesuits, he was paid several hundreds for
it by the firm of Zadoc et Cie; ten years afterwards he died of
a congested liver, a catastrophe which some ascribed to a Jewish
plot, and others treated as a proof that his intellect had long
been failing.
A common peasant fellow, that had been paralysed for ten years,
bathed in the water and walked away in a sprightly fashion
afterwards. This was very likely due to his ignorance, for a doctor
who narrowly watched the whole business has proved that he did
not know the simplest rudiments of arithmetic or history, and how
should such a fellow understand so difficult a disease as paralysis
of the Taric nerve--especially if it were (as the doctor thought
quite evident) complicated by a stricture of the Upper Dalmoid?
Two deaf women were, as is very commonly the case with enthusiasts
of this kind, restored to their hearing; for how long we do not
know, as their subsequent history was not traced for more than five
years.
A dumb boy talked, but in a very broken fashion, and as he had a
brother a priest and another brother in the army, trickery was
suspected.
An English merchant, who had some trouble with his eyes, bathed
in the water at the instance of a sister who desired to convert
him. He could soon see so well that he was able to write to the
_Freethinker_ an account of his healing, called “The Medicinal
Springs of Lagarde,” but, as he has subsequently gone totally
blind, the momentary repute against ophthalmia which the water
might have obtained was nipped in the bud.
What was most extraordinary of all, a very respectable director
of a railway came to the village quietly, under an assumed name,
and, after drinking the water, made a public confession of the most
incredible kind and has since become a monk. His son, to whom he
made over his whole fortune, had previously instituted a demand
at law to be made guardian of his estates; but, on hearing of his
father’s determination to embrace religion, he was too tolerant to
pursue the matter further.
To cut a long story short, as Homer said when he abruptly closed
the _Odyssey_, some 740 cases of miraculous cures occurred
between the mysterious opening of the gates and the date for
the trial at Grenoble. In that period a second and much larger
series of buildings had begun to arise; the total property
involved in the case amounted to 750,000 francs, and (by clause
61 of the Regulation on Civil Tribunals) the local court of
assize was no longer competent. Before, however, the case could
be removed to Paris, the assent of the Grenoble bench had to be
formally obtained, and this, by the singularly Republican rule of
“_Non-avant_” (instituted by Louis XI.), took just two years.
By that time the new buildings were finished, eight priests were
attached to the Church, a monastery of seventy-two monks, five
hotels, a golf links, and a club were in existence. The total taxes
paid by Lagarde to the Treasury amounted to half-a-million francs a
year.
The Government had become willing (under the “Compromise of
’49,” which concerns Departments _v._ the State in the matter
of internal communications) to build a fine, great road up to
Lagarde. There was also a railway, a Custom House, and a project of
sub-prefecture. Moreover, in some underhand way or other, several
hundred people a month were cured of various ailments, from the
purely subjective (such as buzzing in the ears) to those verging
upon the truly objective (such as fracture of the knee-pan or the
loss of an eye).
The Government is that of a practical and commonsense people. It
will guide or protect, but it cannot pretend to coerce. Lagarde
therefore flourishes, the Bishop is venerated, the monastery
grumbles in silence, and there is some talk of an Hungarian
journalist, born in Constantinople, whose father did time for
cheating in the Russian Army, writing one of his fascinating
anti-religious romances in nine hundred pages upon the subject. You
will learn far more from such a book than you can possibly learn
from the narrow limits of the above.