SHE was engaged in taking off her first stocking when she heard around her as it were, the sound of a blast of wind, rising in the meadow-tract with an indescribable character of irresistible might. She believed it to be a sudden hurricane, and turned herself round instinctively. To her great surprise, the poplars which border the Gave were perfectly motionless. Not the slightest breeze stirred their still branches.
“1 must have been deceived,” she said to herself. As she thought again about this noise, she did not know what to believe.
She began once more to remove her shoes and stocking.
At this moment, the impetuous roaring of this unknown blast became audible afresh.
Bernadette raised her head, gazed in front of her, and uttered, or rather strove to utter, a loud cry, which was stifled in her throat. She shuddered in all her limbs, and confounded, dazzled, and crushed in a certain manner by what she saw before her, she sank down, bowed herself entirely to the earth and fell on both knees.
A truly unheard-of spectacle had just met her gaze. The narration of the child; the innumerable interrogations which a thousand sharp-sighted and inquisitive minds have put to her since that period; the precise and minute particularities into which so many intellects on the watch for discrepancies have forced her to descend, allow us to trace—with a hand as sure of each detail as of the general physiognomy—the wonderful and astounding portrait of the marvelous Being who appeared at that instant to the eyes of the terrified and transported Bernadette.
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