These trifling incidents caused by little annoyance to the Prefect. He had as little faith in maladies as he had in cure proceeding from Heaven.
The attitude assumed by the Abbé Peyramale―which though not menacing was inflexible―and his determination to take a personal part in protecting Bernadette against the projected arrest, troubled Baron Massy much more than any signs of heavenly wrath. God, in a word, made him less uneasy than the Curé.
The refusal of M. Lacadé to proceed to that violent measure; his offer of resignation―a most singular circumstance on the part of so timid a functionary―the visible dissatisfaction of the Mayors of the canton, with the speech made at the Council of Revision; The symptoms of serious effervescence with which the removal of the ex-votos from the Grotto had been received; the incertitude as to whether the Gendarmes and soldiers who, as regarded Bernadette, participated in the general enthusiasm and veneration, would passively obey the orders they might receive―all this supplied the Prefect with food for reflection. He plainly saw that, in the midst of so many unpleasant conjunctures, the incarceration of the youthful Seer might be attended with the most disastrous consequences.
It was not that he would not willingly have braved an outbreak. Some of the details we have given would lead us to imagine that such had been the object of his secret wishes. But a general rising of the population, preceded by the resignation of the Mayor, complicated by the personal interference of one of the most universally respected Priests in the Diocese, followed, in all probability by a complaint to the Council of State of arbitrary sequestration, and accompanied by energetic protestations from the Catholic, or simply independent portion of the Press, assumed a serious character which could not fail of forcibly striking a man of so much intelligence and attachment to the duties of his office as Baron Massy.
It was, however, a bitter trial to the proud Prefect to pause in the execution of this radical measure, which he had so publicly announced on the eve of the Council of Revision; and assuredly he could not have brought himself to it, if the report furnished by the medical men had certified the madness of hallucination of the youthful Seer, instead of adducing a simple and hesitating hypothesis. Had Bernadette really been suffering from an attack of mental alienation, nothing would have been easier for the Prefect than to have ordered a second examination; nothing more easy than to have the child’s cerebral disease attested by two other doctors chosen from among the scientific notabilities of the place, and with sufficient authority, as men of learning, to impose their decision on public opinion. But M. Massy, being fully acquainted with the interrogatories to which Bernadette had been submitted, was aware that it was impossible to find any medical man in his right senses who would not acknowledge and declare, as everyone else did, the child’s perfect possession of reason, her uprightness of mind and entire good faith. Before the evidence of such a situation, in presence of the moral and almost material impossibilities which unexpectedly stood up before him, the wary Prefect, notwithstanding his notorious obstinacy, found himself obliged to pause and proceed no further. The force of circumstances condemned him to inaction. As to entirely retracing his steps and revoking the measure which had already been put into execution publicly by Jacomet at the Rocks of Massabielle, such a solution of the difficulty could never once enter Baron Massy’s mind. The removal of the various objects from the Grotto having been accomplished, was persisted in. But the youthful Seer remained free, and doubtless wholly unconscious, between the time of her morning and night prayers, of the storm which had passed over her head, but which had not burst.
The civil authority, by this abortive and never repeated attempt, certified itself, the absolute impossibility of proving Bernadette to be laboring under the slightest cerebral derangement. By leaving the youthful Seer at large, after having attempted to shut her up, official power, in spite of itself, paid public homage to the entire soundness of her reason and her intelligence. By these badly aimed blows, Unbelief wounded herself by her own weapons, and served the very cause she claimed to attack. Let us not, however, accuse her of clumsiness. It must be difficult to struggle against evidence, and in a combat of such a nature the grossest blunders are inevitable.
However, if M. Massy modified in some respects the outline of his projects, he persisted invincibly in the ultimate object of his designs. The only concession he would sometimes make to the course of events was to abandon a means acknowledged to be useless and dangerous, in order to adopt one apparently more adapted to his purpose, and to outflank the difficulties it was impossible for him to crush or break through. In a word, if he changed his tactics, his resolutions remained unchanged. He did not retreat, he endeavored to out-manœuvre his foe.
Now the incarceration of Bernadette was but a means. The important principle and ultimate object was the radical overthrow of Superstition, and the final defeat of the Supernatural.
M. Massy be no means ceased to hope. He had the “full assurance,” he loftily observed, of shortly coming to an end of the increasing difficulties of his situation. That he, a Prefect of the Empire, a Baron, a Massy should be vanquished by the nursery tales of a childish shepherd-girl, and confounded by the phantom of a chimerical Apparition, would have been insupportable to his pride, and appeared impossible to his genius.
If he was therefore compelled to give up the idea of having poor Bernadette shut up on the plea of insanity, in spite of the speech he delivered on the 4th of May, he was only the more on that account determined to put a stop somehow or other to the progress and encroachments of Fanaticism.
The Doctrines and explanations which, for the last few days, had become the favorite theme of the Free-thinkers of those southern regions, suggested to his mind, which was already in a state of embarrassment, a new method which appeared to him truly decisive.
In order to understand how the Prefect came in a certain way to change his plan of attack, it would be well for us to glance at what was passing at that moment in the camp of those whose minds were opposed to Christianity.
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