One of the highest privileges of sovereignty is the right of granting pardon, and when a king wishes to solemnize his accession to the throne, he issues an amnesty to those who have made themselves amenable to the law.
The power of the Queen of Heaven was greater, and she exerted it in a higher degree. She willed that there should not be any guilty of crime. The Apparitions which had already taken place, and those which took place later on, were spread over two periods of three months; at the commencement of each of which the assizes were held. Now during these two judicial quarters, there was not a single crime committed or a single criminal condemned, throughout the Department. The session of the March assizes had only to examine a single case anterior to the date of the Apparitions, and this single case terminated in an acquittal. The next session, which was to be in June, had only two cases to pronounce upon, both connected with occurrences anterior to this same period.
It appears to us that this wonderful coincidence, this mysterious mark of divine influence which hovered over the whole country, this entirely extraneous proof, this moral prodigy, this miracle extending over a whole diocese, is eminently calculated to afford food for reflection to the most frivolous minds.
How came it that during so long a time the arm of the criminal was stayed? Is that imposture, hallucination or catalepsy? How was it that the sword of justice was not required to strike a blow? How came this peace, this truce of God? Precisely at that very moment. Setting aside the reason we have assigned, we challenge unbelief to endeavor to discover the cause of this surprising fact, of this strange coincidence. It will make the attempt in vain.
The Queen of Heaven had passed by, the Queen of Heaven had left her blessing.
Bernadette received constant visits from the innumerable strangers whom piety or curiosity brought in crowds to Lourdes. They were of all classes, of all professions, and of every school of philosophy. No one was offended at the simple and sincere language of the youthful Seer; no one after seeing her and hearing her speak dared to say that she was telling falsehoods.
In the midst of excited parties and numberless discussions, this little girl, by an inconceivable privilege, inspired every one with respect, and was never, for a single moment, exposed to the attacks of calumny. Such was the halo of her innocence, that she was never personally assailed: she was protected by an invisible ægis.
Bernadette was, in every respect, a child of very ordinary intelligence, but she seemed to rise above herself whenever she had to bear testimony to the truth of the Apparition. She was never discomposed by any objection.
Her answers, at times, displayed considerable depth of thought. M. de Ressegnier, Counselor General and formerly Deputy for the Basses-Pyrénées, came to see her, accompanied by several ladies of his family. He made her enter into the most minute details connected with the Visions.
On Bernadette telling him that the Apparition expressed herself in the patois of Béarn, he exclaimed
“You are not telling the truth, my child! God and the Blessed Virgin do not understand your patois, and know nothing of such a miserable dialect.”
“If they did not know it,” she replied, “how could we know it ourselves? And if they did not understand it, who could render us capable of understanding it?”
Her repartees were not deficient in wit.
“How could the Blessed Virgin have ordered you to eat grass? Did she take you for a beast of the field,” observed a sceptic to her one day.
“Do you think of that when you are eating salad?” she replied, smiling archly.
Her answers were remarkable for their artless simplicity. This same M. de Ressegnier happened to be speaking to her of the beauty of the Apparition at the Grotto.
“Was she as beautiful as any of the company now present,” he asked her.
Bernadette glanced slowly round the charming circle of ladies, married and unmarried, who had accompanied her visitor, and with almost a little pout of disdain she replied:
“Oh! it was quite a different thing from all that!”
“All that,” was the élite of the society of Pau.
She used to disconcert those who proposed to her subtle questions in hopes of causing her embarrassment.
“If the Curé were to formally prohibit your going to the Grotto, what would you do?” some one said to her.
“I would obey him.”
“But if you received at the same time from the Apparition a command to repair thither, how would you act between these two contrary orders?”
The child without the slightest hesitation answered at once:
“I should go to ask permission from the Curé.”
Nothing either then or later caused her to lose her graceful simplicity. She never spoke of the Apparition unless she was interrogated on the subject. She always regarded herself as the most backward of all the children at the school superintended by the Sisters, who found some difficulty in teaching her to read and write. The mind of this child was elsewhere, or, if we dared to penetrate the recesses of her exquisite nature so imbued with grace, we would rather say her soul, which doubtless felt little curiosity towards mere earthly learning, was playing truant in the thickets of Paradise.
During the hours of recreation she was confounded with the rest of her companions. She liked to play.
Sometimes a visitor, it might be a stranger from a distance, requested the Sisters to show him this youthful Seer, this being so privileged by the Lord, this beloved of the Virgin, this Bernadette whose name had already acquired so much celebrity
“There she is,” said the Sister, pointing her out with her finger among the rest of the children.
The visitor on turning his eyes in that direction beheld a little weakly child, miserably dressed, playing at base, blind-man’s buff, or with her skipping rope, entirely taken up with the pleasures of childhood. But what she preferred to any thing else was to figure as the thirtieth or fortieth in one of those immense circles which children make, holding each other’s hands and singing all the while.
The Mother of God, while visiting Bernadette, while allotting to her the part of a witness of divine things, while making her the center of vast throngs, and as it were, an object of pilgrimage, had, by a miracle greater than all the others, protected her candor and her innocence, and had granted her the extraordinary, nay, divine gift, of remaining a child.
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