"Come, come!" said she, "we mustn't think of our little troubles. Let us
pray and sing, and the Blessed Virgin will be with us."
She herself then began the rosary according to the rite of Our Lady of
Lourdes, and all the patients and pilgrims followed her. This was the
first chaplet--the five joyful mysteries, the Annunciation, the
Visitation, the Nativity, the Purification, and Jesus found in the
Temple. Then they all began to chant the canticle: "Let us contemplate
the heavenly Archangel!" Their voices were lost amid the loud rumbling of
the wheels; you heard but the muffled surging of that human wave,
stifling within the closed carriage which rolled on and on without a
pause.
Although M. de Guersaint was a worshipper, he could never follow a hymn
to the end. He got up, sat down again, and finished by resting his elbow
on the partition and conversing in an undertone with a patient who sat
against this same partition in the next compartment. The patient in
question was a thick-set man of fifty, with a good-natured face and a
large head, completely bald. His name was Sabathier, and for fifteen
years he had been stricken with ataxia. He only suffered pain by fits and
starts, but he had quite lost the use of his legs, which his wife, who
accompanied him, moved for him as though they had been dead legs,
whenever they became too heavy, weighty like bars of lead.
"Yes, monsieur," he said, "such as you see me, I was formerly fifth-class
professor at the Lycee Charlemagne.
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