Ah! the dear child,
how happy, how happy she must have been!"
As Madame Vincent finished, two tears fell from her cheeks on to the pale
face of her little girl, whom she kissed distractedly.
The general interest was still increasing, becoming quite impassioned.
The rapturous joy born of these beautiful stories, in which Heaven
invariably triumphed over human reality, transported these childlike
souls to such a point that those who were suffering the most grievously
sat up in their turn, and recovered the power of speech. And with the
narratives of one and all was blended a thought of the sufferer's own
ailment, a belief that he or she would also be cured, since a malady of
the same description had vanished like an evil dream beneath the breath
of the Divinity.
"Ah!" stammered Madame Vetu, her articulation hindered by her sufferings,
"there was another one, Antoinette Thardivail, whose stomach was being
eaten away like mine. You would have said that dogs were devouring it,
and sometimes there was a swelling in it as big as a child's head.
Tumours indeed were ever forming in it, like fowl's eggs, so that for
eight months she brought up blood. And she also was at the point of
death, with nothing but her skin left on her bones, and dying of hunger,
when she drank some water of Lourdes and had the pit of her stomach
washed with it. Three minutes afterwards, her doctor, who on the previous
day had left her almost in the last throes, scarce breathing, found her
up and sitting by the fireside, eating a tender chicken's wing with a
good appetite.
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