And you should have heard the
tales that went about, the quiet affirmations, the expressions of
absolute certainty which were exchanged whenever a delirious patient
cried out that she was cured. Another! Yet another! However, a piteous
voice would at times exclaim: "Ah! she's cured; that one; she's lucky,
she is!"
Already, at the Verification Office, Pierre had suffered from this
credulity of the folk among whom he lived. But here it surpassed
everything he could have imagined; and he was exasperated by the
extravagant things he heard people say in such a placid fashion, with the
open smiles of children. Accordingly he tried to absorb himself in his
thoughts and listen to nothing. "O God!" he prayed, "grant that my reason
may be annihilated, that I may no longer desire to understand, that I may
accept the unreal and impossible." For a moment he thought the spirit of
inquiry dead within him, and allowed the cry of supplication to carry him
away: "Lord, heal our sick! Lord, heal our sick!" He repeated this appeal
with all his charity, clasped his hands, and gazed fixedly at the statue
of the Virgin, until he became quite giddy, and imagined that the figure
moved. Why should he not return to a state of childhood like the others,
since happiness lay in ignorance and falsehood? Contagion would surely
end by acting; he would become nothing more than a grain of sand among
innumerable other grains, one of the humblest among the humble ones under
the millstone, who trouble not about the power that crushes them.
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