A writer of great eminence, who had been a leading sceptic all his life, stayed at Lagarde for a month and became a raving devotee. His publishers (MM. Hermann Khan) punished him by refusing to receive his book upon the subject; but by some occult influence, probably that of the Jesuits, he was paid several hundreds for it by the firm of Zadoc et Cie; ten years afterwards he died of a congested liver, a catastrophe which some ascribed to a Jewish plot, and others treated as a proof that his intellect had long been failing.
A common peasant fellow, that had been paralysed for ten years, bathed in the water and walked away in a sprightly fashion afterwards. This was very likely due to his ignorance, for a doctor who narrowly watched the whole business has proved that he did not know the simplest rudiments of arithmetic or history, and how should such a fellow understand so difficult a disease as paralysis of the Taric nerve—especially if it were (as the doctor thought quite evident) complicated by a stricture of the Upper Dalmoid?
Two deaf women were, as is very commonly the case with enthusiasts of this kind, restored to their hearing; for how long we do not know, as their subsequent history was not traced for more than five years.
A dumb boy talked, but in a very broken fashion, and as he had a brother a priest and another brother in the army, trickery was suspected.
An English merchant, who had some trouble with his eyes, bathed in the water at the instance of a sister who desired to convert him. He could soon see so well that he was able to write to the Freethinker an account of his healing, called “The Medicinal Springs of Lagarde,” but, as he has subsequently gone totally blind, the momentary repute against ophthalmia which the water might have obtained was nipped in the bud.
What was most extraordinary of all, a very respectable director of a railway came to the village quietly, under an assumed name, and, after drinking the water, made a public confession of the most incredible kind and has since become a monk. His son, to whom he made over his whole fortune, had previously instituted a demand at law to be made guardian of his estates; but, on hearing of his father’s determination to embrace religion, he was too tolerant to pursue the matter further.
To cut a long story short, as Homer said when he abruptly closed the Odyssey, some 740 cases of miraculous cures occurred between the mysterious opening of the gates and the date for the trial at Grenoble. In that period a second and much larger series of buildings had begun to arise; the total property involved in the case amounted to 750,000 francs, and (by clause 61 of the Regulation on Civil Tribunals) the local court of assize was no longer competent. Before, however, the case could be removed to Paris, the assent of the Grenoble bench had to be formally obtained, and this, by the singularly Republican rule of “Non-avant” (instituted by Louis XI.), took just two years. By that time the new buildings were finished, eight priests were attached to the Church, a monastery of seventy-two monks, five hotels, a golf links, and a club were in existence. The total taxes paid by Lagarde to the Treasury amounted to half-a-million francs a year.
The Government had become willing (under the “Compromise of ’49,” which concerns Departments v. the State in the matter of internal communications) to build a fine, great road up to Lagarde. There was also a railway, a Custom House, and a project of sub-prefecture. Moreover, in some underhand way or other, several hundred people a month were cured of various ailments, from the purely subjective (such as buzzing in the ears) to those verging upon the truly objective (such as fracture of the knee-pan or the loss of an eye).
The Government is that of a practical and commonsense people. It will guide or protect, but it cannot pretend to coerce. Lagarde therefore flourishes, the Bishop is venerated, the monastery grumbles in silence, and there is some talk of an Hungarian journalist, born in Constantinople, whose father did time for cheating in the Russian Army, writing one of his fascinating anti-religious romances in nine hundred pages upon the subject. You will learn far more from such a book than you can possibly learn from the narrow limits of the above.