I do not believe that any assembly of men was ever thrilled by a more violent and noble emotion than that which held us in its grip at this hour, which, let it be clearly understood, was the very hour at which the world's destiny was settled for centuries and centuries. We were not guessing at it through legends and distorted narratives. We did not have to reconstruct it after uncertain documents or to conceive it according to our own feelings and imagination. It was there, that unparalleled hour. It lived before us, in a setting devoid of grandeur, a setting which seemed to us very lowly, very poverty-stricken. The bulk of the sightseers had departed. A dozen soldiers were dicing on a flat stone and drinking. Four women were standing in the shadow of a man crucified whose feet they bathed with their tears. At the summit of two other hillocks hard by, two figures were writhing on their crosses. That was all.
But what a meaning we read into this gloomy spectacle! What a frightful tragedy was enacted before our eyes! The beating of our hearts wrung with love and distress was the very beating of that Sacred Heart. Those weary eyes looked down upon the same things that we beheld, the same dry soil, the same savage faces of the soldiers, the same countenances of the grief-stricken women.
When a last vision showed us His rigid and emaciated body and His sweet ravaged head in which the dilated eyes seemed to us abnormally large, the whole crowd rose to its feet, men and women fell upon their knees and, in a profound silence that quivered with prayer, all arms were despairingly outstretched towards the dying God.
Such scenes cannot be understood by those who did not witness them. You will no more find their living presentment in the pages in which I describe them than I can find it in the newspapers of the time. The latter pile up adjectives, exclamations and apostrophes which give no idea of what the vivid reality was. On the other hand, all the articles lay stress upon the essential truth which emerges from the two films of that day and, very rightly, declare that the second explains and completes the first. Yonder also, among our distant brethren, a God was delivered to the horrors of martyrdom; and, by connecting the two events, they intended to convey to us that, like ourselves, they possessed a religious belief and ideal aspirations. In the same way, they had shown us by the death of one of their rulers and the death of one of our kings that they had known the same political upheavals. In the same way, they had shown us by visions of lovers that, like us, they yielded to the power of love. Therefore, the same stages of civilizations, the same efforts of belief, the same instincts, the same sentiments existed in both worlds.
How could messages so positive, so stimulating have failed to increase our longing to know more about it all and to communicate more closely? How could we do other than think of the questions which it was possible to put and of the problems which would be elucidated, problems of the future and the past, problems of civilization, problems of destiny?
But the same uncertainty lingered in us, keener than the day before. What would become of Noël Dorgeroux's secret? The position was this: Massignac accepted the ten millions which he was offered, but on condition that he was paid the money immediately after the performance and that he received a safe-conduct for America. Now, although the enquiries instituted at Toulouse confirmed the accusations brought against him by the maid-of-all-work, it was stated that the compact was on the point of being concluded, so greatly did the importance of Noël Dorgeroux's secret outweigh all ordinary consideration of justice and punishment. Finding itself confronted with a state of things which could not be prolonged, the government was yielding, though constraining Massignac to sell the secret under penalty of immediate arrest and posting all around him men who were instructed to lay him by the heels at the first sign of any trickery. When the iron curtain fell, twelve policemen took the place of the usual attendants.
And then began an exhibition to which special circumstances imparted so great a gravity and which was in itself so poignant and so implacable.
As on the other occasions, we did not at first grasp the significance which the scenes projected on the screen were intended to convey. These scenes passed before our eyes as swiftly as the love-scenes displayed two days before.
There was not the initial vision of the Three Eyes. We plunged straight into reality. In the middle of a garden sat a woman, young still and beautiful, dressed in the fashion of 1830. She was working at a tapestry stretched on a frame and from time to time raised her eyes to cast a fond look at a little girl playing by her side. The mother and child smiled at each other. The child left her sand-pies and came and kissed her mother.