Providence meanwhile had brought together from the four winds its thousands and thousands of witnesses to the ecstatic states of the child, and in due time had given a solemn confirmation to the truth of Bernadette's story by producing a miraculous fountain before the astonished eyes of the assembled multitudes.
"There is no fountain," was then the word of unbelief. "It is an infiltration, a pool, a puddle; anything that you please, except a fountain."
But the more they publicly and solemnly denied it, the more did the stream increase, as if it had been a living being, until it acquired prodigious proportions. More than a hundred thousand litres (twenty-two thousand gallons) issued daily from this strange rock.
"It is an accident; it is a freak of chance," stammered the infidels, confounded and recoiling.
Next, events following their inevitable course, the most remarkable cures had immediately attested the miraculous nature of the fountain, and given a new and decisive proof of the divine reality of the all-powerful apparition whose mere gesture had brought forth this fountain of life under a mortal hand.
The first move of the philosophers was to deny the cures, as they had before denied Bernadette's sincerity and the existence of the fountain.
But suddenly these had become so numerous and indubitable that their opponents were obliged to take yet another step in retreat, and admit them.
"Well, granted; there are some cures certainly, but they are natural; the spring has some therapeutic ingredients," cried the unbelievers, holding in their hands some sort of a semblance of chemical analysis. And then instantaneous cures, absolutely unaccountable upon such a hypothesis, were multiplied; and at the same time, in various places, conscientious and skilful chemists declared distinctly that the Massabielle water had not any mineral properties, that it was common water, and that the official analysis of M. Latour de Trie was meant simply to please the prefect.
Driven in this way from all the intrenchments in which, after their successive defeats, they had taken refuge; pursued by the dazzling evidence of the fact; crushed by the weight of their own avowals; and not being able to take back these successive and compulsory avowals, publicly registered in their own newspapers, what remained for the philosophers and free-thinkers to do? Only to surrender humbly to truth. Only to bow the head, bend the knee, and believe; only to do that which the ripe grain does when its cells begin to fill.