In view of so many carefully-collected and publicly-certified facts, so striking in their nature; in view, moreover, of the conscientious and thorough inquiry made by the commission, together with the formal and united declarations of medicine and chemistry, the bishop could no longer remain unconvinced.
Nevertheless, on account of that spirit of extreme prudence which we have before remarked, Monseigneur Laurence, before giving the solemn episcopal verdict in this matter, demanded a still further guaranty of these miraculous cures—the proof of time. He allowed three years to pass. A second examination was then made. The miraculous cures still held good. No one appeared to retract former testimony or to contest any of the facts. The works of him who rules over eternity had nothing to fear from the test of time.
After this overwhelming series of proofs and certainty, Monseigneur Laurence at length pronounced the judgment which all had been awaiting. We give below its general features.
PÈRE JACQUES AND MADEMOISELLE ADRIENNE.
A SKETCH AFTER THE BLOCUS.
It was just five months since I had left it, the bright, proud Babylon, beautiful and brave and wicked, clothed in scarlet and feasting sumptuously. King Chanticleer, strutting on the Boulevards, was crowing loudly, and the myriad tribe of the Coq Gaulois, strutting up and down the city, crowed loud and shrill in responsive chorus—petits crévés, and petits mouchards, and petits gamins, and all that was petit in that grand, foolish cityful of humanity. Bedlam was abroad, singing and crowing and barking itself rabid, and scaring away from Babylon all that was not bedlam. But there were many in Babylon who were not afraid of the bedlam, who believed that crowing would by-and-by translate itself into action, into those seeds of desperate daring that none but madmen can accomplish, and that, when the bugle sounded, these bragging, swaggering maniacs would shoulder the musket, and, rushing to the fore, save France or die for her. No one saved her, but many did rush to the fore, and die for her. They were not lunatics, though, at least not many of them. The lunatics showed, as they have often done before, that there was method in their madness. They cheered on the sane, phlegmatic brethren to death and glory, while they stayed prudently at home to keep up the spirits of the capital; they were the spirit and soul of the defence, the others were but the bone and muscle of it. What is a body without a soul? The frail arm of the flesh without the nerve and strength of the spirit? Pshaw! If it were not for the crowing of King Chanticleer, there would have been no siege at all; the whole concern would have collapsed in its cradle.
The story of that Blocus has yet to be written. Of its outward and visible story, many volumes, and scores of volumes, good and bad, true and false, have been already written. But the inward story, the arcana of the defence, the exposition of that huge, blundering machine that, with its springs and levers, and wheels within wheels, snapped and broke and collapsed in the driver's hand, all this is still untold. The great Pourquoi? is still unanswered. History will solve the riddle some day, no doubt, as it solves most riddles, but before that time comes, other, grander problems of greater import to us will have been solved too, and we shall care but little for the true story of the Blocus.
"Yes, monsieur," said my concierge, when we met and talked over the events that had passed since the first of September, when I fled and left my goods and chattels to her care and the tender mercies of the Prussians and the Reds—"yes, monsieur, it is very wonderful that one doesn't hear of anybody having died of cold, though the winter was so terrible, and the fuel so scarce. It ran short almost from the beginning. We had nothing but green sticks that couldn't be persuaded to burn and do our best. I used to sit shivering in my bed, while the petiots tried to warm themselves skipping in the porte-cochère, or running up and down from the cintième till their little legs were dead beat. O Mon Dieu! je me rapellerai de cette guerre en tous les sens, monsieur."