reassure. To leave Lourdes at the end was like leaving home.

After a few minutes before the Grotto, we climbed the hill behind, made
an appointment for my Mass on the morrow; and, taking the car again,
moved slowly through the crowded streets, and swiftly along the country
roads, up to Argelès, nearly a dozen miles away.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The epithet is deliberate. He relates in his book, "Lourdes," the
story of an imaginary case of a girl, suffering from tuberculosis, who
goes to Lourdes as a pilgrim, and is, apparently, cured of her disease.
It breaks out, however, again during her return home; and the case would
appear therefore to be one of those in which, owing to fierce excitement
and the mere power of suggestion, there is a temporary amelioration, but
no permanent, or supernatural, cure. Will it be believed that the
details of this story, all of which are related with great
particularity, and observed by Zola himself, were taken from an actual
case that occurred during one of his visits--all the details except the
relapse? There was no relapse: the cure was complete and permanent. When
Dr. Boissarie later questioned the author as to the honesty of this
literary device, saying that he had understood him to have stated that
he had come to Lourdes for the purpose of an impartial investigation,
Zola answered that the characters in the book were his own, and that he
could make them do what he liked. It is on these principles that the
book is constructed. It must be added that Zola followed up the case,
and had communications with the _miraculée_ long after her cure had been
shown to be permanent, and before his book appeared.