pale like marble, displaying the acute inflammation of her poor,
ulcerated eyes. An aged woman stricken with imbecility, afflicted with
dreadful facial disfigurements, laughed aloud with a terrifying laugh.
And all at once an epileptic was seized with convulsions, and began
foaming on her stretcher, without, however, causing any stoppage of the
procession, which never slackened its march, lashed onward as it was by
the blizzard of feverish passion which impelled it towards the Grotto.

The bearers, the priests, and the ailing ones themselves had just
intonated a canticle, the song of Bernadette, and all rolled along amid
the besetting "Aves," so that the little carts, the litters, and the
pedestrians descended the sloping road like a swollen and overflowing
torrent of roaring water. At the corner of the Rue Saint-Joseph, near the
Plateau de la Merlasse, a family of excursionists, who had come from
Cauterets or Bagneres, stood at the edge of the footway, overcome with
profound astonishment. These people were evidently well-to-do
/bourgeois/, the father and mother very correct in appearance and
demeanour, while their two big girls, attired in light-coloured dresses,
had the smiling faces of happy creatures who are amusing themselves. But
their first feeling of surprise was soon followed by terror, a growing
terror, as if they beheld the opening of some pesthouse of ancient times,
some hospital of the legendary ages, evacuated after a great epidemic.
The two girls became quite pale, while the father and the mother felt icy
cold in presence of that endless /defile/ of so many horrors, the
pestilential emanations of which were blown full in their faces. O God!
to think that such hideousness, such filth, such suffering, should exist!
Was it possible--under that magnificently radiant sun, under those broad
heavens so full of light and joy whither the freshness of the Gave's
waters ascended, and the breeze of morning wafted the pure perfumes of
the mountains!