It was indeed the cry of heavenly charity bursting forth, the invisible helping hand stretched out at last to dress the eternal sores of humanity.

Ah! that dream in which each successive generation sought refuge, with what indestructible energy did it not arise among the disinherited ones of this world as soon as it found a favourable spot, prepared by circumstances! And for centuries, perhaps, circumstances had never so combined to kindle the mystical fire of faith as they did at Lourdes.
* I give this name as written by M.Zola; but in other works on Lourdes I find it given as "Bernarde Loubie--a bed-ridden old woman, cured of a paralytic affection by drinking the water of the Grotto."-- Trans.
A new religion was about to be founded, and persecutions at once began, for religions only spring up amidst vexations and rebellions.

And even as it was long ago at Jerusalem, when the tidings of miracles spread, the civil authorities--the Public Prosecutor, the Justice of the Peace, the Mayor, and particularly the Prefect of Tarbes--were all roused and began to bestir themselves.

The Prefect was a sincere Catholic, a worshipper, a man of perfect honour, but he also had the firm mind of a public functionary, was a passionate defender of order, and a declared adversary of fanaticism which gives birth to disorder and religious perversion.
Under his orders at Lourdes there was a Commissary of Police, a man of great intelligence and shrewdness, who had hitherto discharged his functions in a very proper way, and who, legitimately enough, beheld in this affair of the apparitions an opportunity to put his gift of sagacious skill to the proof.

So the struggle began, and it was this Commissary who, on the first Sunday in Lent, at the time of the first apparitions, summoned Bernadette to his office in order that he might question her.