have even seen it happen that my daughter-in-law and myself, and her
friend Madame de Bois-Sombre, and old Mère Julie from the market, have
formed the whole congregation. Figure to yourself the _bon Dieu_ and all
the blessed saints looking down from heaven to hear--four persons only
in our great Cathedral! I trust that I know that the good God does not
despise even two or three; but if any one will think of it--the great
bells rung, and the candles lighted, and the curé in his beautiful
robes, and all the companies of heaven looking on--and only us four!
This shows the neglect of all sacred ordinances that was in Semur.
While, on the other hand, what grasping there was for money; what fraud
and deceit; what foolishness and dissipation! Even the Mère Julie
herself, though a devout person, the pears she sold to us on the last
market day before these events, were far, very far, as she must have
known, from being satisfactory. In the same way Gros-Jean, though a
peasant from our own village near La Clairière, and a man for whom we
have often done little services, attempted to impose upon me about the
wood for the winter's use, the very night before these occurrences. 'It
is enough,' I cried out, 'to bring the dead out of their graves.' I did
not know--the holy saints forgive me!--how near it was to the moment
when this should come true.

And perhaps it is well that I should admit without concealment that I am
not one of the women to whom it has been given to see those who came
back. There are moments when I will not deny I have asked myself why
those others should have been so privileged and never I. Not even in a
dream do I see those whom I have lost; yet I think that I too have loved
them as well as any have been loved. I have stood by their beds to the
last; I have closed their beloved eyes. _Mon Dieu! mon Dieu!_ have not I
drunk of that cup to the dregs? But never to me, never to me, has it
been permitted either to see or to hear. _Bien_! it has been so ordered.