And she appeared as Our Lady of Tears in that desert landscape of stubborn rocks and dismal hills.  Weeping bitterly, She had uttered reproofs and threats; and a spring, which never in the memory of man had flowed excepting at the melting of the snows, had never since been dried up.

The fame of this event spread far and wide; frantic thousands scrambled up fearful paths to a spot so high that trees could not grow there.  Caravans of the sick and dying were conveyed, God knows how, across ravines to drink the water; and maimed limbs recovered, and tumours melted away to the chanting of canticles.

Then, by degrees, after the sordid debates of a contemptible lawsuit, the reputation of La Salette dwindled to nothing; pilgrims were few, miracles were less often proclaimed.  The Virgin, it would seem, was gone; She had ceased to care for this spring of piety and these mountains.

At the present day few persons climb to La Salette but the natives of Dauphine, tourists wandering through the Alps, or invalids following the cure at the neighbouring mineral springs of La Mothe.  Conversions and spiritual graces still abound there, but bodily healing there is next to none.

“In fact,” said Durtal to himself, “the vision at La Salette became famous without its ever being known exactly why.  It may be supposed to have grown up as follows:  the report, confined at first to the village of Corps at the foot of the mountain, spread first throughout the department, was taken up by the adjacent provinces, filtered over all France, overflowed the frontier, trickled through Europe, and at last crossed the seas to land in the New World which, in its turn, felt the throb, and also came to this wilderness to hail the Virgin.

“And the circumstances attending these pilgrimages were such as might have daunted the determination of the most persevering.  To reach the little inn, perched on high near the church, the lazy rumbling of slow trains must be endured for hours, and constant changes at stations; days must be spent in the diligence, and nights in breeding-places of fleas at country inns; and after flaying your back on the carding-combs of impossible beds, you must rise at daybreak to start on a giddy climb, on foot or riding a mule, up zig-zag bridle-paths above precipices; and at last, when you are there, there are no fir trees, no beeches, no pastures, no torrents; nothing—­nothing but total solitude, and silence unbroken even by the cry of a bird, for at that height no bird is to be found.

“What a scene!” thought Durtal, calling up the memories of a journey he had made with the Abbe Gevresin and his housekeeper, since leaving La Trappe.  He remembered the horrors of a spot he had passed between Saint Georges de Commiers and La Mure, and his alarm in the carriage as the train slowly travelled across the abyss.  Beneath was darkness increasing in spirals down to the vasty deeps; above, as far as the eye could reach, piles of mountains invaded the sky.