In Montgeron’s work fourteen distinct cures are minutely reported, all of persons declared by the attendant physicians to be incurable.  Each of these cures, with the documentary evidence in support of it, occupies from fifty to one hundred pages of his book.  The greater number are cases of paralysis, usually of one entire side of the body, in some instances complicated with general dropsy, in others with cancer, in others again with attacks of apoplexy.  There are four cases where the eyesight was restored,—­one of them of a lachrymal fistula; one of a young Spanish nobleman, who suddenly recovered the use of his right eye, the left, however, remaining uncured; and there is a case in which a young woman, deaf and dumb from birth, is reported to have been suddenly and completely cured on the tomb of M. de Paris, at the moment the convulsions ceased, immediately repeating, though not understanding, any word that was spoken to her by the bystanders.

My limits do not permit me to follow Montgeron through the details and the documentary proof of these cures.  That the patient, in each case, previously examined by some physician of reputation, was pronounced incurable, does not prove that he was so.  Yet, unless Montgeron lie, some of the cures are inexplicable, upon any received principles of medical science.  One man, (Philippe Sergent,) whose right knee had shrunk to such a degree that the right leg was, and had been for more than a year, three finger-breadths shorter than the left, was, according to the certificates, cured on the spot, threw away his crutches, and walked home, unaided, followed by a wondering crowd.  Another patient, (Marguerite Thibault,) affected by general dropsy, and whose feet and legs were swollen to three times their natural size, is reported to have been cured so suddenly that before she left the tomb her servant could put on her feet the same slippers she had worn previously to her malady.  This woman had also been afflicted, for three years, with paralysis of the left side, so complete as to deprive it of all power of motion.  Yet she is stated to have raised herself, unaided, on the tomb, to have walked from the spot, and even to have ascended the stairs of her house on her return.  The symptom immediately preceding her cure is said to have been “a beneficent heat, which diffused itself over the entire left side, so long deadly cold.”  This was followed by a consciousness of power to move it; and her first effort was to stretch out her paralytic arm.[11]

But these cures, wonderful as they appear, are far less marvellous than another class of phenomena already referred to.