It is curious how often this wonderful scene has been repeated in France, never connected with so high a mission, but yet embracing the same circumstances, the same situation, the same semi-angelic nature of the woman-child. The little Bernadette of Lourdes is almost of our own day; she, too is one who puts the scorner to silence. What her visions and her voices were, who can say? The last historian of them is not a man credulous of good or moved towards the ideal; yet he is silent, except in a wondering impression of the sacred and the true, before the little Bearnaise in her sabots; and, notwithstanding the many sordid results that have followed and all that sad machinery of expected miracle through which even, repulsive as it must always be, a something breaks forth from time to time which no man can define and account for except in ways more incredible than miracle--so is the rest of the world. Why has this logical, sceptical, doubting country, so able to quench with an epigram, or blow away with a breath of ridicule the finest vision--become the special sphere and birthplace of these spotless infant-saints? This is one of the wonders which nobody attempts to account for. Yet Bernadette is as Jeanne, though there are more than four hundred years between.
After what intervals the vision returned we are not told, nor in what circumstances. It seems to have come chiefly out-of-doors, in the silence and freedom of the fields or garden. Presently the heavenly radiance shaped itself into some semblance of forms and figures, one of which, clearer than the others, was like a man, but with wings and a crown on his head and the air "_d'un vrai prud' homme_"; a noble apparition before whom at first the little maid trembled, but whose majestic, honest regard soon gave her confidence. He bade her once more to be good, and that God would help her; then he told her the sad story of her own suffering country, _la pitié qui estoit au royaume de France_. Was it the pity of heaven that the archangel reported to the little trembling girl, or only that which woke with the word in her own childish soul? He has chosen the small things of this world to confound the great. Jeanne's young heart was full of pity already, and of yearning over the helpless mother-country which had no champion to stand for her. "She had great doubts at first whether it was St. Michael, but afterwards when he had instructed her and shown her many things, she believed firmly that it was he."