A young priest takes a paralysed girl he has loved since childhood to Lourdes on the white train, and loses his faith over five days among the sick, the cured and the trade in candles. Zola went twice as an observer, took notes in the piscina and the hospital, and the book was put on the Index within the year. He does not deny the cures; he insists on counting them, which was the offence. Sixty plates from 1840 to 1907, among them Courbet and Millet, carry the same hard daylight of roads, rock and stream that Zola found on the road to Lourdes.
