The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

garlic-breathing friend, meanwhile, conversed with me in a low voice. To my surprise, he was a sceptic. He was going to Lourdes to humour his wife. She had made a ‘promesse’ that he would go on a pilgrimage and bathe in the pool to cure his malignant tumour. “I have to go to give the old lady pleasure,” he added, grinning, “otherwise she’ll nag and nag me. I have been to every quack in Toulouse and I have tried many a herb cure too from an old woman in my village, so I might as well see what prayer and Blessed Bernadette can do.” As he spoke he looked apprehensively at his voluminous wife opposite, who was engrossed in her rosary with eyes closed and muttering lips.
    When we arrived at Lourdes I said farewell to my garlic-breathing friend who begged me to say my prayers and go to the Piscine, where, if I had faith, I should be sure to cure my arthritis.
    “If you are no better,” said he, “after a few days of bathing in the pool, I recommend an infallible cure for your foot pains. Get some yeast, vinegar and garlic; fry them together and apply them to your two feet. You might also add a little incense with the mixture. Don’t forget.”
    After leaving my knapsack at a little hotel by the station I hobbled painfully down through the town towards la cité religieuse. As I plodded onwards through the crowded streets my spirits sank, for never in all my life had I seen such a bewildering succession of shops laden with trashy souvenirs, with ‘Lourdes’ stamped upon them. Shop after shop filled to the brim with hideously vulgar holy statues, holy water fonts, jugs, bottles of every shape and size, penknives, ash trays, paper-cutters and a thousand different kinds of trumpery. Many of these shops were vast stores like Woolworth’s and had high-sounding names such as Le Palais du Rosaire, all of them crowded with pilgrims, who jostled one another to get near the counters. Every second house in the street was a hotel or pension.
    As Lourdes is built on a hill there is an upper and a lower town. High above our heads, perched on a precipitous rock, stands inaccessible the great castellated fortress of Bigorre, which was a stronghold when the Saracens held out against Charlemagne. According to a legend the Saracens were about to surrender through starvation, when an eagle dropped from the sky on the rock a trout which the Saracen chief, following the ruse of Lady Carcas, sent to the Emperor, in order to show how well-provisioned was their garrison. With Charlemagne, however, was the rusé Bishop of Puy, who suggested that the best policy would be to invite the infidel to surrender not to the Franks but to our Lady of Puy. The Saracen chief accepted the terms, surrendered the stronghold, became a Christian, and took the name of Lorus, whence is derived Lourdes. How far away that noble rock of Bigorre seems from this hideous, grovelling town of cheap excursionists with its jumble of high powered cars, its blaring loud-speakers, its tawdry commercialism!
    Just off the main street, in a side-alley surrounded on all sides by shops, I came across the small cottage belonging to the father of Bernadette Soubirous (1844-79), who was a miller. It was called Le Moulin de Boly and I felt sad to see it overwhelmed on all sides by the modern materialistic world. When Bernadette was born there on January 7, 1844, the town had a population of four thousand. The family were very poor and, as a little girl of twelve, Bernadette was sent to earn her living as a shepherdess in the village of Bartrés, but she soon returned to her home, where she continued to live in great poverty. The eldest of the family, she spent her days wandering along the banks of the Gave searching among the pebbles of the river for bones which she could sell for two sous and pieces of wood for the cottage fire. Today, as the result of the apparition of Our Lady to the little shepherdess, Lourdes has become the greatest pilgrimage centre in the world. It is said that close on two million pilgrims from all over Christendom visit the Grotto every year, and no pilgrimage in the world, not even those to Mecca, St. James of Compostella, Rome or Jerusalem have ever gathered such multitudes.
    Such were my thoughts as I gazed at the pathetic little mill-house hidden away in the heart of this vulgar blatant town with its jostling crowds.
    At the foot of the hill I crossed a bridge and found myself at the entrance of the spacious park leading to the Basilica.