The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

myself in his hands. There were not many pilgrims about as there was an icy wind blowing and rain and sleet fell in torrents. As I was undressing he started a decade of the Rosary to which I made the responses. When I was undressed he took a damp piece of navy blue cloth and wrapped it round me, and helped by him I descended into the bath, uttering all the time the ejaculations to Our Lady, which are printed upon a card hanging on the wall at the end of the bath. The water was desperately cold and made me gasp, but I had to lie back covered altogether by the water. The hospitaller then gave me a little silver statuette of Our Lady to hold in my hands and led me out of the bath. I then had to put on my clothes without drying my body, and thus shivering and clammy I went outside to face the rain and the sleet again. I felt at first strangely faint, but the hospitaller led me to a neighbouring hostel where I fell into a deep slumber. I awoke an hour later feeling strangely elated. I found to my amazement that I breathed freely and my feet no longer pained me. Such was my energy that I set off immediately to ascend the mountain Via Crucis, which is a mile in extent, saying the Stations of the Cross in thanks for my cure.
    Afterwards I ascended on my knees the granite steps of the Scala Santa. There was one other pilgrim painfully ascending, a little frail old woman, reciting her prayers in a loud voice. At the end when we were both descending the mountain, she said to me in Italian: “Questa e assai piu dolorosa che la vera Scala Santa a Roma.”
    How the old lady had managed to climb the mountain even as far as the Scala Santa puzzled me, for she seemed about to collapse at any moment and I had practically to carry her, at times, on the way down to the Basilica. The old lady insisted on bringing me to the museum containing relics and records of the life of Bernadette. All the time she continued talking in her melodious Italian of the childhood and the persecutions Bernadette had to endure after her first vision on February II, 1858.
    “You must remember,” she said, “Bernadette was a poor primitive little Pyrenean girl of fourteen with no education, and spoke only her native Gascon patois. When the ‘Lady’ begged her to return she answered simply: ‘I shall ask my parents’ permission.’ Her life must have been una agonia, for on one occasion she said that any one who has seen Our Lady has no wish but to die, and as for her life at home, it was un inferno, and what bestioni her family were to her; they threatened her and so did the clergy at first and the magistrates. But day by day she went to the grotto and at times her mystical ecstasy lasted thirty and even forty minutes. Word by word Bernadette learned from Our Lady an intimate prayer, which she would always recite to herself, but she never disclosed it to others. At the end of February of that year two thousand people followed the child to the grotto and heard her sobbing and crying out the words: ‘Penance, Penance, Penance!’ On March 2 still greater crowds gathered at the grotto where Bernadette knelt for one hour wrapt in her mystic vision. But not one word did she tell them that day of what the ‘Lady’ said to her. The ‘Lady’ had not given her name. But at last on Thursday, March 25, the feast of the Annunciation, Bernadette who had not gone for three weeks to the grotto felt irresistibly bidden to go. And when the ‘Lady’ appeared the child begged her to reveal who she was. And the ‘Lady’ raising her hands and gazing up to heaven bent down towards the child and in a gentle voice said in Gascon patois the following words: ‘Que soy era Inmaculada Conception [I am the Immaculate Conception!]’
    “The poor child could not understand those words and ran to Don Peyramale, the priest who had been worrying her incessantly to find out who the ‘Lady’ was. But Don Peyramale’s eyes, when he heard the words, filled with tears, for he knew now that the child had not invented those significant words. The visions of the little Bernadette had transformed the grotto of Massabielle into the Mount Sinai of L’Immacolata.
    “The greatest miracle of Lourdes, amico mio, is Bernadette, for she lived to the end a life of heroic abnegation. Instead of staying on in Lourdes near the grotto, where she had lived in the ecstasy of her vision, she sacrificed all and entered the convent of Nevers, where she knew no one. She denied herself, she worked