The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

for others in spite of her perpetual longing to return to Lourdes. She died at thirty-five, about one year after taking the veil.”
    The old lady, as she continued in her gentle voice to tell me the story of Bernadette, pointed out here and there in the museum objects that had belonged to her: her rosary beads, her shoes, her white socks, her tabatiere of tortoiseshell, for the doctor made her take snuff for her asthma.
    Later on that day I went with the old lady to Rosary and Benediction in the Basilica and I attached myself to her pilgrimage, which filled the church, for there were over two thousand, mostly school girls from convents from Spain and Italy as well as France, and the three languages were spoken. My companion continued her cantilena in praise of Lourdes: “The pilgrimages,” she said, “are bringing the people together from different countries and getting them to know and understand one another, for all the hatred in the world, my friend, is due to ignorance, and lack of knowledge and above all fear. It is fear that drives men into wars, like the terrible war we have just had when many of us thought that even Rome itself would be destroyed. Nowadays the only answer we Christians can make to the atomic and hydrogen bombs with which they threaten us in the next war is to meet all together in pilgrimage and pray together for peace and understanding.”
    At the end of the religious service I took part with the pilgrims in the Procession of the Blessed Sacrament which made the tour of the Basilica and the grounds and formed up in the great open space in front. First came the men students then the priests carrying the blessed Sacrament and the other priests and acolytes, then hundreds of girl students wearing white veils. The sick and infirm people were drawn up in their bath-chairs and the priest with the Host passed between them and blessed them. One of the pilgrims beside me in the procession told me that the miracles generally took place, either at the moment when the priest passed with the Blessed Sacrament, when an infirm person would spring up, crying that he had been cured, or else at the moment when his body touched the water of Lourdes in the piscine.
    One of the memories I shall always cherish of Lourdes is the contrast between the thousands of young men and young girls from the different countries in all the glory of their youth and health and the thousands of old and infirm forever present in their bath chairs, waiting patiently and expectantly, forever hoping for the miraculous cure. We are thus conscious of death. But to both young and old a pilgrimage is an adventure, which takes all these people out of their conventional everyday surroundings. Even my old Italian friend, who was so frail that it seemed as if one of those piercing blasts from the Pyrenees would send her floating away out of this world, had come from Siena all by herself and every moment of the pilgrimage was a joy to her—perhaps the only joy left to her in life, for she had lost two sons, killed in the war, and was a lonely widow.
    Before I left Lourdes I climbed the hundred and thirty-one Saracen Steps to the castellated fort of Lourdes, the stronghold of the Earls of Bigorre who were great seigneurs even in the eleventh century, but their relations with their subjects were arranged on a democratic basis by the Fors de Bigorre, one of whose provisions was the following: ‘Nous qui voulons chacun autant que vous et qui, réunis, pouvons plus que vous, nous vous établissons notre seigneur à condition que vous respectiez nos droits et privilèges, sinon, non.’
    In the year 1062 Bernard I placed his earldom of Bigorre under the protection of Notre Dame du Puy-en-Velay, and the deed he signed runs as follows: ‘Moi Bernard, Comte de Bigorre, l’an 1062, dans l’église de Notre Dame du Puy me suis voué et mon comté avec moi à l’église du Puy dediée à la sainte et Immaculée Vierge. Je me fais une loi de lui offrir annuellement soixante sols que je porterai moimeme ou je ferai porter. Je veux que mes descendants agissent de même.’
    The people of Bigorre are a vigorous race of mountaineers and excel as fighters. ‘Nous sommes toujours rois chez nous’ is one of their favourite phrases. In the thirteenth century the English seized Bigorre and the Treaty of Brétigny confirmed their possession of it, but in the fifteenth century, in 1406, they were driven out by the Bigourdans.
    From where I stand on the