A JUBILEE DAY AT LOURDES. EVEN last night the little town had seemed to us to be crowded to congestion. The electric trams, clattering up and down between the station and the Grotto, had been always black with pilgrims, and every open shop-front and crooked street-corner had held its knot of voluble if subdued conversationalists. And yet this morning, very early, and while we were still more or less asleep, ten thousand more, so we are informed, have been landed in our midst, peasants for the most part, brought here in a long series of special trains from the flat country about Toulouse. All night indeed the town had been busy, as our uneasy dreams had testified. A Belgian pilgrimage, already established here, and some two thousand strong, had attended a midnight mass, filing down from the Basilica, the great church above the Grotto, in time only to extend a tired welcome to the first of these newcomers, brown-faced and black-smocked enthusiasts, marshalled along by devoted parish priests. All night the streets had echoed with the passing and repassing of uncountable boots and sabots or the softer footgear of the native inhabitants; and quite early, as it seemed to us, the trams had begun to run again, clanging their bells, a strange and bizarre contrast to the leisurely bullock waggons of the neighbouring farmers. A goatherd, playing upon a piccolo, had passed beneath our window more than once, taking up his position at last upon one of the roads near the Grotto, where he would milk his charges, for a small consideration, into the cups of the passers-by. All night the streets had been evidence enough of a various and restless humanity; but now, as we sipped our coffee at seven in the morning, they were humming with half the jargons of Europe, set too, for the most part, in that curious pitch of half-awed, yet not uncheerful, intensity, that seems here to be at once characteristic and infectious. A continual pageant of Sunday clothes and smocks moved by us as we sat at the open window, black as a rule, and blacker still by contrast to the blaze of hot June sunshine, that poured down from a cloudless sky, and the glimpses of surrounding greenness, that came to us between the corners of the houses. It is fifty years this year since the little peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, made known to her relatives and friends the visions that had been vouchsafed to her in the cavern by the Gave; and it is impossible not to be impressed with the extraordinary position that her native village has since come to hold throughout the Catholic world. As we linger over our café complet an unbeliever among us raps the table dogmatically with his teaspoon. The neurotic imaginings of an hysterical girl, he tells us, a little brown water out of a rock, and the infinite gullibility of evolving humanity in its lower intellectual stages-these are the ingredients of the renown of Lourdes. And yet, and yet-well, by the day's end, even our unbeliever, unbelieving still, has contrived to modify his statement by a little, has come to behold in this scene of twentieth-century pilgrimage, in this odd jangle of electricity and mediævalism, of science and, if you like, superstition, something that lies too deep among the root-fibres of the human being to be a mere spectacle for an instructed scoffer. For, in the first place, if ever there were a spot designed by Nature to the ends of worship it would be Lourdes, perched above the plains, yet itself in something of a valley, bisected by the brown torrent of the Gave, bubbling down from its springs in the surrounding mountains-Lourdes, with the green hills rising up from it on all sides but one, rich in verdure and starred with flowers, campanula, campion, and gentian, and backed by the still snow-topped grandeur of the High Pyrenees. Within a couple of hours of Lourdes, there are mountain fastnesses unequalled in Europe; and we cannot help remembering that faith has always throned itself among the hills that, if they breed brigands here and there, produce religionists all the world over. While in the second place, as half an hour's stroll into the winding streets would assure the least appreciative, whatever else might be dwelling upon these swarthy passing faces, there was certainly no stuff for even the tenderest of ridicule-less, indeed, perhaps, than might be beheld upon an August day in Keswick. The older part of the town, lying on the right bank of the Gave, clusters round the rocky cliff upon which the old Château, a typical frontier fortress, and once held by the English, is set four-square, a sober comment upon the more garish modern architecture, that surrounds and surmounts the Grotto lower down and upon the opposite side of the stream. But it is here that the true soul of the place abides; and for every pilgrim that climbs up to the stern old battlements, there will be a thousand to flock before the candleVOL. XXV.-NO. 148, N.S. 34 lit crevice under the Basilica. The one may have played its part perhaps in the making of a little earthly history; but this other has become one of the gates of God. Within it-it is scarcely larger than an ordinary dining-room-there stands now an altar before which one or more masses are daily said. To one side, beyond walls worn smooth with the elbows and rosaries of half a century of pilgrims, is placed a picture of the Virgin, a shrine illuminated with a stack of continually burning candles. Across its entrance is now a palisade of railings, against which, except at certain times, the faithful must be content to wait and watch, and through which, as they kneel before the Grotto, the Communion is administered to them. In front of the Grotto, stretching back to the roadway that has been built, with a parapet, alongside the river, are arranged rows of seats, seldom empty of worshippers, while beside it are the Piscines, or baths, where the sick may be dipped in water led from the Grotto spring. Perched upon the rock, out of which the Grotto has been carved, is the Basilica, the great church that commemorates the visions, and whose slender spire has become the most prominent landmark for a good many miles around. Below it is the crypt, lined with memorial tablets, set there by such as have been desirous of visibly recording the blessings that have been granted to them; and below and in front of this is the Chapel of the Rosary, whose porticoes stand open to the great open space, flanked by descending terraces, around which, in the afternoon, will be gathered the strangest multitude of sufferers, perhaps, to be seen in all the world, the sorrowful clinic of our Lady of Lourdes. Just now they are crowded about the entrance to the baths, far more of them than can be admitted, one fears, in this single day, even though the official hours were never so elastic, or the brancardiers-a body of self-elected attendants-never so eager or efficient. Here there are waiting in rows upon the seats, in chairs and stretchers, on strong arms and crutches, the tangible illustrations of a whole library of text-books-poor malades, with patient faces, some frankly hopeless, brought here by the efforts and hard savings of a pleading family, others still holding with both hands to the unconquerable hope in a Divine interposition. Are there not a thousand crutches hanging there from the rocky front of the Grotto, evidences of past favours from the Blessed Virgin-visible signs of mistaken diagnoses, says our unbeliever-and behind these the reports, true and legendary, of a thousand other benefits and cures ? So they wait, an always changing audience, knocking at the portals of Heaven's mercy, sprinkling themselves with the holy water brought to them in little cans and bottles, and biding their time, with what patience they can command, for their turn to be dipped bodily in the healing stream. Sights that would ordinarily revolt, perhaps, become here merely the occasion for murmurs of pity, for the reiterated invocations of passers-by. Scarred faces, that would be timidly veiled in any other corner of the world, are here laid bare to the sunshine with a frank pathos, if haply even looking upon so sacred a scene may gain some little boon of miracle. As we linger upon the hot pavement we study them for awhile, sick and well, men and women, who might, any one of them almost, have sat for Millet or Le Breton, dogged, devoted, childlike, if you would have it so, but with the childhood that believes and is made happy in a literal Heaven and a very personal Godhead. Is it not wonderful? A young priest, speaking English, pauses for a moment at our side. Is it not wonderful? And he reminds us that, alas! France must be no longer regarded as a Catholic country. He shakes a sorrowful head. The State has pronounced against religionagainst clericalism, if you like to put it in that way--but in reality against religion, and with a fervour of bitterness, of which only a Latin race could be capable. They have robbed us of the children, he says, and the times are evil; and yet, behold, is there another country in all the world that could offer such a spectacle of faith as this? The smile that is never far away, for all the solemnity of Lourdes, breaks out again, if a trifle wistfully. Ah, la belle France, but it will all come right in the end. The pendulum will swing back. The heart of the people must have its God again, and its God is still the dear Son of our Lady of Lourdes. -- And it is here, after all, we reflect, that we see Lourdes at its best, here at the Grotto and the Piscines, in the Basilica and the crypt, and the Rosary Chapel, in the great space below the terrace, and around the gaudy statue of the Virgin at its opposite end. Up there, towards the Château, whether we will or not, the more commercial side of it all must intrude itself upon us-the great hotels, with their lifts and telephones and large profits, the electric trams, the shops full of statuary and medals, the waxwork presentations of scenes in little Bernadette's short life-she died some twenty years ago in a convent-all these; and we cannot help feeling that Bernadette, by her visions, has conferred a very substantial material prosperity upon her relatives and fellow-citizens. And yet again, all the time, so simple is the history, so artless the investigations that followed it, so entirely sincere the devotion of the many to the few, that one cannot but spurn as unworthy any idea of a deliberate charlatanism. The prosperity has been the gift of Heaven, the inevitable adjunct to a holy celebrity. And why not? On our way back from our morning stroll we meet an English pilgrimage, the largest that has ever come here, on its way to be received by the Bishop of Tarbes, whose palace overlooks the valley of the Grotto. We exchange greetings and pass on, up through some narrow by-ways of the town, and presently, crossing the river higher up, drop down into a path by its side, winding up towards the beautiful valley of Angeles, towards Pierrefitte and Cauteret and the inner heart of the French Pyrenees. And here, for a brief breathing space, we touch fingers again, upon the outskirts of the town, with a more usual existence. Here the grass is being cut in great fragrant swathes, and upon the banks of the river the old women are washing their clothes. The air is heavy and languorous, unpurged by yesterday's thunderstorm, and we turn regretful eyes towards the snow tops of twenty miles away. Lazily we complete our circle, returning again through a busy market-place into the crowded streets. Black eyes flash at us appraisingly, brown fingers hold up rosaries for our regard, and we are called upon to observe the attractions of a hundred inexpensive trinkets. We pass the hospital, filled to its last corner with the sick from all corners of Europe, tended by devoted Sisters, and the scene, we are assured, of numerous unexplainable miracles. We pass sheds where the poor and hardy may spend the night for nothing, and lodging-houses to suit any sort of purse. And so the hot hours pass away for us quickly enough until, as three o'clock draws near, there comes for each sick person, for every faithful pilgrim indeed, the supreme moment of the day, when the officiating priest, bearing the golden monstrance, shall hold out in benediction to each worshipping sufferer the broken body of his Lord and Saviour. This is the ceremony towards which converges the whole of the day's preparations. It is the crisis, as it were, of the universal worship, the breaking-point of spiritual tension, a breaking-point, often enough, of tears and sobs, and the commonest moment, we are assured, of healing manifestations. Here there must be gathered, in an almost tropical sunshine, at least ten thousand persons, ranged round in a great circle, below the steps of the Rosary Chapel, the sick innermost, with the brancardiers watching over them, |