"Lourdes is a small town in the diocese of Tarbes, Hautes Pyrenees,
picturesquely situated on the right bank of the river Gave." I quote
the words from a booklet which purports to be "A Short Account of the
Apparitions and Miracles at Lourdes." We arrived here from Toulouse
about five o'clock on the afternoon of the day before yesterday. It
had been a very hot day in the cars, but all covered with sweat and
dust as we were we went straight in procession to the Grotto of Our
Lady, without waiting to go to our hotel. There, on our knees before
the statue, which smiles down sweetly upon us, as did erstwhile the
Virgin Mother for whom it stands, upon the simple peasant girl of the
Pyrenees, we recite the Rosary and sing the Magnificat. All about us
throngs are kneeling in prayer, and there are signs of a subdued
excitement, for just five minutes before our arrival a young girl who
had suffered severe injuries by a fall three years ago, and was
carried thither in her little carriage, a few hours before, was seen
to rise to her feet and walk. But neither before nor after the cure
did she report at the Bureau des Constatations Medicales.
The words that I have quoted at the head of this page were written
twenty-four years ago by an English priest who visited the shrine.
Were he now writing he would no longer say that Lourdes is a small
town. The old town of Lourdes is, indeed, small, just a bit of a
village in the Pyrenees. But the new Lourdes that has sprung up as
if by magic on the banks of the Gave, over against the famous Grotto,
has pretensions to rank as a city. It has its banks, its public
buildings, its electric cars, rows upon rows of stores, though the
wares are almost wholly of a devotional character, hotels and
boarding houses without number, and a population of about ten
thousand souls. And yet twenty-six years ago, just two years before
our English priest wrote his account, there was not, as an old
inhabitant told us, a stone upon a stone of the modern, and, for the
most part, handsome buildings that one sees to-day.
Nature has lavished her charms on this favoured spot. Nothing is
wanting of all that can please the eye or soothe and rest the mind in
natural scenery. Lofty hills in front and in the rear, some bare and
bald, others clothed with forest to their very tops; in the
background, the snow-clad peaks and spurs of the Pyrenees; at your
feet a narrow valley, studded with stately trees and carpeted with
green-sward; and ever in your ears, though the eye wearied with
gazing, should seek repose, the rushing waters of the Gave. Surely a
fitting entourage for this most gracious of all our Lady's shrines!
The waters of the Gave, how swiftly and noisily they flow, flinging
themselves passionately upon the rude rocks that would stay their
onward course! The murmur of the Gave has been in my ears from a
boy, for I seemed to hear the rushing of its waters when in boyhood's
days I lingered over the pages of Henri Lasserre's fascinating story
of the wonders of Lourdes. And to-day as I sit on the bank and gaze
down upon the swift stream that flings itself into the Adour to
mingle finally with the waters of the mighty Atlantic, the Gave of my
boyish dreams is a reality. It is something more. It is an emblem
at once and a sermon--an emblem of the surging multitude of pilgrims
which ever keeps streaming to the Grotto of our Lady, flowing hither
from the ends of the earth; a sermon on the true purpose of life.
See how this eager mountain stream, like a thing of life, runs
joyously to its rest in the bosom of the great ocean! Not less
surely was it meant by Nature to find there its repose than we are
meant by the Author of Nature to find our repose in Him. Yet we
linger by the way and loiter, while the Gave leaps onward, oh, how
swiftly and how surely! to its goal and the home of its rest.
But the Gave has not always been at this point the deep, narrow,
noisy stream that it is to-day. Once it roamed at will over its
rocky bed, making for itself a wider and more spacious pathway. Now
stout stone walls fence it in and confine it to a narrow channel, and
it frets and foams as does the wild beast of the forest when
imprisoned behind iron bars. In these hot July days, too, the Gave
runs deeper and swifter, fed by the melting snows of the Pyrenees.
But on that February day, forty-two years ago, it was a feeble and
mild-mannered stream. Bernadette and her two little companions
crossed the main stream by the stone bridge. But a narrow side
channel still separated them from the Grotto in the rocks of
Massabielle, where was plenty of the drift wood they were in search
of. Stooping down slowly to pull off her shoes and stockings with a
view of wading this stream, Bernadette heard a noise as of a sudden
gust of wind. "It was a calm grey day, and not a twig of the poplars
was stirring, yet she felt certain that she had heard the rush of
air. She stooped down again, and again the mysterious current
startled her. This time the child looked up towards the niche-shaped
cave. To her amazement a clear bright light issued from the
aperture, in the midst of which stood a woman more wondrously
beautiful than any one Bernadette had ever seen, or could have
imagined. She was clad in white, with a long white veil falling over
her shoulders; a blue scarf encircled her waist and reached to her
knees, and upon either bare foot was a gold-coloured rose." I am
quoting from my little book. But the story has been often told and
is trite now, though it can never be commonplace.
The number of pilgrims who visit Lourdes yearly is estimated at two
hundred and fifty thousand. They come from every country under the
sun. The two ends of America are wide enough asunder, yet the fact
of our being from the same continent is a real bond between ourselves
and our fellow-pilgrims from Brazil, whom we meet here at the shrine
of our Lady as we met them at Paray le Monial and again in the
audience chamber of the Vatican.
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