She has only a low brown church to show, with heavy stucco angels spreading their gilded wings down a perspective of incense-fogged baroque; but the image of it will come back when presently, standing under the big dome of the Lourdes “Basilica,” one gives thanks that modern piety chose to build its own shrine instead of laying hands on an old one.
There are two Lourdes, the “grey” and the “white.” The former, undescribed and unvisited, is simply one of the most picturesque and feudal-looking hill villages in Europe. Planted on a steep rock at the mouth of the valley, the mountains pressing it close to the west and south, it opposes its unbroken walls and stern old keep to the other, the “white” town sprawling on the river bank—the town of the Basilica, the Rosary, the Grotto: a congeries of pietistic hotels, pensions, pedlars’ booths and panoramas, where the Grand Hôtel du Casino or du Palais adjoins the Pension de la Première Apparition, and the blue-sashed Vierge de Lourdes on the threshold calls attention to the electric light and déjeuner par petites tables within.
BÉTHARRAM: THE BRIDGE
Out of this vast sea of vulgarism—the more aggressive and intolerable because its last waves break against one of the loveliest landscapes of this lovely country—rises what the uninstructed tourist might be pardoned for regarding as the casino of an eminently successful watering-place—as the Grotto beneath, with its drinking-fountains, baths, bottling-taps and boutiques, might stand for the “Source” or “Brunnen” where the hypochondriac pays toll to Hygieia before seeking relaxation in the gilded halls above. For the shrine of Bernadette has long since been overlaid by the machinery of a vast “business enterprise,” a scheme of life in which every heart-beat is itemised, tariffed and exploited, so that even the invocations encrusting by thousands the Basilica walls seem to record so many cases of definite “give and take,” so many bargains struck with heaven—en souvenir de mon vœu, reconnaissance pour une guérison, souvenir d’une prière exaucée, and so on—and as one turns away from this monument of a thriving industry one may be pardoned for remembering the plane-tree by the Ilissus and another invocation:
“Ye gods, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the inner and the outer man be one.”
But beyond Lourdes is Argelès, and at the first turn of the road one is again in the fresh Pyrenean country, among budding crops, sleek fawn-coloured cattle, and the grave handsome peasantry who make one feel that the devotional ville d’eaux one has just left is a mushroom growth quite unrelated to the life of industry to which these agricultural landscapes testify.
There is always an added interest—architectural and racial—about the border regions where the idiosyncrasies of one people “run,” as it were, into those adjoining; and a key to the character of each is given by noting precisely what traits have survived in transplantation. The Pyreneans have a certain Spanish seriousness, but so tempered by Gallic good-humour that their address recalls the perfectly mingled courtesy and self-respect of the Tuscan peasant. One feels in it, at any rate, the result of an old civilisation blent with independence and simplicity of living; and these bold handsome men, straight of feature and limb, seem the natural product of their rich hill-country, so disciplined by industry, yet so romantically free.
ARGELÈS-GAZOST: THE OLD BRIDGE