The close smell of the studios gave way again to the odour of crowded humanity and I was in the arena of Seville. But never, not even at Easter, had I seen the populace so joyous, the ladies shrouded in such rich mantillas or flirting such precious fans, the picadors so gaily caparisoned, the toreadors so daring, the bulls maddened with so many banderillas or disembowelling so many horses. It was the mutual ecstasy of slaughter. And from all parts of the city penetrated the chiming of bells, while the thunder of festive cannon sometimes drowned even the roar of the ring. And at every thrilling stroke or perilous charge there came from parted lips, “Ave Maria purissima” or “Viva nuestra Señora,” and from all around rose the instinctive reply: “Sin peccado concebida.”
Gradually, as I listened to the conversation in the intervals of the bull fights, I became aware of the sense of the Fiesta. All this overflow of religious rapture sprang not from the bulls but the Bull—Regis Pacifici—which after centuries of passionate controversy had at last been launched by Paul V in this sixteen hundred and seventeenth year from the bearing of the Virgin, forbidding the opponents of Immaculate Conception to sustain their doctrine in public. Maria had been conceived without sin. The last flaw had been removed from her perfection.
“Heaven rewards us for expelling the last of the Moors,” cried a lovely Señora with a dazzling flash of eyes and teeth. “And now that we have purged Spain and placed her and her mighty possessions under the protection of the Immaculate Conception, her future shall be even more glorious than her past.”
But my reply was drowned by the roar of the ring as the dead bull was trailed off at a gallop.
“Ave Maria purissima!”
“Sin peccado concebida!”
I am still in Spain, watching Señor Bartholomé Estéban Murillo polish off his Madonnas for country fairs or South American convents. Presently under the guidance of Señor Pacheco, Holy Inquisitor of pictures, he paints the popular dogma of the day, in the shape of little angels floating below a lovely lady in a blue mantle standing with clasped hands on the earth-ball, and the scene shifts to France where two centuries later the picture is purchased at a fabulous price by the Louvre, just before Pio Nono from his refuge at Gaeta publishes the Bull Ineffabilis, definitely declaring that the freedom of the Virgin from original sin is a divine revelation. Cheap coloured pictures of the “Immaculate Conception” multiply, and Bernadette, a pious young shepherdess in the French Pyrenees, beholds in a grotto by a spring a White Lady, veiled from head to foot, with a cerulean floating scarf, a chaplet with golden links, and two golden roses on her naked feet, who announces herself as “The Immaculate Conception” and demands a Procession to her shrine.
And before my eyes unrolls the long panorama, painted in immortal colours by the epical brush of Zola: the mushroom Lourdes of hotels and holy shops replacing the rude village, the Hospital of our Lady of Sorrows, the crowned statue of our Lady of Salvation, the Fathers of the Grotto, the Blue Sisters, the Church of the Rosary, the Basilica swathed in splendid banners, glittering with golden hearts innumerable, and jewels and marbles and marvellous lamps; the unending masses and litanies, the three hundred thousand pilgrims a year, the thaumaturgic bathing pools, unclean, abominable, the White Train rolling through the night with its hideous agglomeration of human agonies, amid ecstatic canticles to the Madonna, the thirty thousand tapers winding round in leagues of flame to the rhythm of interminable invocations, the perpetual thunder of supplication breaking frenziedly on the figure of the Madonna framed in the ever-blazing Grotto.