On the sixty-fourth day, finding himself in absolutely the same state, he left for Pau, to seek a temporary alleviation in the mildness of its climate. But soon reproaching himself for having quitted Lourdes, and regarding his having done so as an act of weakness and a want of faith, and, moreover, possessing in the depth of his heart a conviction that sooner or later the Blessed Virgin would grant his prayer, he returned to the sacred grotto and took up his abode in the town.
An invalid, he constituted himself the guide and guardian of the sick and suffering. Pilgrims who of late years may have spent any time at Lourdes will recollect having seen there a priest, still young, with a long, light beard, a distinguished countenance, with a bright earnestness and sweetness in the expression of the eyes; a tall, slight figure, the chest somewhat narrowed and the shoulders bent by suffering—a priest who led the blind, assisted the lame and infirm, to the piscina, and spent the whisper of his failing voice in cheering and consoling the afflicted. This was the Abbé Martignon.
“If Our Blessed Lady does not cure me this time,” he would say, smiling, “I have made up my mind for a novena of years, then a novena of centuries; and after that I will stop.”
He had the joy of seeing several of the sick of whom he had been the guide and stay miraculously cured; but he himself, though experiencing at times some slight alleviation, did not obtain the complete recovery he sought.
Did he at last feel that there was some secret resistance on the part of the Blessed Virgin to grant the favor he solicited? We do not know; but it seemed to us that, while his faith continued the same and his charity ever on the increase, the virtue of hope was with him gradually turning into that of resignation—or, to speak more accurately, that he was postponing his hope. Happy to remain in this corner of the earth, on which the feet of the Queen of Heaven had rested, and to pray daily at the sacred grotto, he did not begin the novena of years and of centuries of which he had smilingly spoken.
“I stay here,” he would say, “at the disposal of Our Lady of Lourdes, like a person sitting in an ante-chamber waiting for an audience. She will hear me when she pleases. My turn will come; I shall have my hour or minute, and will take care not to let it escape me.”
For this hour and this minute he waited three years. Then, a few months ago, he felt an impulse within him urging him to knock again at the heavenly gate. He resolved to make a novena which should end on the Feast of Our Lady of the Seven Dolors. He had not observed that, this being a movable feast, the first day of the novena would this year (1877) coincide with the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin,[[202]] and that his prayer would thus go, as it were, from the birth of Mary to the last sigh of Jesus—from the cradle of the Mother to the sepulchre of her Son.
Had the Abbé Martignon been cured he would have returned to Algeria; and we imagine that if at first the Blessed Virgin refused his request, it was because she had no intention of so soon granting leave of departure to such a servant. Neither God nor his priest were losing anything by this refusal. When such and such a temporal blessing—that is to say, the copper coin—is denied to our prayers, it is because the gold and the rich increase are being laid up in store for us, either in this world or the world to come. Besides, a new mission had been imposed on the ardent zeal and charity of the Abbé Martignon: one which flowed naturally from the function to which he devoted himself of consoling the afflicted.
From the commencement of his sojourn at Lourdes he had found a man more suffering than the sick and more tried than the ordinarily afflicted, and to him also he had ministered aid and support. He to whom we allude—the Abbé Peyramale—had had the signal honor of receiving a message from heaven, and of accomplishing, in spite of every obstacle, the divine command. But the Blessed Virgin, doubtless reserving for him a higher place, had said: “I will show him how much he must suffer for love of me”; and the most unlooked-for troubles had been sent to torture his heroic heart.
By a strange contrast he was at the same time on Calvary and on Thabor. While his name was celebrated throughout Christendom, while he was blessed by the people whose beloved father and patriarch he was, he had also, especially during these latter times, the bitter pain of being misjudged, forsaken, and obstinately persecuted in that matter which he had most at heart—in his zeal for the Lord’s house. Like the Cyrenian, he was the man bearing the cross, and his robust shoulders were bruised and bleeding beneath the sacred burden, while around his sufferings, as around those of his Master, many shook their heads, saying: “He has been the instrument of Mary; let her now help and deliver him!”