Destination: France : In the pilgrimage town of the Pyrenees, no trinket outshines an unexpected miracle of joy

It was Leopold Pene, a third-generation souvenir statue maker and native Lourdois, who helped me reconcile the sacred and profane natures of this city in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Leopold is a retired statue maker, as are most souvenir artisans in Lourdes. The stuff for sale today in the narrow streets outside the Domaine Religieuse, the entire “religious city” of shrines, churches and hospices, is now made chiefly in Italy and Spain, where labor is cheaper. Not to worry about Leopold, however, who has found new employment as the maitre d’ in the best restaurant in town, Le Magret, where his son Phillipe has become famous for his way with duck and other Pyrenean specialties.

After a substantial dinner of duck aux fruits des bois , salad, cheese, fruit and a bottle of the strong local red, I settled back in my chair and asked Leopold about what it’s like to live in Lourdes. He dutifully began to rattle off the list of attractions: the wax museum, the built-to-scale miniature version of the historic town and the nearby caverns that boast a formation known as “the mushroom.” At last I made him understand we have our own Hershey Park in the United States and that what I really wanted to know was what he made of the miracle and the commercialism existing in such proximity.

A small man of considerable aplomb, he sized me up for a moment in a French sort of way, then decided to tell me the truth. “You must understand that this is a small town, monsieur,” he said, “less than 20,000 people. But about 4 million pilgrims (pelerins) visit each year. They come to pray, but they also want a memory to take home. To you, who come for a day, it’s shocking (choquant ) . For us, it’s natural.”

Lourdes’ fame rests, of course, on the miraculous visions of a young peasant, Bernadette Soubirous, who saw what was deemed to be the Virgin Mary near the Gave (river) de Pau here in 1858 (more about this later). By the turn of the century, the cult of Lourdes had already been well established and visitors loudly decried the “detestable earthy adjuncts” associated with it. Writers have been trashing the place ever since. It’s an easy enough mark. Prowl any of the souvenir shops lining the Boulevard de la Grotte, one of the main streets leading down to the Domaine Religieuse and you will find Virgin Mary corkscrews, ashtrays and cuckoo clocks. Virgin Mary statues for indoors or out, with or without twinkly fairy lights for night viewing, ones with thermometers in them, ones with hooks for your car keys. And everywhere there are Virgin Mary plastic bottles with the handy blue screw-top crown to capture holy water from the spring where the Virgin Mary appeared before Bernadette.

I knew I had reached meltdown when I found myself staring too hard at a life-size vinyl image of Jesus’ face on the cross, eyes closed in suffering. I moved back and the eyes opened. It could have been a great leap forward in religious icon technology. It could have been a shoplifting deterrent. Whatever it was, I decided to wait outside in the street and take my chances with the local cab drivers, who pilot their Mercedes cabs as if they insist on destroying them.

While it’s true that the French have little to learn from us in the crass exploitation department, not all sense of propriety has gone up in smoke. True, any of the souvenir huts will cheerfully sell you a switchblade knife (perfectly legal here), but you can’t buy one with the Virgin Mary on the handle. As of this writing, I mean.

What happened at Lourdes, somewhat abridged, is this: In 1858, a sickly 14-year-old girl from a family on the verge of starvation was collecting firewood with two friends by the Gave de Pau near a sort of rock overhang that at the time was being used as a pigsty. Suddenly she heard a noise like a rush of wind and looked up to see a beautiful lady in a white dress with a blue belt and a yellow rose on each foot, the same color as the rosary she held in her hands. The lady smiled and made the sign of the cross. Bernadette Soubirous, nearly paralyzed with fear, finally managed to make the sign of the cross herself, whereupon her fear subsided.

The lady beckoned her closer, but the child could not move. The lady smiled, then vanished. Bernadette was a pious but uneducated girl. As the story is told, it did not occur to her who the lady might be.

*

Between February and July of that year, Bernadette saw the lady 18 times. People would come and watch her when she went to pray at the grotto, at which times she would often fall into a trance, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes profoundly melancholy. At the 10th visitation, the lady told her to dig in a small, muddy pool in a corner of the pigsty and drink the water. The next day a spring of clear water appeared there, which flows to this day. Relating her vision to the skeptical local priest, she was told to ask the lady who she was. At first the lady gave no answer. When she finally did speak, the reply came in the local dialect: “Que soy era immaculada councepciou” (I am the Immaculate Conception). According to most accounts, the untutored Bernadette didn’t know what the Immaculate Conception was. The lady also told her three secrets, which she was never to reveal to anyone. It is believed that Bernadette kept her word.

She suffered from tuberculosis and asthma, and entered a nearby convent at Nevers when she was 22; she remained there until her death at 35. Bernadette was made a saint in 1933.

The Domaine Religieuse is an area of considerable size and includes the grotto itself, numerous visitor support buildings and three elaborate churches: the Rosary Basilica, circular and domed like a crown; another church above it called the Crypt, and the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception above it, whose windows depict the visitations of the Virgin to Bernadette. In 1958, the 100th anniversary of Bernadette’s visions, a 20,000-seat subterranean church was opened here to accommodate the thousands of pilgrims who visit, chiefly in the summer months. It’s basically an underground parking garage for people (there was a station wagon backed up to the altar when I visited), though when filled with that many people singing, the atmosphere is said to be immensely moving.

Every evening at 8:45 there is a candlelight procession along the esplanade in front of the churches. You buy your candle in town, then cross the bridge over the river, leaving detestable earthly adjuncts behind. A sign warns against pickpockets as you enter the religious sector.

My friend Mary is a little uncomfortable as we slip into the front of the parade among the handicapped people in their special three-wheeled chairs, wagons really, pulled by scores of young boys who come from all over France for a week or so of volunteer duty. “We shouldn’t be this far in front,” she scolds me in a whisper. “These people are believers. We’re just, you know, tourists.”

“Tourists have souls too.” I say, just before the long, illuminated line begins moving.

In the kind of high school French that makes dogs stop and look at me funny, I make friends with the wheelchair puller next to me, an exuberant boy of 13 or so from Lyon. He has a large nose and an open manner and says this is his fifth and last day in harness before going home. He’s an old hand now, bending close to chat amiably with the elderly woman in his care for the evening.

I ask the women how the boy’s doing by her. “He’s a boy,” she tells me with a kind of happy weariness. “From such creatures, what can one expect? But it’s hard work, pulling us around. And they’re so darling.”

The parade route is simply a long oval down the esplanade in front of the basilica and back again. We move slowly to organ music and the words of the Mass coming over the loudspeakers in seven languages. English is not one of them this night. This is October, the end of the busy season at Lourdes. Even so, there are several thousand people. Almost everyone has a candle with a little paper holder on which are printed blue prayers and the words to a version of Ave Maria, which we are singing to an old Pyrenean folk song. When we round the halfway point and turn back, I’m looking at a sea of glowing tulips. At each chorus, the candles rise on the word Ave , then settle slowly back to Earth.

We slip out a little early to visit the grotto, just to the right of the basilica, before it gets swamped after the service. The line is about a hundred yards long when we get there. We are herded into a sort of chute about six people across between the rock wall and a line of portable crowd-control gates. There is a place where huge votive candles, about five feet tall and decorated with ribbons, sputter in the night air. The crowd is mostly 50 or older and nobody looks American to my eyes. Some are moving their lips in prayer. The man to my left keeps shifting his big hands as he prays, as if he can’t decide which should hold, which should be held.

I can’t see the cave, only a slight bend where people disappear and others file out. Outside the entrance is a place where people stand or sit on folding chairs or kneel in silence by more tiers of windblown candles. There are women on their bare knees on the stones. It’s different than the kind of kneeling I remember from church. They are unself-conscious and bolt upright, as if their legs had buckled, as if they’d literally been brought to their knees.

As we get closer, the crowd packs even tighter. Whispers and the clearing of throats cease. We pass beneath a wire upon which are hung the canes and crutches of people who have been cured. A man on a gurney, semiconscious, his head rolling from side to side, is wheeled past us to the front of the line. I feel as if I’m in another time, as if beneath the surface of our modern lives we are the same as the peasants you see in medieval tapestries.

At last we’re there. The grotto is just the kind of place God likes--supremely ordinary. If Jesus was born in a barn, it’s fitting that Mary might choose a pigsty to appear to an unschooled girl. The place is shallow and unwelcoming. It would barely shield you from a hard rain. There is a cement altar, a statue of the Virgin that Bernadette herself said bore little resemblance to the Lady in White, and a plexiglass oval shield the size of a tray covering the spring, which is lighted from below so that the water sparkles unnaturally.

The rock has been worn smooth from the lips and fingers of millions of visitors over more than a century. Some women are wiping back tears as they press their faces to the walls. A minute later we’re out near the dozens of taps where pilgrims line up to capture the holy water from the spring.

Mary and I walk back to the esplanade, past a sort of transit room where the people in wheelchairs are returned to their tour groups and families. In the large crowd, I suddenly make out my young friend helping his charge back into her own wheelchair. He is still jabbering away as he leans over to say goodby, and she gives him a peck and slips something into his hand.

Duties fulfilled for the evening, he pulls the empty chair behind him to take it down a gentle slope back to wherever they’re stored. Free for the night, he checks for supervision, finds none, sits himself down in the chair, folds the handle back so he can hold it between his knees to steer and pumps the hubs hard.

The chair picks up speed, rolling smoothly. As it moves away from us, I catch a glimpse of him. He’s sitting back as far as he can, wind ruffling his hair. Just before he disappears into the shadow, he throws his hands straight up in pure exhilaration: the Joy Ride of Lourdes.

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GUIDEBOOK

Pilgrimage’s Progress

Getting there: Fly nonstop LAX to Paris on United, Air France and AOM French Airlines; direct on American, USAir and Continental; connecting service on most international carriers. Fares start at about $990 round trip on AOM, about $1,075 including taxes and fees on other carriers.

Between Paris and Lourdes (roughly four hours), TGV trains run three to four times daily; one way first class $152, second class $109. Air service is on Air Inter, round trip about $175.

Where to stay: Generally, you will pay a bit more in Lourdes than in neighboring towns that have no miracles. But there is an abundance of clean, simple places.

Hotel Adriatic (4 Rue Baron-Duprat, from U.S. telephone 011-33-62-94-31-34); bright, comfortable singles from about $65.

Grande Ho^tel de la Grotte (66-68 Rue de la Grotte, tel. 011-33-62-94-58-87); singles from $85-$130; four-star old favorite.

Gallia et Londres (26 Avenue Bernadette-Soubirous, tel. 011-33-62-94-35-44); singles from $130; four stars, provincial flavor.

For more information: Lourdes tourist office, tel. 011-33-62-42-77-40. Or French Government Tourist Office, 9454 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 715, Beverly Hills CA 90212; tel. (900) 990-0040 (calls cost 50 per minute; call before 2 p.m. Pacific time), fax (310) 276-2835.