The Discovery of France (18 page)

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O
NE MORNING IN THE
late winter of 1858, a fourteen-year-old girl left the dirty, slum-ridden Pyrenean town where she had grown up and set off along the torrential river called the Gave de Pau. Despite her chronic asthma, she walked for ten miles, past slimy limestone caverns, watermills and chapels, a hamlet built by a colony of cagots, and the nail-makers’ forges at Saint-Pé. At last, she came to an ivy-covered bridge. On the other side were a vast grey church and a wood that was occupied by a permanent fair. A noisy, festive crowd was buying cakes and rosaries, singing songs, staring at gaudy pictures of the blessed Virgin, evil Jews and Roman soldiers, and half-listening to gesticulating priests who harangued them in Bearnese. For the girl, the shrine at Bétharram lay at the outer limits of the world. She had just enough time to pray at the shrine, buy a rosary and return home before dark.

Like the thousands of other pilgrims who went to Bétharram every year – many of them, like the girl, on foot and in rags, but some in gorgeous clothes and carriages – she was hoping for a miracle. Her father had lost an eye while roughening up a millstone with a chisel, and then the new owner of the mill had turned them out. A year before Bernadette’s visit to Bétharram, her father had been accused of stealing two bags of flour. Winter work was hard to find and the family had been forced to move from the district where the cagots once lived, to the medieval prison that was now used to house the indigent. They were cold, hungry and desperate. There were other shrines much closer to home, but the Bétharram Virgin was known to be more potent and prolific than all the others.

The caves of Bétharram had been a holy site long before cults of the Virgin Mary began to appear in the Pyrenees in the Middle Ages, but its national fame dated from the early sixteenth century, when
two shepherds saw a light in some bushes and found the tiny statue of a woman. For the first twenty-two years, the statue had performed more than twenty miracles a year. The name, ‘Beth-Arram’ (‘beautiful branch’), referred to the branch that miraculously appeared when a shepherdess fell into the river. Bernadette Soubirous, the girl who visited the shrine that day in February, was also a shepherdess, and it was reasonable to expect a special favour from the Virgin.

A few days later, Bernadette, her sister and a friend were gathering firewood and bones by the river between the forest and the town. Here, the water had created a network of caverns and strange stalactitic formations. The caverns were associated with oracles and demons. Carved stones, arrowheads and even human bones had been found there. But they also attracted tourists in search of natural wonders. George Sand had visited them in 1825:

The scenic grottos of Lourdes were a valuable resource for the scruffy little town. Lourdes lay on the pilgrim route to Bétharram and on the tourist route to the spas. The local chemist had been noted in guidebooks since the time of Napoleon for his delicious syrups and chocolate confectionery. But Lourdes’s only other attraction was a gloomy fortress. It had no healing waters to attract wealthy invalids, and its rival, Argelès, had won the battle to become the administrative centre of the region.

The three girls reached the part of the river where it was joined by a small canal, at the cave called Massabielle, which means ‘Old Rock’. This was common land, where poor people gathered fuel and swineherds brought their pigs. As she was removing her stockings to cross the canal, Bernadette heard a sudden gust of wind coming from the cave. Looking up, a few feet above the entrance, she saw a tiny figure dressed in white. It was no taller than herself (four foot seven inches). It wore a blue sash and a yellow rose on each foot. She later described it as ‘
uo pétito damisèla
’ (in French,
une petite demoiselle
). The figure reminded her of a twelve-year-old girl she knew who often wore a white dress.

As usual when a Virgin appeared, there was great excitement in the region. Over the next six weeks, followed by an ever larger crowd, Bernadette saw the
demoiselle
another seventeen times. She revealed to her the existence of a spring in the cavern floor and told her that a chapel should be built on the spot. On the sixteenth visit, she was persuaded to ask the figure what she was. She told her, in the local dialect, ‘
Que soy era immaculada councepciou
.’ She had no idea what the mysterious words meant, though she would have heard them when she was taught the catechism. (This was in 1858. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception had been proclaimed in 1854 by Pope Pius IX and promulgated in Lourdes in 1855.)

Some people thought that they knew better than the girl herself what she had seen. The local newspaper called the apparition a ‘lady’, which led some to suppose that the little pauper had been impressed by an elegant tourist or one of the local beauties – perhaps the newspaper editor’s fiancée or the chemist’s wife, who was known as ‘la Belle Chocolatière’ because she bought her clothes in Paris. But Bernadette had a very different creature in mind. Later, she became quite angry when painters and sculptors depicted the tiny, child-like apparition as a tall, well-fed lady in corsets and crinolines, well past puberty and more likely to be at home in a Paris salon than in a damp provincial cave.

To Bernadette and the local people, ‘
damisèla
’ had a particular connotation.
Demoiselles
were forest fairies, who dressed in white and disappeared if anyone came too close. Flowers grew at their feet. They could conjure up a sudden wind and calm it just as quickly. They lived in caves and grottos and were associated with springs and running water. They were also known to be on the side of the poor and could be quite violent when an injustice had been done. In neighbouring parts of the Pyrenees, when the Forest Code of 1827 placed restrictions on the food and fuel that could be gleaned from what had once been common land, forest guards and industrial charcoal burners had been terrorised by ghostly white figures. Their huts were set on fire and they were threatened with mutilation. The ‘War of the Demoiselles’ was at its height in the early 1830s but continued sporadically until the 1870s. The
demoiselles
of this rural Résistance turned out to be local men dressed up as fairies but they
modelled their behaviour on supernatural spirits that were believed to exist as late as the 1950s.

The events at Lourdes came to be seen as a battle between sceptics and believers, but there was a much older and deeper division between the authorities and the common people. The peasant mind was quite at home with mysteries and contradictions. The apparition was the Virgin Mary and she was also a pagan spirit. In folk tales told in many parts of France, the Virgin and the local fairy were interchangeable. Four centuries before, Joan of Arc and the children of her village had danced around the ‘Fairy Tree’ and woven wreaths for the statue of the Virgin. The vital point was not the metaphysical status of the being but her actions and sympathies.

Like the forest fairies and most of the other Pyrenean Virgins, the Lourdes Virgin appeared on common land. She was kind to the poor but also quite capable of humiliating doubters and had to be appeased with offerings. Above all, she was not a creature of the Catholic Church. As usual in such cases, the Church authorities were sceptical. Like the local Prefect, they were also concerned about the threat to law and order. In their view, Bernadette was a simple-minded peasant, and the twenty thousand people who deposited candles and offerings at the cave were a nuisance and a public health hazard.

Twelve years before, on a lonely mountainside at La Salette in the diocese of Grenoble, the Virgin had appeared to two shepherds – a sullen girl and a boy with such a short attention span that he started throwing stones while the Virgin was still delivering her message. The Virgin of La Salette was a far more questionable apparition than the Virgin of Lourdes but popular enthusiasm had forced the Church to validate the miraculous cures she performed.

Four years passed before Bernadette’s vision was ratified by the Church, but by then her family and the town had been saved. Soon, Lourdes had more visitors than the grandest Pyrenean spas. Properties on the road to the shrine soared in value and shops sprang up like flowers at the feet of a fairy. ‘Here the relations of the celebrated child contrive to make money out of the connection by advertising in large letters above their shops, “Bernadette’s Aunt”, etc.’ (Henry Blackburn,
The Pyrenees: a Description of Summer Life at French Watering Places
, 1881). Whatever educated people chose to believe,
this was not cynical opportunism. The little people had won a great victory, and it was right and proper, in their view, that they should profit from the Virgin’s gift. The demoiselle had chosen Lourdes, not Bétharram or Argelès. One day, Lourdes would have more hotels than anywhere but Paris, and Bétharram would be deserted. As Henry Blackburn’s landlady at Argelès remarked a little sourly, ‘It’s a stroke of good luck for Lourdes.’

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T
HE EVENTS IN
L
OURDES
were spectacular but not exceptional. They belonged to an ancient tale that can be traced back to the days of Roman Gaul, and even further, beyond the birth of Christ, into unrecorded history.

Some of the early parts of this tale can be deciphered with a map of France and a list of place names. If all the places named after a saint are marked on the map, a distinct pattern appears: a concentration of ‘Saints’ (or the earlier ‘Dam-’ and ‘Dom-’, from
dominus
) in the centre and the west, and large areas with relatively few ‘Saints’ in the north, the north-east and the far south-west. This pattern reflects varying degrees of settlement and stability in the early Middle Ages: a town or village that was already well established when the new religion came was less likely to be renamed after a saint than a scattered settlement that only later coalesced around a church. Even at this distance in time, smaller details are also visible. Places called Saint-Martin (the Roman soldier who became Bishop of Tours and evangelized Gaul in the fourth century) tend to occur along the lines of Roman roads and perhaps reveal the routes by which the new religion spread. Places called Saint-Bonnet – excluding the ‘Bonnets’ that were derived from the name of the Celtic god Belenos – draw an erratic line across the country from Savoy to the Gironde, and appear to trace the route that was taken by Saint Bonitus. (Bonitus died in the seventh century while returning to Clermont-Ferrand from Rome, and then continued in a disembodied state or was carried in a reliquary until he reached the Atlantic Ocean.)

The pattern of saints’ names is curiously reminiscent of a longterm trend that is known to geographers and historians as the Saint-Malo–Geneva line (p. 318). This imaginary line runs diagonally across
the country from the Cotentin peninsula in the English Channel to the northern French Alps. At least until the late nineteenth century, it appears with surprising regularity when various sets of data are plotted on a map: south and west of the line, people tended to be shorter and to have darker hair and eyes; they were less literate, lived in smaller places, had less taxable income and were more likely to be employed in agriculture.

The Saint-Malo–Geneva line may predate the north–south divide (see p. 67), and it may reflect ancient and otherwise untraceable movements of the population. It may be the ‘strange attractor’ of a chaotic process involving geology and climate, invasion and migration, enterprise and inertia. It does at least suggest that the Christianization of France was subordinate to other realities and trends, and it raises some tricky questions. Did the Church consolidate the nation by creating parishes and dioceses, or was it simply implanting itself – as it did at Lourdes – on societies and beliefs that already existed? Was modern Gaul created or only conquered by the Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church? And were ‘superstition’ and popular religion just the jumbled bones of Druidism or a coherent system of belief ?

The nervous reaction of the Church to Bernadette’s vision in 1858 betrayed a fear of insignificance that was almost as old as the Church itself. Since the fourth or fifth centuries, the Church had been eradicating and commandeering pagan sites. Sometimes, saints were invented to replace the old gods. Saint Minerve took the place of Minerva, Mars became Saint Mard or Saint Maurice. Ancient religious sites were converted to a semblance of Christianity. Saint Anne is the patron saint of Brittany, not because she ever went to Brittany, but because she was the closest plausible match for the Celtic goddess Ana and the sacred swamps where this world was joined to the world beyond. (
Ana
or
anam
was a Gaulish word for swamp.)

The names changed but the holy sites were rarely abandoned. The chapel of Saint Agathe in the valley of the Vilaine in southern Brittany dates back to Gallo-Roman times. It has a fresco depicting Eros on a dolphin and a naked woman – either Venus or the local fairy – combing her hair beside the water. Before the ninth century, the chapel was rededicated to a certain male ‘Saint Venus’ who later
became Saint Vénier. In the eighteenth century, when the old miracle-working saints were replaced with the saints of the Catholic Reformation, the Sicilian saint Agatha was imported as a replacement for Saint Vénier, who had always enjoyed the reputation of making sterile women pregnant.