These Fathers are very active, enterprising
men, and have made a great success of this annual national pilgrimage.
Under their direction thirty thousand pilgrims are transported to
Lourdes, including over a thousand sick persons.
"So in the following year I went in August, and saw a national
pilgrimage, and followed it during the three days which it lasts, in
addition to the two days given to travelling. After its departure, I
stayed on ten or twelve days, working up the subject in every detail. My
book is the story of such a national pilgrimage, and is, accordingly, the
story of five days. It is divided into five parts, each of which parts is
limited to one day.
"There are from ninety to one hundred characters in the story: sick
persons, pilgrims, priests, nuns, hospitallers, nurses, and peasants; and
the book shows Lourdes under every aspect. There are the piscinas, the
processions, the Grotto, the churches at night, the people in the
streets. It is, in one word, Lourdes in its entirety. In this canvas is
worked out a very delicate central intrigue, as in 'Dr. Pascal,' and
around this are many little stories or subsidiary plots. There is the
story of the sick person who gets well, of the sick person who is not
cured, and so on. The philosophical idea which pervades the whole book is
the idea of human suffering, the exhibition of the desperate and
despairing sufferers who, abandoned by science and by man, address
themselves to a higher Power in the hope of relief; as where parents have
a dearly loved daughter dying of consumption, who has been given up, and
for whom nothing remains but death.
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