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By Root 1452 0

’Connor and her mother returned to the airport by bus, with the group, for a transatlantic flight aboard the TWA Constellation. Separating from the others at Shannon Airport in Dublin, a leg of the trip that Flannery, still holding on to the anti-Irish fervor of her girlhood, was only too happy to miss, they traveled on to London. Early the next morning the pair flew to Milan, where they arrived shortly after noon, and were met by Robert Fitzgerald. Nearly a year after driving Flannery from Chicago to South Bend, he now took her and Regina on a prettier ride from Milan to Levanto, a coastal town on the Ligurian Sea, south of Genoa, at the end of a thickly wooded pine valley. There Flannery was reunited with Sally, and with her three girls and three boys, for whom Flannery brought Uncle Remus tales after promising pocketknives and snuff.

The four days spent at the Fitzgeralds’ villa — built on several levels on a steep hill dotted with olive trees, and overlooking the light blue sea, where Robert had been translating The Odyssey — certainly fulfilled Dr. Merrill’s orders for Flannery to rest between the strenuous beginning and middle of her trip. On spring days the trees below exploded with white and pink blossoms, the night air grew heavy, and, through open windows, the blond children could often be seen, or heard, playing in the courtyard. O’Connor reread the Uncle Remus tales that she brought as a gift, as well as Nabokov’s Pnin, finding the comic novel about an absentminded professor of Russian literature “wonderful.” Even so, as she reported to Ashley Brown, “The first cold germ I met on the other side moved in and stayed for the 17 days so most everything I saw was through a fog.”

Arriving in Paris from Milan with Sally and Regina, Flannery was forced by her cold to recuperate inside the art deco Hotel Ambassador, near the Paris opera house, where she was visited by Gabrielle Rolin, a young French journalist and novelist. “Instead of seeing Paris I saw her,” said Flannery. Although Rolin judged the novel “almost unreadable,” she brought her, as a gift, Emile Zola’s Lourdes. “Flannery’s way of speaking reminded me of Donald Duck,” recalls Rolin, “and her ‘home made permanent,’ Shirley Temple, but her eyes . . . perhaps she owed this interior light to her faith, this look so sharp and blue. ‘I owe it to my Irish origins,’ she said. But there was something more. The terrifying Mrs. O’Connor also had a keen eye but she didn’t look beyond her interlocutor. Flannery saw farther, higher, elsewhere. . . . The amiable Mrs. Fitzgerald’s smile was a comfort after having encountered the acid grin of the mother.”

Reunited with the group from Savannah, the three women then traveled south from Paris to the Haut-Pyrenees region of Lourdes, near the border of Spain, long a medieval pilgrimage route on the way to Compostela. Crossing through France, during one phase of this trip, Sally and Flannery had a long, confidential conversation in a train compartment. “She said to me . . . that she had come to terms with her illness, with the crippling, the isolation, the constant danger of death,” recalled Fitzgerald. “That, in fact, her only remaining fear was that her mother would die before she did. . . . She added, ‘I don’t know what I would do without her.’” Yet when Fitzgerald later passed on this remark to Caroline Gordon, who never liked Mrs. O’Connor, she flashed her black eyes at Sally, and snapped scornfully, “Yes! She would have lost her material.”

Flannery had mixed feelings about going to Lourdes, as she was used to being an observer of, or writer about, religious enthusiasm boiling over into visions and healings, rather than a participant. Yet the village itself was a study in contrasts. The accommodation for the Savannah group, on the evenings of April 30 and May 1, was the nineteenth-century Grand Hotel de la Grotte, on the avenue Bernadette-Soubirous, the cream-colored epitome of la vieille France, with hanging eaves, wrought-iron balconies, and long white wooden shutters, situated on rocks overlooking a valley cut by the