Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [141]
Lourdes had always been subject to commercialization, almost within months of reports, in 1858, of the healing of the paralyzed fingers of Catherine Latapie, when she plunged them into the spring discovered by her friend Bernadette, at the direction of the Virgin Mary — an apparition the fourteen-year-old at first simply called “Aquéro,” or “that thing,” in the local patois. In the early twentieth century the aesthete and Roman Catholic convert Joris-Karl Huysmans derided its many honky-tonk shops as “a hemorrhage of bad taste.” Flannery enjoyed quoting Mauriac’s remark that “the religious goods stores were the devil’s answer there to the Virgin Mary.” Such marketing had only escalated in the past decades with the appearance of a six-hundred-page historical novel, Song of Bernadette, by the Jewish novelist Franz Werfel, and its adaptation as a 1943 Academy Award–winning, black-and-white Hollywood movie, starring Jennifer Jones.
But all sales of religious souvenirs ceased at the large iron St. Michael’s Gate at the foot of the boulevard de le Grotte, which marked the beginning of the Domain, a sort of medieval town arranged about various churches, squares, and shrines, and full of pilgrims, many as maimed and afflicted as O’Connor’s characters. In this veritable open-air hospital, the critics of Lourdes often had a change of heart. No less a snob than Huysmans allowed that “nowhere have I seen such appalling illnesses, so much charity and so much good grace.” For Mauriac, the grotto was a “heart that never stops beating.” “The heavy hand of the prelate smacks down on this free enterprise at the gates of the grotto,” Flannery wrote Ashley Brown. “This is always full of peasants milling around and of the sick being wheeled on stretchers.” In a postcard to Katherine Anne Porter, O’Connor penned a single line: “The sight of Faith and affliction joined in prayer — very impressive.”
Not only was Flannery in the company of her mother and Sally, but they were joined on their first day by William Sessions, who was on a Fulbright grant in Freiburg, Germany, attending the lectures of Martin Heidegger — Hulga’s philosophical obsession in “Good Country People.” Sessions arrived on May 1, the weather having turned warm and humid, in spite of breezes from nearby snowcapped mountains. “I joined them for lunch my first day, and it was the upstairs of their small hotel,” he remembered. “I kept wondering how Flannery had managed with her crutches. . . . Sally and Regina were on one side of the table, and I slipped into the outside seat beside Flannery. While we were eating, and Sally and Regina were talking, Flannery leaned over to me and cast her eyes rather slowly about the dining room. ‘Look,’ she whispered to me, ‘at all those Mauriac faces.’”
That afternoon, Flannery, Regina, and Sally sat at the back of the Grotto, the outcropping of rocks where Bernadette had experienced her visions, while Sessions braved the crowds of farmers descended from all over France for May Day, a holiday honoring the Virgin Mary. As they were marching ceaselessly up and down, he jostled to get to the spigots dispensing springwater above a basin, hoping to score just one gift bottle intended for Caroline Gordon. “In the pushing and shoving among the pilgrims for the holy water, I was knocked into the basin but not before I’d filled three bottles,” wrote Sessions. “Sally and the O’Connors were laughing when I returned with soaked polyester trousers but handing them bottles.” In the evening, Flannery and her mother looked on as Sally and Bill took part in the nightly candlelit procession in Rosary Square, beneath the basilica, singing the Lourdes Hymn to the Virgin and saying the Rosary, their entire group marching