ENCOURAGING the workmen, seeing to everything, suggesting ideas, sometimes helping himself to straighten a stone placed crooked or a tree badly planted, recalling to the imagination by his indefatigable ardor and his holy enthusiasm, the grand figures of Esdras or of Nehemiah, occupied, in obedience to the commands of God, in constructing the walls of Jerusalem, a man of lofty stature, with a broad and strongly marked forehead, seemed to be everywhere at one and the same time. He attracted attention even from a considerable distance by his powerful frame and his long black cassock. His name may be easily guessed. It was the pastor of the town of Lourdes; it was the Curé Peyramale.
Every hour in the day he was thinking on the message addressed to him by the Blessed Virgin through the youthful Seer; every hour in the day he was thinking of those prodigious cures which had accompanied and followed the divine Apparition, of those countless miracles which he witnessed daily. He vowed his life to the execution of the orders of the mighty Queen of the Universe, and to the erection of a magnificent monument to her glory. Any delay, any slowness, even the loss of a single moment seemed to him to mark the ingratitude of men; and his heart, devoured with zeal for the house of God, often led to his being indignant, and manifested itself in severe admonitions. His faith was absolute and replete with grandeur. He regarded with horror the wretched narrowness of human prudence, and he thundered against it with the holy disdain of one accustomed to view things according to the horizon of that sacred mountain, from whose height the Son of God preached the nothingness of earth and the reality of heaven: “Be not troubled. Seek first my kingdom and all the rest shall be added unto you.”
One day, just opposite the miraculous Fountain, in the middle of a group of ecclesiastics and laity, an architect presented to him a plan―and it was by no means an ungraceful one―of a charming little Church which he proposed building over the Grotto. The Curé Peyramale glanced at it and his face became flushed; with a gesture of impatience he crumpled up and tore the plan and threw the fragments into the Gave.
“What are you doing?” exclaimed the astonished architect.
“You see,” replied the priest, “I blushed at what human meanness presumes to offer to the Mother of my God, and I destroyed the miserable design. What we must have here in memory of the great events which have taken place, is not a little confined village church, but a temple of marble as large as the summit of the Rocks of Massabielle will afford room for, and as magnificent as your mind can possibly conceive. Now then, sir, as an architect let your genius indulge in the most daring conceptions, let nothing arrest its upward flight and let it give us a masterpiece. Be sure of one thing, that were you Michelangelo himself, it would be strangely unworthy of the Virgin who has appeared here.”
“But, sir,” to the Curé, “it would take millions to realize what you are speaking of.”
“He who caused a Spring of living water to gush forth from this barren rock will have no difficulty in rendering the hearts of believers generous, go and have no fears.” replied the priest.
The temple was erected in the proportions designed by the man of God.
Often the Curé, considering the different works in progress, used to say, “When will it be granted to me to be present, in the midst of Priests and the faithful, at the first procession which shall come to inaugurate in these blessed places, the public worship of the Catholic Church. Might I not in such a moment chant my Nunc Dimittis and expire with joy at such a feast?”
His eyes used to fill with tears at such thoughts. Never was any desire more ardent and more fondly dwelt on in the depth of a soul than this innocent wish of a heart entirely taken up with God.
Occasionally, at times when there were but few persons at the rocks of Massabeille, a little girl came to kneel humbly before the place of the Apparition, and to drink at the spring. She was evidently sprung from the people and was poorly dressed. There was nothing to distinguish her from others, and unless some pilgrim happened to know her, or to inform others of her name, no one would have guessed that it was Bernadette. She who had been so highly privileged by the Lord, had returned to her primitive state of silence and obscurity. She continued to attend the schools of the Sisters, where she was the most simple of the scholars and would have wished to have been one of the most in the shade. The countless visits she received there did not trouble her peaceful soul, in which the memory of her glimpse of heaven and the image of the incomparable Virgin lived forever. The people, however, thronged to the spot from every direction, miracles were there accomplished, and the temple rose by degrees. And Bernadette, like the saintly Curé of Lourdes, looked forward to the day―the most fortunate to her next to those of the Divine visit―when she should, with her own eyes, see the Priests of the true God, conducting the faithful, headed by the Cross, and with banners floating in the air, to the Rock of the Apparition.
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