Chap 3 - Rocks of Massabielle

This chapter describes the state of Lourdes around ten years prior, focusing on its geography and the significance of the Rocks of Massabielle, which later became famous as a site of Marian apparitions. The Description emphasizes the natural beauty and isolation of the area, painting a picture of a place where divine grace finds its way into even the most barren environments.

Find more chapters here.

SUCH was the state of Lourdes ten years ago.  The railroad did not then pass by it, nor was it indeed in contemplation.  One marked out more direct appeared to be intended beforehand for the line of the Pyrenees.

     The whole of the town and the fortress, as we have already observed, are situated on the right bank of the Gave, which after breaking— in its course from the south—against the enormous rock that serves as a pedestal to the castle, makes immediately a bend at right angles and takes suddenly a westerly direction.

     An ancient bridge, built some little distance above the first houses of the town, serves as a means of communication with the country, meadows, forests and mountains on the left bank. 

   
On this last bank, a little above the bridge and opposite to the castle, a large canal is formed from the water of the Gave. This canal rejoins its parent stream about a kilométre further down, after passing the rocks of Massabielle, the base of which it washes.

   The long island formed by the Gave and this canal is one vast and verdant tract of meadow land and is known by the name of I’lle du Chalet, or more commonly le Chalet.

  The mill of Sâvy, the only one on the left bank, is built across the canal and serves as a bridge between the island meadow and the main land.

    In 1858 there was scarcely a wilder, more savage or solitary spot in the environs of the busy little town we have described, than the Rocks of Massabielle, at the foot of which the mill-stream rejoined the Gave.

   A few paces above this junction, on the bank of the stream, the abrupt rock was pierced at its base by three irregular caverns, curiously placed above each other and communicating with one another like holes in a gigantic sponge.

   The singularity of these caverns renders them somewhat difficult to describe.
     The first and the largest was on a level with the ground. It had almost the appearance of a booth at a country fair, or of a badly shaped and very high oven cut vertically through the centre, so as only to form a semi-dome.  The entrance in the shape of an arch very much askew was about thirteen feet high. The breadth and depth of the grotto could not have been less than three times its height. The rock sloped back from the entrance, like the roof of a garret seen from below, and became narrower on either side.

 Above, somewhat to the right of the spectator, were two superimposed apertures in the rock, forming as it were annexes or dependencies of this larger one.

   Viewed from the outside the principal of these two openings was oval in form and about the size of a window in a house or a niche in a church.  It sloped slightly up as it receded; then, at the depth of about six feet, forked; one branch descending to the grotto beneath, the other turning back on itself as far as the exterior of the rock and forming the second upper aperture of which we have spoken, but being of no importance except that it gave light in every way to this supplementary cavity.

   An eglantine or wild rose, springing from a fissure in the rock, trailed its long branches at the base of this niche-like orifice.

  At the foot of this little series of caverns, which the eye could take in at a glance, but of which it is very difficult by mere description to convey a correct idea, the mill-stream rushes over a chaos of enormous rocks, fallen from the mountains, to reunite with the Gave five or six paces below.

   The grotto was exactly in front of the Ile du Chàlet which, as we have already observed, was formed by the Gave and the canal.

   These caverns were called the Grotto of Massibielle from the name of the rocks of which it formed a part. In the patois of the country “Massabielle” signifies “ Old Rocks.”
   Lower down on the banks of the Gave there was a steep and rugged hillock which, as well as these rocks, belonged to the commune of Lourdes, and where the poor of the town used to bring their pigs to feed. On the approach of a storm the grotto served them as a place of shelter, as also to the few fishermen who were wont to fish with nets in this part of the Gave.

   As in all caverns of this nature the rock was dry in fine weather and slightly humid when it rained.  This occasional humidity and imperceptible dripping of the wet season was only observable on one side, that to your right on entering.  It is precisely on this side that the rain usually comes, driven by the westerly wind; and the rock being very slender and full of clefts in this place suffered in the same way as do houses with the same exposure and built with indifferent mortar.

   The left side and the bottom not being thus exposed were always as dry as the floor of a drawing- room. The accidental humidity of the western wall served even to set off by contrast the burning dryness of the northern, eastern and southern portions of the grotto.

   Above this triple cavity arose almost in a peak the enormous mass of the Rocks of Massabielle, garlanded in many a place with ivy and box, heather and moss. Tangled brambles, hazels and wild roses, a few trees, whose branches were often broken by the wind, extended their roots into the fissures of the rocks, wherever the falling in of the mountain or the breath of heaven had afforded them a handful of earth for their nourishment.  The eternal sower, He whose invisible hand fills the immensity of space with suns and planets, He who has produced out of nothing the ground on which we tread, the vegetable and animal kingdoms, the Creator of so many millions of men who have peopled the earth, and so many millions of angels who people heaven, that God, whose wealth is boundless and power unlimited, does not intend that a single atom should be lost in the immense regions of his works.  And this is why He leaves nothing barren which is capable of production; this is why over the entire extent of our globe innumerable germs float in the air, covering the vegetable earth wherever it appears, were there only room for the existence of a blade of grass or for the growth of the tiniest moss. And in the same way, O Divine Sower!  thy graces, like an invisible dust of fruitful seeds, float around our souls on the watch for a fertile soil.  And if we are so barren, it is because we present to Thee sometimes hearts harder and more arid than the rock, sometimes beaten paths for ever trodden by the feet of the passers by, sometimes thickets of thorns solely occupied by rank weeds which choke the good seed.