“Never mind that. Do you really want to go all the way to Lourdes, Eugénie?”
“It is the only thing I want.”
Henri stared, apparently finding me inscrutable.
“Then, chouette—you must,” said Jolie.
“Lourdes?” asked Henri.
“Eugénie has family there.”
“Well, don’t go for the claptrap miracles. But you will be safer out of the capital.”
“Could you really detain de Chaveignes?”
“With pleasure. Time enough that he should pay his debt to the working man.”
“ And woman, and child,” added Jolie, full of mischief.
Henri was fixed on my traveling with a companion, suggesting everyone from Finette (if she could be tracked down) to La Tigre. I insisted that I had entered Paris alone and would navigate this exit in the same manner. I would travel as a widow; and be safe. He finally settled for giving me his knife and a lesson on how to use it, resting his hand on my own as he did. I looked up into his eyes. So much about the man I did not know. Then over to Jolie, on the balcony, peering out at the street. I had loved her; and had come close—so close—to loving him. Would I see either of them again? . . . Another time. Another place, another lifetime—I might know Henri better; and he me. I’d heard of such things. Other lives, lived long ago. And lives to be lived, future lives. Better ones, perhaps. Mitra and I discussed such things during the long nights of the siege. After the strangeness of the idea wore off, I found curious comfort in it.
Then we took out the maps and he sketched out a possible route—a long one that embarked from Saint-Lazare; passed through Courbevoie near the forts and the Commune’s terrible battle; and traveled west past Versailles before curving south.
It was not for another two weeks that circumstances permitted exit. Fighting was heavy in the ring around the capital, with casualties coming into our reopened, now undersupplied ambulance at the rue du Mail. Francisque and Sylvie were still at Versailles with their past-season dresses, so it was left to La Tigre, Amé, and me to nurse and tend to the men as best we could. From them we heard of the increasing despair and disorganization of the Commune’s forces; of the loss of morale following the defection of the once-heralded Cluseret to the side of Versailles and the assembly. They were angered by the current attitude of the leaders of the Commune, who favored appeasing the Prussians, still installed menacingly around the eastern perimeter. Some of these men had joined up to avenge the honor of France; others were true-blooded for the Commune; no faction had been presented with an effective leader or the desired enemy. The plan to free Blanqui was a failure; Thiers held fast to his prisoner and would accept no terms.
Although the air was full of betrayals, the gaiety of spring nonetheless strangely infused a city longing for reprieve, and Parisians rallied around a new project: tearing down the enormous Vendôme column, erected by Napoleon I and the icon of his departed nephew. This effectively shut down traffic, as did the razing of Premier Thiers’s mansion in the place Saint-Georges—with great fanfare its artworks were shuttled off to the museums; its linens were sent to the hospitals. And the true life of Paris went on. Gardeners gardened; spring flowers came up and consoled us for the lack of trees. Fishermen fished the Seine and street hawkers came out with their chestnuts, bouquets, birdcages, and window glass. Theaters were lit; the Salon of 1871 was announced, and Parisians promenaded in Sunday attire even as wagons of corpses rattled by. Amid this hubbub and chaos, Finette came down from the Red Cat with a sprained ankle, begging to be taken back.
And so it was the middle of May, during a brief cease-fire lasting only a few hours, that I boarded the train, alone, out of Paris. The Aurore, the night train, headed south-southwest.
31. Grotto
MAKE WAY FOR the malades!” the porter called, and at that, the railway men took off their hats and stood still. Limoges station was bright and sunny—an echo of Paris, without the surrounding ring of Prussians. “The Red City of France,” Henri had called it, because its porcelain workers had pushed for recognition of the Commune. This had plunged the city into a maelstrom of civil strife; soldiers who had been marshaled to support Versailles refused to board the trains to travel to the capital. Some stacked their rifles at the station; others, when the train was stopped some distance outside the city, disembarked and marched back home, singing “La Marseillaise.” On Henri’s railway map, a firm, blue-inked artery flowed with confidence to Limoges.
After that, it was crossed with hatch marks. At Agen, a pale green thread indicated a change to a line that continued on to Auch, but in the station key there was no mention of Auch as a stop. The map may have been one of railway optimism rather than actuality—at any rate, it was printed before the war.
Thus I was uncertain what I would find by way of rail accommodation to Lourdes; and I wondered if the anticlerical sentiments of the Commune had penetrated its sister city and the way to the shrine of Our Lady would be barred. However, the reverse was true—at Limoges I was issued a ticket without question. In a city of divided sentiments, the law of contraries was in force. At the rail station, piety prevailed: for what soldier would prevent the dying one last chance at a miracle?
When I stepped aboard the train, there were no compartments, no superior classes of service, no baggage racks, and no seats. Only stretchers, nuns, rosaries, and raised hands; keening wails and sights better left undescribed. It was the White Train, the train of pilgrimage. And as was obligatory for ambulatory passengers, I accepted a smock, a tin cup, and a water pitcher. Began with the first stretcher in front of me, and looked, dismayed, down the long carriage.
“Everything is for the best; we are praying,” a nun said to me, seeing the look on my face. “There are no more remedies here.”
Lourdes was not far from the place of my birth, but then, roads hardly went directly from one place to the next and never when the terrain was as difficult as this passage toward the Pyrenees. Those mountains were our distant watchers; portents of weather, of the local mood—loftily unapproachable. After Bernadette had her visions at the Grotto Massabielle, Lourdes had gone from stone to gold, and not by plowing and planting, or mining, or any other recognized means of human progress: but for miracles.
I assumed that Berthe had been sent to Lourdes for pragmatic reasons, though; because it was the nearest large convent that would take her after her transfer out of the hospice system. As to why Stephan would have wanted it and what exactly he intended—that I could not know.
I filled my cup with water and turned to the first cot.
It was morning when we arrived, and as the train dropped down into the valley, I could see the processions, the long winding lines of pilgrims. As the White Train disgorged, and one by one, my fellow passengers fell to their knees or their stomachs, or raised their hands in the air if they were on their stretchers—as they wailed and shouted and prayed, called out for hands to carry them, the porters and lay brothers and sisters prepared for the passage, joining the thousands already converged. Lourdes, during pilgrimage season, is not a place to search for someone you have never seen.
Walking uphill from the station and into the center of town, my head went light and dizzy; my limbs ached, and my lungs and chest, as though my entire being was attempting to expel a vicious poison but was too weak to do it. It was the altitude, but more than that. I shouldered past the stretchers and wheeled chairs and carts; swept along in the crowd but solitary. How was I ever to find Berthe here? I felt entirely alone, and resentful. I was not ill or dying and had limited curiosity about the miracles of Lourdes. After all that we had witnessed during the siege, I did not want to confront more piteous sights of illness and death. Was humanity never to be healed? Was it never to fight? But they were fighting in Paris, brother against brother, and what good was it doing? Piteous we were, with every form of human malady on full display under the beating Pyrenees sun. No remedies, indeed.
It was a southern sun, and too hot for the
uphill trudge to the center of Lourdes, which was a humble sort of place like a thousand others, except for its gigantic fairground of promised miracles. I kicked at my long, full skirts; tugged askew the lace and embroidery going-away cape in black silk; ruffled across its hem, its small criss-cross embroidered buttons undone in this heat—the cape was meant to cross in front and required the hands of a maid to tie properly, but I was not traveling with a maid. The view-obscuring veil and kid gloves tightened around my heat-swollen fingers. And here I was, in a place very similar to the one in which I had once worn a skirt and chemise as simple as Bernadette’s. My old wooden sabots would have been superior to the Paris ladies’ boots manacling my feet, mincing between the gaps in the cobbles. I picked up a religious flyer that stuck to one of my heels, tossed it aside. The Grotto was not my goal nor my intention. My pilgrimage was of a different kind.
The streets of Lourdes were clogged. At cafés, crutches were propped against the walls. Jugglers and fire eaters gathered in the square; hawkers offered tours and sold souvenirs: plaster virgins and medallions, water bottles and everything Bernadette. I waited in a long line for a café table, and when finally blessed by a chair, ordered vin ordinaire. My eyes had begun to blur, to search, to well with tears. Tears began to stream amid the cacophony of the marketplace of saints’ bones, splinters of the True Cross, vessels for holy water. I was more tired than I knew. Out of place, left out of the general miracle seeking—and yet I wanted a miracle too, just not the sort advertised.
My eyes followed a girl across the square; swept her for signs, marks of the abandoned—you will see Berthes everywhere—stooped shoulders, a limp, a lead medallion—any of a thousand consequences of neglect. Did this one look like my mother when she was young, or like me? But it was merely a girl’s body; hips just beginning to curve out below the drawn-in waist; a face that could be lovely, or dull as lead; one of those faces that changed with the weather. A girl’s body, before she has lived in it many years. What is my fate today? Which clouds will tumble across my sky? And would she be overcome, one day—wake like a sudden storm—to that roaring in the ears that led to leaving everything behind to follow her desires to the nethermost; would she find herself gripped by the passions of her foremothers?
I pushed aside the wineglass; the liquid tasted cheap and bitter; then changed my mind, drank the dregs, and worried about my soul. I did not consider myself hardhearted; so why did the sights and sounds around me not arouse compassion? Must my hand be worn and callused in order to appear innocent? Must I brandish my wound to feel it . . . Who were they, the religious, the authorities—to judge my own harm? How long had my own wounds been effaced, silenced; never touched, never seen? For as long as ever was. As long as Eve’s day, after the serpent slid away. A day that lasted forever. These and other inchoate ideas occupied me as I made my way over the bridge, toward the convent. The way was not difficult; all roads ended at the hospice, and at the Grotto.
“Yes, it was a gentleman who came for her,” said the sister to me, the one I found nearly without looking. Her skin luminous as parchment, her voice low. “Accompanied by a dark-skinned boy, a servant. He prayed at the Grotto and then he came here to speak to us. He presented papers attesting to his name and estate; apologized for the unholy chaos in Paris and for his boy, who he said was Hindoo but studying the Bible.” The sister paused and almost smiled. “He came by permission of the director of the Hospice des Enfants Assistés in Paris. The girl was his daughter, he said.”
“Of course we hesitated. Berthe Sophia was very special to us; she had been with us such a short while. But she worked right along with us, from the first. So old for her years, that girl. No matter how hard or difficult the chore, she never flinched; whether she was attending us at the baths or meeting the White Trains. She had the mark of the abandoned on her, but she hid it very well . . . Oh, no, my dear—not last August. It was only last week!”
I gasped. My heart dropped to my feet; my head into my hands.
“I called her to my office, that day he arrived. I didn’t want to let her go, but he insisted; he had the papers. A father. Oh, I did hesitate. We loved her, our little daughter. Whatever she had been through; we didn’t know what it was. When she saw him, she went to him as though she had known him all her life. She went right to him and held out her hand.
“‘Mother, I feel I know him,’ she said. I did not know whether it was right, my dear. I prayed about it that night. While the gentleman was here taking the waters, attending the masses, I met with him again; I felt that he was not the most abject of sinners; he had a heart in him, this man. He had been in India, had started a school there for the poor. He also wanted to speak to us about transporting French Bibles there.”
“I don’t think—” I began, but stopped.
“It was not that, that moved me. But when he was to leave, he asked her if she wanted to go with him. He gave her the choice and I knew in my heart she would go. I was torn, you see—I did not understand. I believe she was perplexed herself, at first. I went to pray with her and when we were finished she spoke. She did not—she did not want to become a nun, she said. It nearly broke my heart; and I knew that I was too attached to her. It was a caution to me, that bond.
“Do not blame yourself, my dear. She was to be found one way or another. You missed them only by a matter of days.” She was quiet for a moment, then dropped her head as if in prayer. “I have been in this order all my life. The world—it still astonishes me. That little girl—Berthe Sophia—so many wanting her after she was so long abandoned. All of our sisters here, this father, you. It is the work of the Holies, it is a mystery. But there are many orphans here. Children and the grown, as well. Your daughter will have what is needed, I think. But you must look to your own soul, Eugénie. Lourdes is a place of miracles; and one may be hovering over us even now. Do not travel from here as you came: in anger, in recrimination.”
“I do not—I am sorry, Mother. Faith is not to me what it is to you. I don’t say I have none—but . . .” I stopped, tried to breathe deeply into my constricted lungs.
“Go to the Grotto, my dear. Pray there. Do not go with the crowds. If you go now,” she glanced at the clock, “you will be there when most of the others are at Mass. It is a good time. Quiet. Allow yourself some healing, after what you have been through in Paris.” She bowed her head, then raised it, smiling.
And so, helpless and exhausted; my tears now a dried, poisonlike fury on my cheeks, I followed the parade of push chairs, nuns, and pilgrims; stretchers with those unable even to stand, who wanted to die in front of a rock. As the sister had promised, they broke off and filed up to the church, where the bells were ringing. And I carried on to the Grotto. An attendant was removing spent tapers and replacing them with fresh ones on an enormous standing candelabra.
The attendant paid no attention and in a few steps I walked up inside the Grotto, the very place where Bernadette had scraped in the dirt and found a miracle. Rules and restrictions, at least, seemed to have fallen away; I did not even need a ticket to enter. It was cool and damp, at least; the interior itself a comfort after the sunny heat. The place of the mothers, the sister had said. I glanced over my shoulder. Still no one interfered, nor seemed to care at all what I might be doing. I had the instinct to unclasp my boots and slip them off, to stand on the Grotto’s bare earth. Undid the traveling cape; and since it did not seem to matter, shed the coat as well, placing it over a shelf of rock. I shivered, slightly, in the cool; a Pyrenees breeze came through—a small gust like those I remembered from my own province—and all around was quiet but for the sound of trickling water; rivulets running down the side of the cavern. Near me, by the Grotto’s opposite wall, a well-dressed man dabbed his handkerchief on one of the rivulets and pressed the dampened cloth to his brow. Like mine, his trouble, whatever it was, was not apparent.
A strange feeling stole over me, a relief from thoughts because it was different, other. I would put words to it if I could; but I can
not. The sensation, a slight tremulous feeling, whether from the rock or from my own body, passed through me as I touched the mottled, damp surface, ran my palm over the cavern’s craggy, damp interior. A humble place, similar to dozens of others, it reminded me of the springs of my childhood, those places of wishes and rags, where my aunt had mumbled and the village had strung up their tokens and supplicated the spirits. It was that feeling, that kind of place; and very strong. My aunt would not have been amazed at all. The more you listen, the more you shall hear, she used to say—and perhaps it was true.
I was not ready to cast my lot with the hordes and masses, but had a feeling in this place connected with something in the past—like two bells rung together, one distant, the other near. I stood in the interior of that rocky outcropping and experienced peace, for the first time that day; the first for a very long time.
I sensed that I had passed through a long struggle . . . Could that be? Passed through—when such fresh hurt as the sister’s words had caused—had hardly even begun? I stood, rock-still, for a long time. Not wanting to move from there.
But then the masses were over; the throng began to trickle along the path, first two or three, then hundreds behind them. The tower of candles was lit for the procession then, sparkling in the midday sunlight. They came and kneeled; they filled their bottles and jars and vessels from the Grotto’s spring. And I passed out of the cavern. No longer angry; no longer blinking with tears.
32. Auch
MUST EVERY TALE have its villain, or are we all of us, from salt spoon to carving knife, complicit in the evil of our own lives? Was this to be a journey of retrieval, then—a restitution not of what I most desired but what I wished to deny—a full serving of life’s heartbreak? Berthe, my mother, casts a long shadow. She always did.
The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. Page 39