Tea at Trianon: A Rebirth for Lourdes

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, July 27, 2019

A Rebirth for Lourdes

From The LA Times:

The centerpiece of Lourdes, a town of fewer than 15,000 residents that sees an estimated 5 million annual visitors, is the Gothic Notre Dame cathedral, built atop the grotto where Bernadette had her visions.

Visitors can walk through the grotto, touching the walls, sometimes as a priest conducts Mass in front. They then pass a series of fountains to fill jugs full of water or wait in line to bathe in the water from Bernadette’s stream. The Catholic Church says Lourdes has been the source of 70 medical miracles.

The sanctuary is surrounded by blocks of hotels and souvenir shops that for decades targeted a flux of tourists who arrived as part of large, organized pilgrimages.

About 10 years ago, the rate of those group pilgrimages began to plummet, mirroring changes in the Catholic Church, which has seen the percentage of its congregations in Europe fall and those in places like South America, Africa and Asia rise. Instead of busloads of pilgrims from places like Italy, Lourdes is seeing small groups of pilgrims from farther away.

In 2009, the town’s hotels reported 3,260,022 “nuitées,” a unit of measure in France’s tourism industry to count the number of nights a person spends somewhere. (For example, three people staying four nights makes 12 “nuitées.”) By 2017, the number of nuitées had fallen to 2,005,732, according to the French government’s official statistics agency. (Read more.)