All this has passed from Poitiers to Lourdes, the apparition being modernized by putting the Madonna for the Christ and a peasant for a queen, and altering the date from the Sixth Century to 11 February 1858. My father and mother stayed a night at Lourdes, 27 August 1861; but their diaries say nothing of Bernadette or any cures or miracles there. My father just notes “walking out by the small rocky hill”; and that, I presume, was the hill where one sees processions of pilgrims now. I went to Lourdes, 11 September 1894, and it profited me £1. 14_s._ 7_d._ or thereabouts. I was going to Gavarnie in the Pyrenees, and found that the fare to Lourdes was lower than the fare to Pau, though Lourdes was further off from Paris, and further on towards Gavarnie. Zola’s _Lourdes_ had come out in the spring; and I took it with me, and read it in the train, holding it well up at the window. It acted as a scare-crow, and gave me a compartment to myself. On reaching Lourdes, I bought the antidote that was on sale there--_Réponse complète au Lourdes de M. Zola_. But the antidote seemed hardly powerful enough to counteract the poison. There were pilgrims there in thousands, not nearly so much in earnest as pilgrims I have seen in Palestine, but much more so than some I encountered at Ancona going to Loreto, 20 August 1898. They were certain of absolution there, and meant to make it cover a multitude of sins. In the Papal Registers--Avignon, 1 August 1346--there is an entry of an absolution to Thomas de Courtenay and his wife, to take effect at death, and therefore covering all sins committed meanwhile. They were the owners of this place--Wreyland--and probably were scared by the Black Death. The disease was spreading westward, and its victims died too suddenly for the priests to shrive them. In the Middle Ages it was the fashion to bring earth home from the Holy Land for burial, and there is still a fashion for bringing Jordan water home for baptism. I was down by the Jordan with my mother and a friend of mine, 21 March 1882, and she insisted on bringing some water home. So we filled up some empty soda-water bottles from this uninviting stream. (The rivers of Damascus _are_ better: there is no doubt about it.) A year or two afterwards there was a birth in some friend’s family, and she sent a bottle for the baptism. But the child was not baptized in Jordan water after all. When the water was uncorked, it sent forth such an overpowering smell, that it had to be poured down the sink at once.