POITIERS TO THE PYRENEES
before seeking relaxation in the gilded halls above. For the shrine of Bernadette has long since been overlaid by the machinery of a vast "business enterprise," a scheme of life in which every heart-beat is itemised, tariffed and exploited, so that even the invocations encrusting by thousands the Basilica walls seem to record so many cases of definite "give and take," so many bargains struck with heaven—en souvenir de mon vœu, reconnaissance pour une guérison, souvenir d'une prière exaucée, and so on—and as one turns away from this monument of a thriving industry one may be pardoned for remembering the plane-tree by the Ilissus and another invocation:
"Ye gods, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the inner and the outer man be one."
But beyond Lourdes is Argelès, and at the first turn of the road one is again in the fresh Pyrenean country, among budding crops, sleek fawn-coloured cattle, and the grave handsome peasantry who make one feel that the devotional viile d'eaux one has just left is a mushroom growth quite unrelated to the life of industry to which these agricultural landscapes testify.
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