There has just left the Grotto at Lourdes, never to return to it, an old man who has been inseparable from it for over fifty years, and who will always be inseparable from it in the thoughts of countless pilgrims from every part of the world who have visited it in that long period. Perhaps no contemporary Catholic layman has had so many personal friends. This old man, who has just died in his ninetieth year, is Jean-Marie Laffont, the elder of the two Guardians of the Grotto, ‘the old candleman,’ he whose majestic head reminds one so forcibly of portraits of our own Cardinal Newman.

He was born at Poueyferré, a little village on the summit of a hill a few kilometres to the north-west of Lourdes. His family were well-to-do peasant proprietors, with a charming property which went down to the Lac de Lourdes. He was the eldest of a family of twelve children, and he and his brothers and sisters grew up in sight of the town with which he will be eternally associated. In those days village children were not worried with much instruction. If they learned to read and write, it was something of a marvel, but they certainly knew their catechism. Jean-Marie would spend most of his time helping about his father’s land, driving the cattle and the pigs to pasture, leading the sheep, going to market with the ox-waggon, and becoming astute in barter and rich in wisdom. He took the abundant corn from their rich lands to be ground in Lourdes by a miller named Soubirous— rather a slack and undependable but amiable person and one in need of help for the sake of his wife and children. The eldest child, Bernadette, was an asthmatic little thing, needing care and getting little of it.