Skeptical and only at the urging of friends, the legendary writer Joris-Karl Huysmans travels to Lourdes. What he encounters there has indeed little to do with the untouched idyll of the grotto by the Gave River, where in 1858 the fourteen-year-old Bernadette Soubirous is said to have seen the Virgin Mary multiple times. There is a huge crowd: hordes of people flood the place, including many unfortunate souls with the most dreadful diseases. Religious kitsch of the cheapest kind is as omnipresent as the medical operations for sick pilgrims and the routine of countless masses and grand processions. Amid all the distractions, irritations, and often superficiality, Huysmans gradually discovers the deeply human, the beautiful, and the touching, and he decides to write about the phenomenon of Lourdes. It will be his.