The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: Our Very Own Madonna Summary & Analysis

Many of Bauby’s friends have jokingly asked whether he would consider making a journey to pray at the Sanctuaires Notre-Dame de Lourdes, a major Catholic pilgrimage site since the mid-1800s. Bauby tells these friends that he already made the trip, years ago, at the end of the seventies. He went on a road trip there with his then-girlfriend, a woman named Joséphine, a high-maintenance and dramatic woman—their relationship was deteriorating even before the start of the trip. Joséphine was angry because Bauby was enmeshed in reading an absorbing, seven-hundred-page novel, and didn’t want to participate in any activities along the way. 

After checking into a hotel, a difficulty at the height of tourist season, Bauby wanted to continue reading, but Joséphine insisted on going right back out to see the Madonna, at a grotto whose springs are rumored to have healing powers. The two went out, even though the sky threatened a storm, and at the Madonna, Bauby encountered a group of paraplegics in wheelchairs. He couldn’t help but stare.

As rain began coming down, Bauby tried to get Joséphine to get out of the long line for the grotto, and as a measure of desperation told her that he didn’t want to be the only well people visiting the statue—should a miracle occur, he joked, they might both become paralyzed. The two returned to town, where Bauby purchased a small Madonna lamp for the sulky Joséphine.

Back in their hotel room, after Joséphine fell asleep for the evening, Bauby dressed for a nighttime walk to tire himself out from the stressful day. After wandering around the city for a while, he returned to the hotel and cracked open his tome to find that Joséphine had scrawled a long letter to him in thick ink over several of the book’s pages—pages that Bauby had already read. He ignored Josephine’s notes, finished the novel, and turned off the Madonna lamp as dawn was breaking.