The true story as our family saw it
Between 11 February and 16 August 1858, the Virgin Mary appeared eighteen times to Bernadette Soubirous in the grotto of Massabielle, in Lourdes. Eighteen times exactly, not one more.
Everyone knows this story. We tell it from the Cachot, where François — imprisoned the year before, wrongly accused of theft — and Louise lived in fear and incomprehension through those six months when their 14-year-old daughter was seeing the Virgin.
On that freezing Thursday morning, Bernadette is gathering dead wood with her sister Toinette and her friend Jeanne Abadie near Massabielle, a gloomy dumping ground on the banks of the Gave. Left behind, she feels a gust of wind: "a lady" is standing in the rock of the grotto. Back at the Cachot around midday, she says nothing, having begged her companions to do the same; but Toinette talks that very evening, and Louise questions her:
"A lady in a golden light. She smiled at me. She wore a spotless white dress and a blue sash. Golden roses shone on her bare feet."
Her asthmatic, illiterate daughter, raised in utter destitution, seeing apparitions? Frightened, Louise slaps her:
"Stop your ravings! It's your asthma making you delirious. You will never go back there again."
That evening, François, home without work, listens in silence. He is afraid.
Bernadette pleads for days on end. Louise gives in, with a flask of holy water to drive out the devil, if that is what it is. On 14 February, sprinkled with the water, the lady smiles and beckons her closer. On 18 February, her first words, in Bigourdan:
"Would you do me the grace of coming here for fifteen days?"
"I do not promise to make you happy in this world, but in the other."
Back at the Cachot, François explodes:
"We already have nothing to eat, and now your daughter is going to spend her days at the grotto instead of working?"
Bernadette has given her word. The crowd swells — ten, fifty, a hundred, three hundred people come to watch "the little girl who sees the Virgin" in ecstasy, before her humiliated parents. On 21 February, Police Commissioner Jacomet summons them and threatens Bernadette with arrest; Father Peyramale demands proof.
That morning, more than 300 people surround the grotto for the ninth apparition. In ecstasy, Bernadette drops to all fours, scratches at the ground with her bare hands, and drinks the blackish mud. The crowd, horrified, thinks she has lost her mind. A few hours later, clear water gushes forth: a spring that still flows today, 100,000 litres a day — the water of the baths of Lourdes.
On 1 March 1858, Catherine Latapie plunges her paralysed hand into it: instant healing. The sick pour in, the prefect has the grotto barricaded, pilgrims climb over the barriers.
Three weeks after the last apparition, Father Peyramale orders Bernadette to ask the lady her name. Three questions go unanswered. At the fourth, on 25 March, the lady opens her arms, raises her eyes to heaven and speaks in Bigourdan:
« Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou. »
"I am the Immaculate Conception."
Bernadette does not understand this learned expression. She runs to recite it to the priest, repeating it all the way. Peyramale turns pale: this dogma, proclaimed by the Pope only four years earlier, is something an illiterate 14-year-old girl cannot possibly know. Impossible — unless it is true. François and Louise finally understand: their daughter had been telling the truth from the very beginning.
On 7 April, the seventeenth apparition: in ecstasy, Bernadette keeps her hand for several minutes above the flame of her candle. Not a single burn — out of ecstasy, the flame burns her normally. The sceptics begin to waver.
On 16 August, an irresistible call draws her back. The grotto has been barricaded by order of Prefect Massy since 8 June: she crosses the Gave to the Ribère meadow and glimpses the lady one final time, across the river, luminous and far away. No words, one long gaze; the lady fades into the stone. Bernadette will say later:
"I had never seen her so beautiful."
She will never see her again. Eighteen apparitions, and it is over. Bernadette is 14, and will live another twenty-one years without ever seeing the Virgin again.
The apparitions stop, and hell begins: day and night, pilgrims, journalists and desperate sick people besiege the Cachot to see Bernadette, to touch her. Her parents, prisoners of their poverty and of her fame, cannot protect her. At 16, she takes refuge at the Lourdes hospice, run by the Sisters of Nevers, where she is hounded still. Monseigneur Laurence rents the Moulin Lacadé to the family in February 1865, then transfers ownership to them in 1867: the end of ten years of humiliation.
In July 1866, Bernadette leaves for Nevers, for good. Before the train, she goes down to the kitchen to embrace Louise — dying, unable to climb the stairs — and collapses into her arms: she will never see her again. François and the brothers who can walk go with her to the station; on his return, he sits down on the edge of the bed and weeps.
The books tell the 18 apparitions as a beautiful, pious story; we keep the other side of it: the day-labourer father wearing himself out while his daughter sees the Virgin, the mother who slaps her out of fear, the commissioner who threatens, the crowd that tears off pieces of her clothing. Bernadette saw the Virgin eighteen times; her parents went through six months of hell.
Our family carries this double memory, the grace and the suffering. Jean-Marie, Bernadette's brother, kept everything — objects, keepsakes, stories — and passed it all down to us: sixth generation, we have kept the whole story for 159 years.
Come and understand the 18 apparitions of Lourdes as Bernadette's family lived them: come and see the house where François and Louise lived after those six terrible and wonderful months, touch the objects Bernadette touched, and discover Bernadette's complete story and that of her family.
The christening gown, the letters, the missal: everything can be seen in the house, presented by the family.
or call us on 05 62 94 22 51