ON the morning after the 12th apparition of Our Lady to the simple girl Bernadette Soubirous in a grotto in Lourdes in 1858, a Paris newspaper reported:
“That little actress, the miller’s daughter at Lourdes, collected round her again on the morning of the 1st of March, beneath the Massabieille rock, nearly two thousand five hundred boobies. It is impossible to describe the idiocy and moral degeneration of these persons. The visionary treats them like a troop of monkeys and makes them commit absurdities of every kind. This morning, the pythoness was not inclined to play the seer, and to make a little variety in the exercises, she thought the best thing was to play the priestess. Assuming a grand air of authority, she ordered the fools to present their Rosaries and then blessed them all.”
This account comes from Abbé Francois Trochu’s book Saint Bernadette Soubirous, first published in France in 1954. This is just one example of the derision and contempt with which journalists from major publications and many ordinary people in France viewed the growing number of people drawn to the events in Lourdes.
