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Bernadette Soubirous might appear, at first blush, to be an unusual candidate for divine revelation. Small for her age (14, but she looked 11), Bernadette was among the poorest of the poor in the little French town of Lourdes, on the foothills of the Pyrenees. Her mother allowed her some modest indulgences: lice-ridden, malnourished, plagued by asthma, Bernadette alone among her siblings was treated to the luxury of stockings—she was particularly vulnerable to cold—and, because she could not digest the corn-mash bread that was the staple of the Pyrenean poor's diet, she occasionally was given a slice of wheat bread.
On February 11, 1858, while searching for wood with her sister and a friend near the river on the outskirts of Lourdes, Bernadette saw the first of 18 Marian apparitions that would catapult her and her hometown of Lourdes to international fame.
The white-clad female figure Bernadette saw in a grotto near the river was petite: Bernadette called her bien mignonnette, more little girl than lady. On the second day, Bernadette splashed the figure with holy water, a test the apparition, who calmly waited until Bernadette had run through almost an entire vial, passed with ease. Although by the fourth apparition sizable crowds were gathering at the Grotto, no one but Bernadette could see or hear the figure, whom Bernadette referred to as Aquero, patois for someone who was clearly not human but not definitely divine. On the day of the ninth apparition, the usually dignified visionary shocked the crowd: she clawed at the earth, and, uncovering a spring, gulped down mouthfuls of muddy water. At the thirteenth apparition, Aquero instructed Bernadette to tell "the priests" to come to the Grotto in a procession and to build a chapel there. On the Annunciation, March 25, Bernadette, encouraged by local authorities to determine the identity of the apparition, asked the white girl four times who she was. Finally, she replied "Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou," I am the Immaculate Conception, a strange and stilted phrase, as if, in the words of Ruth Harris, "the apparition had said she was beauty rather than that she was beautiful."
Lourdes has occasioned scads of books. Catholic apologists championing the veracity of Bernadette's visions and hostile secularists seeking to debunk the phenomenon have picked up the pen to defend or desecrate. Among the most influential of these chroniclers was Henri Lasserre. His Notre Dame de Lourdes, which appeared a decade after Bernadette's visions, exemplifies the first impulse; in Lasserre's account, Bernadette and "the people" stand opposed to villainous officials who tried to stamp out the apparitions. Faith takes the day over skepticism, ordinary folks triumphing over authority. Some years later, Jesuit Leonard Cros published Histoire de Notre-Dame de Lourdes, taking on Lasserre's account. In Cros's version, Bernadette's family was not the innocent, pious ideal Lasserre had depicted; "the people," gullible and naive, posed a far greater threat to the Grotto at Lourdes than did any officials; and the "false visionaries" who followed on Bernadette's heels revealed more about Lourdes than any member of the Soubirous clan did. By the midtwentieth century, Benedictine scholars sought to put an end to the debate over Lourdes once and for all. Rene Laurentin and Bernard Billet, in two massive documentary collections (Lourdes: Histoire authentique des apparitions and Lourdes: Documents authentiques), tried to "reserve a space for the divine within a rigorous … history." But simply demonstrating, for example, the trials and tribulations that Bernadette and those devoted to her suffered hardly confirms, as Laurentin and Billet hoped it would, that Bernadette in fact saw the Virgin Mary 18 times.
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