“The lady told me to drink of the fountain and to wash in it. Not seeing any spring, I was going to the Gave, but she signed to me to enter the cave. I entered and saw only a little dirty water. I put my hand to it, but could collect none, so I scratched, and the water came, but it was muddy. Thrice I rejected it. Only on the fourth attempt could I swallow any.”
The Jesuit father Cros says with regard to this exhibition: “Mademoiselle Lacrampe se retira si défavorablement impressionée, qu’il a fallu des années et des miracles pour la convaincre.” M. Estrade, receiver of indirect taxes, says with respect to this affair: “Je commerçais à être dérouté, et ne savais que penser de tout ceci.”
Thus was the miraculous spring discovered, the water of which, or what is supposed to come from it, is sent throughout the world, a case of thirty bottles carriage paid to the station 7 fr. 45 c. One bottle, “franco à domicile,” in France 1 fr. 80 c.
Now it is absolutely certain that the water was there before Bernadette Soubirous scratched till she reached it. The Abbé Richard, a geologist, says that it was there and it was known to be there by many individuals in Lourdes.
On 25 March Bernadette made her seventeenth visit to the grotto. The curé Peyramale had been at her repeatedly insisting that she should ask the apparition who and what she was.
Accordingly on this occasion she said: “Madam, kindly inform me who you are?”
Then the figure crossed its hands over the breast, lowered the eyes, and said: “Je suis l’Immaculée Conception, et je désire une chapelle ici.”
It is deserving of notice that the apparition did not state that she was the Blessed Virgin, but that she was an abstraction, the manifestation in visible form of a dogma.
Now Bernadette had been subjected for some time to strong suggestion. She had been influenced by the Abbé Ader at Bartrès, who had announced that she was just the sort of person to be chosen by the Blessed Virgin to see her; then she had been under the direction of the vicaire Pomian, and the strong personality of the curé Peyramale, who could mould such a feeble creature as wax. I do not imply that they consciously provoked a fraud; far from it. I think that these clergy had made up their minds that Bernadette was a suitable subject to be favoured by a vision, and had let her understand what their opinion of her was. Indeed, the schoolmaster at Bartrès, in his simplicity, wrote as much in the Guide du Pèlerin à Lourdes. The fathers of Garaison, who “ran the show,” to use a vulgar expression, were so alarmed at this revelation, that they brought up and destroyed every copy of the Pèlerin on which they could lay their hands. According to J. de Bonnefon, Lourdes et ses tenanciers:—
“Somewhat later, the Abbé Ader, dissatisfied, neglected, forgotten, was filled with scruples, and told everything.”