A Book of the Pyrenees

by S. Baring-Gould

In 1869 appeared Lasserre’s book, Notre Dame de Lourdes, which had an enormous sale; it had reached its 126th edition in 1892. Henri Lasserre had been a journalist, and his paper, the Contemporaine, had utterly failed. He was in bad circumstances, when the bright idea struck him to puff Lourdes. He went there in August, 1867, and placed himself in the house of the curé Peyramale, and took in without criticism everything that he was told. He did more; he dressed up every incident fantastically, turned the story into a romance, giving details and conversations that could only have been obtained had he tracked Bernadette from day to day with a camera snap-shotting her, and with a note-book and pencil taking down everything heard in shorthand. He made no scruple to falsify facts which did not suit him, and he had his reward; the book sold with an unprecedented rapidity, and filled his pockets with gold. Now the Jesuit Cros also wrote about Lourdes; but his work, that appeared in 1901, while exposing many of Lasserre’s falsehoods and exaggerations, had to be gone through and cut about by his superiors before that it was suffered to be published.

It causes some surprise, and it convinces some people that miraculous agency has worked in the grotto, in that so much water flows away from the taps supposed to discharge that which issues from the spring in the cave. This water is drawn off, evaporated, and sold in pastilles (big boxes, 2 francs; bonbonnières, 75 cents). But does it really come from the source pretended? The water of the cave is merely the dripping and sweating of the walls and the oozing up of infiltration of the Gave, that is little lower than the floor; but hence now issues a copious spring.

An experienced scientist of Bayonne managed to break through the wire netting at the end of the grotto that conceals the miraculous spring from the public, and to pour in sufficient fluorescine to discolour 10,000 litres of water. This would have revealed itself at the taps infallibly, had this latter supply come from the grotto. No discoloration, however, appeared. The gentleman who made this experiment wrote to the superior of the Fathers of the Grotto to inform him of the test he had applied. He received no answer. Then, in a second letter, published in the Reveil de Bayonne, he offered to pay the superior the sum of 40,000 francs if he would allow the matter of the water to be properly investigated, and could prove that there was no trickery. The water, he asserted, was drawn from the Gave higher up stream. The Fathers shrank from the investigation.

My authority for this is Jean de Bonnefon. But I must add that I wrote to that gentleman and also to the editor of the Reveil de Bayonne to learn the name of the man who offered the challenge, and also the date when made, and that neither one nor the other has had the courtesy to reply. The editor may, however, be dead, as the Reveil has ceased to appear.

Nevertheless, the charge of fraud has been made publicly by M. de Bonnefon, and it is incumbent on the French Government to see that no trickery is used to impose on the religious public, and obtain of it money under false pretences.

The Fathers of Garaison are no longer nominally in charge of the grotto and all its belongings, but this is nominally only. They are now called vicaires, under authorization of the Bishop of Tarbes. The name is altered, that is all. Monte Carlo is under the protection of the French Government. A German, Captain Weihe, has brought charges against the Company of fraudulent action, of having the balls loaded and of employing magnets. The French Government should insist before extending its patronage to the gambling hell at Monte Carlo and to the grotto of Lourdes to have the proceedings in both thoroughly and impartially investigated. But both bring vast sums of money into the country, and consequently the Government shuts its eyes upon both. When the inventories were taken in the spring of 1906 the Bishop of Tarbes gave instructions that no sort of opposition was to be offered at Lourdes to the Government authorities counting up the silver hearts, and crutches, etc., in the basilica and grotto. It mattered not to him to have the feathers of the goose counted, so long as the goose itself was not killed that laid the golden eggs. He was careful not to provoke opposition, lest an inquiry should be made that might lead to awkward disclosures.

Not that any amount of exposure of trickery—if trickery has been resorted to—would disabuse the minds of the credulous. Human stupidity is too crass for that; but it would relieve the French Government of the discredit of conniving at dishonest proceedings.

Before Lasserre’s book had appeared, the Bishop of Tarbes had appointed a commission to investigate the alleged marvels at Lourdes, but there was not a name on the commission that could command confidence, only a vicar-general, canons of the cathedral, and the like, not a single man of science and of independent mind. When the bishop was satisfied—and most easy to satisfy he was—he gave his sanction to pilgrimages to the grotto, and Pius IX accorded indulgences to such as made the visit. He did more; he instituted a liturgical office for 11 February, to be inserted in the Breviary, in commemoration of the first apparition. Consequently the Church of Rome is irrevocably committed to this great delusion.

It was necessary to get rid of Bernadette; she was not indeed likely to “faire des bêtises”; but, in her own interest, it was well that she should be removed, lest her head should be turned, as people were entreating her to perform miraculous cures. And it was quite possible that she in her simplicity might let out compromising avowals—not indeed that the whole thing had been got up as a fraud, for that it was not, but might avow how greatly she had been influenced by the suggestive action of the abbés Ader, Pomian, and Peyramale, all doing their part in good faith, with no intent of deception but who, like Ader, had become, conscious après coup that they had brought this affair about.

Bernadette was taken off and shut up in a convent at Nevers, at such a distance from her home that there seemed no chance of relative or acquaintance ever seeing her again. There she was retained very close; hardly any one was permitted to visit her. Her health, always frail, gave way in confinement, deprived of her mountain air, and she died in 1879. When it was known that she was on her death-bed M. le Gentil very kindly undertook to pay the expenses of her brother to Nevers, so as to have a last look at his sister. Gentil accompanied him. Nevers would seem to have been chosen expressly as a place where to place Bernadette, so difficult is it to be got at from Tarbes—only by cross lines and slow trains, with long waits at every change. However difficult and tedious Gentil and Soubirous may have found it, making their way thither by train, it was nothing to the difficulties caused by wilful obstruction put in their way on reaching Nevers. Soubirous went alone to the convent, and asked for the superior. She replied to his demand for an interview with his dying sister, “It is against the rules of the convent.”