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Updated: July 28, 2025
On the first occasion when Bernadette visited him, he received this child who had been brought up at Bartres and had not yet been seen at Catechism, almost as sternly as the Commissary of Police had done; in fact, he refused to believe her story, and with some irony told her to entreat the Lady to begin by making the briars blossom beneath her feet, which, by the way, the Lady never did.
Ah! those years at Bartres; in what sweet peacefulness did Bernadette live them! Yet she grew up very thin, always in bad health, suffering from a nervous asthma which stifled her in the least veering of the wind; and on attaining her twelfth year she could neither read nor write, nor speak otherwise than in dialect, having remained quite infantile, behindhand in mind as in body.
She remembered the Bible at Bartres, that old book which had been in the family a hundred years, and whose pages had turned yellow; she could again see her foster-father slip a pin between the leaves to open the book at random, and then read aloud from the top of the right-hand page; and even at that time she had already known those beautiful stories so well that she could have continued repeating the narrative by heart, whatever might be the passage at which the perusal had ceased.
The doctor, who belonged to Bartres, had a family vault in the Lourdes cemetery, a vault constructed at his own expense, and in which his father and mother already rested. He desired, therefore, that his wife should be interred there, in a compartment adjoining that in which he expected soon to lie himself.
"I remember," he continued, "that in my childhood at Bartres, my mother, a peasant woman, made me join my hands and implore God's help each morning. The prayer she taught me came back to my mind, word for word, when I again found myself alone, as weak, as lost, as a little child. What would you have, my friend?
And whence, above all things, had come those golden roses poised on the Virgin's feet, that piously imagined florescence of woman's flesh from what romance of chivalry, from what story told after catechism by the Abbe Ader, from what unconscious dream indulged in under the shady foliage of Bartres, whilst ever and ever repeating that haunting Angelic Salutation?
It was the same rather massive face, the same full thick mouth, and the same magnificent eyes; and he recollected that Madame Majeste had already pointed out to him this striking resemblance, which was all the more peculiar as Apolline had passed through a similar poverty-stricken childhood at Bartres before her aunt had taken her with her to assist in keeping the shop. Bernadette! Apolline!
They all ran to her, jumped upon her lap, and passed their tiny arms round her neck, and the garden would then fill with the noise of joyous games, races, and cries; and it was not she who ran or cried the least, so happy was she at once more feeling herself a poor unknown little girl as in the far-away days of Bartres!
Two priests of Grenoble, however, Abbe Deleon and Abbe Cartellier, accused a Mlle. de Lamerliere of having concocted the miracle, and when she took proceedings against them for libel she lost her case. Trans. Thus her childhood ran its course at Bartres.
It was the same rather massive face, the same full thick mouth, and the same magnificent eyes; and he recollected that Madame Majeste had already pointed out to him this striking resemblance, which was all the more peculiar as Apolline had passed through a similar poverty-stricken childhood at Bartres before her aunt had taken her with her to assist in keeping the shop. Bernadette! Apolline!
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