Sections
Today's editionKids editionArchiveSaintsAbout RSS Search
Search
brief · LOURDES, Hautes-Pyrénées, 1859 AD

The season on the spa road: what the carriages bring to Lourdes

Edition of

Saint Bernadette Soubirous
A sepia photograph of a horse-drawn diligence halted in the dusty street of a small Pyrenean town, its roof roped with trunks, men in top hats and frock coats standing beside it while two women in long white hooded capes wait at the corner and a group gathers at a doorway, with a wooded mountain and an old castle above the roofs.
The halt of the season's carriages in the main street of Lourdes, Hautes-Pyrénées, 1859 AD; St. Bernadette Soubirous is not in the picture.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of a wet-collodion photograph of 1859 printed on albumen paper, from the paper's reference portrait based on Bernadette Soubirous en 1863, photo de Billard-Perrin (plate 4) (Auguste Billard-Perrin, 1863, Wikimedia Commons; reproduced from René Laurentin, Bernadette vous parle, t. 1, p. 297). No likeness of St. Bernadette Soubirous is depicted. View source artwork.

LOURDES, Hautes-Pyrénées, 1859 AD — Lourdes is a small town at the mouth of the gorge that leads to the thermal baths, a few leagues higher up. Every carriage for Cauterets, Saint-Sauveur and Barèges passes through it. The season opened as June ended, and the diligences from Pau, Tarbes and Bagnères-de-Bigorre have been setting down bathers since.

The cures draw bankers, magistrates and deputies out of Paris and London for the summer. Their carriages halt at the Hôtel de la Poste — four horses to a team, bells on the harness — long enough to dine and climb to the castle.

Last year Our Lady appeared eighteen times to Saint Bernadette Soubirous, a girl of this town, at the grotto of Massabielle. Travellers walk from the halt to the rue des Petits-Fossés and queue at the Soubirous door, in the town’s disused gaol. When St. Bernadette is not there, they go on to the hospice of the Sisters of Charity of Nevers.

No railway runs into these mountains; everyone who comes, comes by road.

About this story

Catholic Saints News tells the lives of the saints as news from their own time and place. This story was written with AI from the historical record, and we read and approved it before it ran.

The Saints' words. This newspaper will never make a saint say something the historical record does not preserve.

Read more

Image. AI-generated image, in the manner of a wet-collodion photograph of 1859 printed on albumen paper, from the paper's reference portrait based on Bernadette Soubirous en 1863, photo de Billard-Perrin (plate 4) (Auguste Billard-Perrin, 1863, Wikimedia Commons; reproduced from René Laurentin, Bernadette vous parle, t. 1, p. 297). No likeness of St. Bernadette Soubirous is depicted. — see the original.

Found an error? Let us know.

More on this saint

A young woman in a striped headscarf and dark shawl, seated with one hand resting in her lap, looks slightly to the side in a sepia-toned photograph.
writings · LOURDES, France, September 14, 2008 AD

A Pope reads out the errand a fourteen-year-old was given at Lourdes

At the Mass for the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the apparitions of Our Lady at Lourdes, Pope Benedict XVI opened not with his own words but with the message St. Bernadette Soubirous was given at the grotto on March 2, 1858 AD. Pilgrims have never stopped coming since, he said. He came back twice to the girl who carried the message: to the sign of the Cross Our Lady made before St. Bernadette could make it, and to what she was when Our Lady chose her.

Edition of · 3 min read

Also in the edition of Sunday, 30 August 2026

profile · SAN DAMIANO, below the walls of Assisi, 1212 AD

St. Clare of Assisi, eighteen, moves into San Damiano below Assisi

Saint Clare of Assisi, the eighteen-year-old daughter of an Assisi knight, has moved into the low dwelling beside the church of San Damiano, a quarter of a mile below the town walls. She left her father's house in secret in Holy Week, was received by St. Francis of Assisi and his friars at the Porziuncola, and has been moved twice since while somewhere permanent was found. She is living at San Damiano with her younger sister St. Agnes of Assisi and a few other women, on what they earn with their hands.

6 min read

event · CARMEL OF LISIEUX, Calvados, 30 August 1897 AD

Céline photographs St. Thérèse under the infirmary cloister at Lisieux

Sister Geneviève of the Holy Face — Céline Martin, sister of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux — photographed her today under the cloister of the infirmary at the Carmel of Lisieux. St. Thérèse, twenty-four and dying of tuberculosis, was rolled out on a folding bed to the door of the choir and left there alone before the picture was taken. She is back in the infirmary tonight.

4 min read

interview · LOURDES, HAUTES-PYRÉNÉES, this year, 1859 AD

'As they might go to a menagerie': St. Bernadette Soubirous at fifteen

St. Bernadette Soubirous is fifteen, cannot read or write, and lives with her family in the disused gaol of Lourdes. Since Our Lady appeared to her eighteen times at the grotto of Massabielle last year, the carriages bound for the spa towns halt in the town and their passengers come to her door. She spoke to this paper about the shape of her days, the money and souvenirs she turns down, and the asthma she says she prefers to the visitors.

4 min read