St. Bernadette, thirteen, sent up the valley to herd another family's sheep

BARTRÈS, Hautes-Pyrénées, September 1857 AD — The Aravants of this village wanted a girl to take a little flock of sheep and lambs out to pasture, and they asked for Saint Bernadette Soubirous by name. Her parents raised no objection, because it meant one mouth less to feed at Lourdes. She is thirteen, and she is here as a farm servant. The accounts do not agree on when she walked up. J. B. Estrade, the tax official who afterwards wrote the eyewitness account, places her going in the summer of 1857; the shrine’s own page on Bartrès dates this second stay from September.

Her father, François Soubirous, is a miller without a mill. For three years after the family lost Boly they moved from lodging to lodging in Lourdes, often with no money on pay day. They live now in the town’s disused gaol in the rue des Petits Fossés, let to them without rent by André Sajous, a relation of her mother who owns the building. It is a damp, unhealthy old guard post. Hunger and cold in it were wearing down a girl who has had asthma since she was small. Coming up here takes her out of that room.

It also puts a hill road between her and the catechism class at Lourdes, and she needs that class: at thirteen she has still not made her first communion. A child in these parishes is prepared for it by the parish clergy at catechism, and the clergy go by the look of a child as much as by the register. Hers has misled them. She is small, her face is younger than her years, and she has been put in the back rows and passed over.

She has lived at Bartrès before. She was six months old and her mother was expecting another child, so her parents sent her out to a wet nurse. The nurse was Marie Aravant, who had just lost a baby boy. St. Bernadette stayed fifteen months. The tie held after she went home. Madame Aravant brought her flowers, or fruit, or a cake at the bottom of her basket whenever she came down to Lourdes, and St. Bernadette walked up here several times a year to see her. So when the Aravants wanted a shepherdess, they knew whom to ask.

Bartrès is a few kilometres north of Lourdes and a good deal higher. The ground between rises in stages to this village and its neighbour Poueyferré, broken up by fields, meadows and patches of trees and scrub, with flocks spread over all of it looking for pasture.

Her flock is a small one, sheep and lambs together. She drives it in front of her along the roads and up to the high ground. The people who meet her have a word for her, and she answers them sensibly and modestly.

The parish priest of Bartrès, whose name the record does not give, met her on the road one day as she was taking the sheep up, and he turned round several times to watch her go. The schoolmaster of the commune, Monsieur Barbet, was walking with him. “That little shepherdess is exactly like what I have always imagined the children of La Salette to have been,” the priest said to him.

On September 19, 1846 AD, eleven years ago, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to two shepherd children on a mountain near the village of La Salette-Fallavaux, in the Isère. They were Mélanie Calvat, who was fifteen, and Maximin Giraud, who was eleven. Bishop Philibert de Bruillard of Grenoble declared the apparition certain on November 16, 1851 AD and authorised the devotion to Our Lady of La Salette.

Madame Aravant is the one person here who has worked out how old St. Bernadette is and how far behind she has been left. In the evenings she takes her into the chimney corner and teaches her the first elements of Christian doctrine, and none of it holds, because the girl cannot read and so has no way of going back over it. She stands 1 metre 40, she can neither read nor write, and she minds being the one left out. Madame Aravant’s own account of those lessons is hard on herself: “It was useless for me to repeat my lessons; I always had to begin again. Sometimes I was overcome by impatience, and in temper I threw the book aside and said to her, ‘Go along, you will never be anything but an ignorant fool.’”

St. Bernadette takes it without sulking, and afterwards puts her arms round Madame Aravant’s neck. What she can do is say her rosary, and she says it steadily.

A votive cross stands at the entrance to the village now, raised in 1925 AD, the year St. Bernadette was declared blessed. The village is still fields, a church and a sheepfold, and it is kept quiet; pilgrims come up the road from Lourdes to see it.