Emperor's telegram brings down the fence at the Lourdes grotto

LOURDES, October 5, 1858 AD — The wooden fence that had shut people out of the grotto of Massabielle at Lourdes since June came down on October 5, 1858 AD. The people of Lourdes had gone over the prefect’s head to the Emperor, Napoleon III, and he had ordered the barriers removed at once. In the weeks that followed, the prefect and the police commissioner who had enforced the closure were moved to other posts.

The grotto is the place where the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared eighteen times this year, between February 11 and July 16, to Saint Bernadette Soubirous, a fourteen-year-old girl of the town. The prefect, Baron Massy, governed the department from Tarbes and did not accept the apparitions. In March he had asked the mayor to have St. Bernadette examined by doctors, to see whether she could be sent to an asylum. The people wanted to pray at the rock and drink from the spring at its foot. The prefect wanted them kept away.

The order that closed the grotto was dated June 8. The mayor, A. Lacadé, signed it, and the prefect approved it. It forbade anyone to take water from the spring or walk on the town’s common land at Massabielle, and it put a fence of wooden palings across the mouth of the grotto. It gave as its reasons “the interests of religion” and the chance that the water held minerals: the spring was not to be used until a scientific analysis had shown what it was good for, and the law put mineral springs under government control.

The town fought the fence. The quarrymen of Lourdes broke it to pieces on the evening of June 17. It was rebuilt and guarded, and on June 27 and again on July 5 it was torn down, the planks and stakes thrown into the river Gave. Each time it went back up.

On July 16, the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, St. Bernadette was praying in the parish church in the evening. She heard a voice in her soul telling her to go to the grotto. The fence was up. So as not to break the prefect’s order, she and her aunt Basile went instead to the meadow on the far bank of the Gave, opposite the rock, and knelt there. Women who were already praying in the meadow got up and gathered round her. St. Bernadette looked across the river and cried out: “Yes, yes, there she is. She welcomes us, and is smiling upon us across the barriers!” It was the last apparition. St. Bernadette said afterwards: “I saw only the Blessed Virgin, and she was more beautiful than ever!”

After that evening St. Bernadette went back to the life she had led before the apparitions. Every morning she walked to school at the hospice of Lourdes, carrying a basket with the stockings she was knitting, a crust of black bread and a worn spelling-book.

All that summer, from July into the first days of August, an officer from the town hall kept watch at the grotto. Each evening he gave the police commissioner a list of the people who had gone inside the fence, and ninety-four of them were summoned to court. The justice of the peace tried each week’s offenders together and fined every one of them five francs, with the court costs split between them.

On July 28 the Bishop of Tarbes, Bertrand-Sévère Laurence, set up a commission to examine the cures credited to the water. It was also to decide whether the apparitions St. Bernadette described were genuine and, if they were, whether they were natural or divine.

Napoleon III was spending the sea-bathing season at Biarritz, and the people of Lourdes and the villages around it took their complaints to him there. Archbishop de Salinis of Auch and a former member of the national parliament went to see him in person. Other people sent him written petitions, asking for the prefect’s measures to be withdrawn. One of the petitions told him: “In the name of mere humanity allow the sick to go there to be cured, if such is their hope.”

The Emperor said little. He listened to the story of the grotto without showing what he thought, but when he was told how the officials of the department had been treating the people who went there, he frowned and rang at once for his secretary. He had a telegram sent to the prefect at Tarbes: the barriers were to come down immediately, and the prefect was to stop interfering in the matter of the apparitions.

On October 5 a notice signed by the same mayor, Lacadé, went up on the walls of Lourdes. On the instructions of higher authority, it said, “the order of the 8th June, 1858, is repealed.” The men who had put up the barriers took them down. Then the crowds came back. They knelt before the rock, sang hymns, recited the litany of Our Lady and drank from the spring.

The members of Bishop Laurence’s commission had refused to come to Massabielle while the prefect’s barriers stood. With the barriers gone, they began their work at Lourdes in the third week of November. They said a Mass of the Holy Ghost in the parish church, and then they sent for St. Bernadette.