The shepherd girl at the back of the class

One mouth less to feed

BARTRÈS, Hautes-Pyrénées, September 1857 AD — A farming family called the Aravants lived up the hill at Bartrès. They wanted a girl to take a little flock of sheep and lambs out to grass, and they asked for Saint Bernadette Soubirous by name. Her parents said yes, because it meant one mouth less to feed at Lourdes. She was thirteen, and at Bartrès she was a farm servant.

The old records don’t agree on when she walked up. One account puts it in the summer of 1857 AD, and the shrine at Lourdes dates this stay from September.

Her father, François Soubirous, was a miller without a mill. For three years the family moved from one lodging to another in Lourdes, often with no money on pay day. By now they were living in the town’s old gaol, a prison building nobody used any more. A relation of her mother let them have it without rent.

It was a damp, unhealthy old guard post. The hunger and the cold in it were wearing down a girl who had had asthma since she was small.

Going up the hill also put a hill road between her and the catechism class at Lourdes. That was the class where the parish clergy got children ready for their first communion. She needed it, because at thirteen she still had not made hers. She was small, with a face younger than her years, so she was put in the back rows and passed over.

She had been there as a baby

St. Bernadette had lived at Bartrès once before. She was six months old and her mother was expecting another child, so her parents sent her away to a nurse. She stayed there fifteen months. The nurse was Marie Aravant, who had just lost a baby boy of her own.

Madame Aravant kept up with her afterwards. Whenever Madame Aravant came down to Lourdes she brought flowers, or fruit, or a cake at the bottom of her basket. St. Bernadette walked up to Bartrès several times a year to see her.

Bartrès is a few kilometres north of Lourdes and a good deal higher. Her own flock was a small one, sheep and lambs together. She drove it in front of her along the roads and up onto the high ground.

Lessons that never stuck

Madame Aravant was the one person at Bartrès who had worked out how old St. Bernadette was. She could see how far behind the girl had been left. In the evenings she took her into the chimney corner. There she taught her the first things the Church teaches about the faith. None of it stayed. St. Bernadette could not read, so she had no way of going back over it. She minded being the one left out.

Madame Aravant was hard on herself about those lessons: “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 took it without sulking, and afterwards put her arms round Madame Aravant’s neck. What she could do was say her rosary, and she said it steadily.

The priest turned round to watch her go

The parish priest of Bartrès met her on the road one day as she was taking the sheep up. He turned round several times to watch her go. The record doesn’t give his name. The schoolmaster of the village, 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.

Eleven years before, the Blessed Virgin Mary had appeared to two shepherd children. It happened on September 19, 1846 AD, on a mountain near the village of La Salette-Fallavaux, in the Isère. Bishop Philibert de Bruillard of Grenoble declared it certain that Our Lady had appeared there, on November 16, 1851 AD.

A cross stands at the entrance to Bartrès now. It was put up 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.