Ninety-four people were taken to court for crossing a fence

LOURDES, October 5, 1858 AD — From July 1858 AD into the first days of August, an officer from the Lourdes town hall kept watch at the grotto of Massabielle. A fence of wooden palings stood across the mouth of the grotto. Each evening the officer gave the police commissioner a list of everyone who had gone inside the fence. Ninety-four of them were taken to court, and the judge fined every one of them five francs.

The fence had gone up in June. It stood across the place where the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared eighteen times that year to Saint Bernadette Soubirous, a fourteen-year-old girl of the town. The people wanted to pray at the rock and drink from the spring at its foot. But the prefect, Baron Massy, ran the area from the city of Tarbes. He did not believe the Blessed Virgin Mary had really appeared there, and he wanted the people kept away.

The order that closed the grotto was dated June 8. The mayor of Lourdes signed it, and the prefect approved it. No one was to take water from the spring until a scientific test had shown what the water was good for. to be used until a scientific test had shown what the water was good for.

On the evening of June 17 the quarrymen of the town broke the fence to pieces. It was built again, with guards this time. On June 27 and again on July 5 it was torn down, and its planks and stakes were thrown into the river Gave. Each time it went back up.

On the other side of the river

On the evening of July 16, St. Bernadette was praying in the parish church. She heard a voice in her soul telling her to go to the grotto. The fence was up, and she did not want to break the prefect’s order. So she and her aunt Basile knelt in the meadow on the far bank of the Gave, opposite the rock.

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 time the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to her. Afterwards St. Bernadette said: “I saw only the Blessed Virgin, and she was more beautiful than ever!”

On July 28 the Bishop of Tarbes, Bertrand-Sévère Laurence, set up a commission. It was to look into the cures people said the water had brought. It was also to decide whether the apparitions St. Bernadette described were real.

The Emperor frowned

That summer the Emperor, Napoleon III, was at Biarritz for the sea-bathing season. The people of Lourdes and the villages around it took their complaints to him there. The Archbishop of Auch went to see him in person. Other people wrote asking him to undo what the prefect had done. One of them 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 while he listened to the story of the grotto. Then he was told how the officials 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 fence was to come down at once, and the prefect was to stop meddling in the apparitions.

On October 5 a notice went up on the walls of Lourdes. It was signed by the same mayor who had signed the order closing the grotto. It said that, on instructions from higher up, “the order of the 8th June, 1858, is repealed.” Then the men who had put up the fence took it down. The crowds came back to the rock. They knelt, sang hymns and drank from the spring.

In the weeks that followed, the prefect and the police commissioner were both moved to jobs in other places.

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