Bernadette’s manuscripts: her texts
1. “Deus Charitas is”
The motto of the founder of the Order, Jean-Baptiste Delaveyne (1653-1719), still is on the pediment of the Convent of Nevers where Bernadette lived thirteen years of religious life. The pilgrims come to meditate today, see the places and its personal objects which are kept there.
July 7, 1866
Even Bernadette Soubirous, then little educated, includes this simple Latin sentence with his spelling mistake (the “H” is too much) who welcomes him, engraved on the monumental blonde limestone facade of the Saint-Gildard convent, the parent company Sisters of Charity of Nevers.
There, on this hill above the Loire, the 22-year-old Lourdaise discovers her new house. And this motto can only reassure her: she comes here to devote her life to charity! So she crosses the threshold.
2. “I saw something white having the shape of a lady who smiled at me”
On several occasions in Lourdes, then in Nevers, Bernadette is invited to sleep on paper the story of her appearances. The yellowed sheets are covered with his leaning but now regular writing. In the Saint-Gildard convent archives room, these exceptional documents are today preciously preserved, out of light and manipulations.
July 8, 1866
In a calm voice, the postulant, qualified as “privileged child” by the sisters who are delighted to welcome him, once again tells how she witnessed eighteen appearances of the Virgin between February 11 and On July 16, 1858, when she was going to pick up wood on the banks of the Gave, in Lourdes. On the ground floor of the convent, the large novices room is packed at the start of the afternoon.
Along the walls are seated, in large black clothes, three hundred sisters, representing the almost complete order. Their heads are turned to the tiny young girl-she is only 1.44 meters-which has just entered with the applicants and forty-three other novices. Bernadette is still dressed in her civilian clothing, like the modest people of his native Pyrenees: a white knit and a poor skirt badly shade of indigo.
The bishop of Nevers is present for the occasion and invites him from the top of the pulpit to speak. Bernadette knows Bishop Théodore-Augustin Force, who came to see her three years earlier, when she was employed with the Sisters of Charity of Lourdes where she had found refuge in the face of the increasingly invasive fervor of pilgrims and curious . He had reassured her with humor, while she doubted to be good for something: “In any case, you are at least good to peel the carrots!” He had observed while watching her work in the kitchen.
Intimided by the solemnity of this welcome, the young clairvoyant begins in dialect before recovering and switching to French. With her simplicity and direct tone that the sisters will learn to appreciate, she tells, once again, what she saw, at 14, in the anfractosity of the rock, above the small cave of Massabielle.
For the authorities of the Order and for Mother Marie-Thérèse Vauzou, the mistress of the novices, this session is enough: there is no question that Bernadette becomes “proud” and the center of interest of her comrades. So, she will be firm with the girl, often imposing on him to kiss the ground as a penance. “There is not a single floor that I would not have kissed,” will sigh not without humor Bernadette, a few years later. It must be said that education precepts are rough at the time.
And Bernadette, herself, marries these fears of pride sin from her ears. She works her humility permanently. Witness the answer she will make to a postulant to whom we show her in the courtyard and who exclaims with spite: “Is that Bernadette?” “Yes, that’s just that,” she retorts to him then.
Yet the mistress of the novices likes Bernadette, but she would appreciate her confidences on the appearances, which puts off the young Béarnaise. What is the share of education and frustration in the punishments of Mother Vauzou? The hearts of beings is complex and history will probably not say it …
3. “Tobia and other calligraphy exercises …”
Among Bernadette’s papers preserved in Nevers are moving pages of writing exercises which she laboriously carried out between 1858 and 1861 in the sisters of Lourdes. By economy, the front and back of each sheet are used. And on this poor paper, the features of calligraphy with the pen appear on the small copy exercise drawn from the Bible.
1867-1868
In any case, Bernadette, who had laboriously learned to write in the sisters of Lourdes, calligraphing pages of “Marie” in full and deleted, or even anecdotes drawn from holy history, has now more ease and s’ Besides, from his year of novitiate and all his life, to copy entire letters to integrate the official turns, the epistolary style.
If the sisters of Nevers refuse most of the time that we come to speak to him and touch her, they accept that believers solicit his prayers by letter. And there are so many letters to which the novice must answer! She will always be rereading and correcting her texts because she does not have a good spelling, having very late and little frequented the school. These exercises and the disciplined life of the nuns do not prevent the girl with a playful temperament from turning the strip to jump during recreation in the courtyard of the convent.
4. “My dear and well loved brother”
Brothers and sisters, aunt, godfather, cousins, former conduciples of Lourdes, religious … Upon his arrival, countless letters are copied with his hand for different recipients. At the beginning, these are writing models never sent, then the girl becomes a better letter letter.
April 1870
Bernadette writes at length to her brother Jean-Marie to tell him the “happiness that my heart has experienced” to learn that he becomes a novice in turn. To her sister Marie, she asked for her indulgence to answer her only once in three. She goes around her family, asks her little niece going to “two big kisses for me to my father”. The separation was very hard to live for the girl, especially during the first months in Nevers. She learned with great sorrow the death of her mother in December 1866.
“When I received a letter from home, I was waiting to be alone to open it, because I felt unable to read it without crying all my tears,” she said later. And she runs at the bottom of the garden, “deflate her heart” near the source which feeds the washhouse of the convent and the statue of Notre-Dame des waters with open arms which, she says, reminds her of the cave .
5. “Equivalence of old measures and grams”
“Put the comma to the right of the number.” Among the many pages bearing the writing of Bernadette, a whole bundle relates to her work as a help-infirmière, carrying medication formulas, therapeutic principles and tables allowing to find your way between old measures and the system metric. These notes constituted precious memory aid for itself and for other sisters.
November 8, 1872
God knows if Bernadette, who has become sister Marie-Bernard, knows well the vast square room of the infirmary, where three beds occupy the angles! She learned of the assistant function, relieving the pains of her sisters by potions made on site and … a lot of prayers. Here she is today promoted to nurse. It applies to write a few notes to transmit its knowledge.
After her wishes, on October 30, 1867, she had learned, to her great disappointment – she wanted to go at the service of the poor – that the bishop and the superior mother had decided, exceptionally, to keep the new nun in Nevers instead to send it on a mission like the others. Two reasons for that: the incredible notoriety of the young clairvoyant required special protection; His state of health is deplorable. Bernadette must resign.
In reality, the girl will be sick most of the time, a real “pillar of infirmary”, she laughs while describing herself in a letter of 1867. Her stomach has been very bad since she had , child, cholera. Chronic malnutrition, the cold and the humidity suffered in the years of misery of her parents condemn her to asthma attacks on which the bone tuberculosis which will prevail.
She also suffers from a knee tumor and chronic otitis. One of the three beds of the infirmary, “his white chapel”, becomes almost permanently, which she decorates with pious images. She will receive the extreme unction four times during her Nivernais years.
6. “Intimate notebook”
Now in very poor condition, it can only be viewed in facsimile. It is a tiny notebook with brown cardboard cover, on which the nun applied herself to carefully copy extracts from spiritual books, prayers, notes taken during pensions and the directives and advice that her confessor gave her, The sweet father, as well as some personal reflections on faith.
September 1874
Sister Marie-Bernard, very tired, bedridden to the infirmary, no longer showed these “liveliness” that the sweet father reproached him, and who sometimes led him to respond to his sisters. Leaving, in a second step, to apologize for his “susceptibility”. She takes her little brown notebook which is so dear to her and grabs a pencil.
Of a now trembling writing, it reflects on “infallible means of holiness” that God makes available to nuns: “Light, that is to say our rules” and adds “on our part: good will, c ‘that is to say energetic, courageous, constant, persevering ”.
7. “Very holy father”
If the manuscript finally sent to Rome is in the Vatican archives, the first “clean” test and the two preparatory drafts, with their spelling mistakes, oral erasures and expressions, are preserved preciously in Nevers.
December 16, 1876
Bernadette, almost always bedridden, suffers enormously even if she tries to hide it from her loved ones. She knows that her health is deteriorating and preparing for the worst, trying to be of good advice for her family through her letters. Suddenly, during a visit, the bishop of Nevers-Mgr de Ladoue now-explains to him that he leaves for Rome and spontaneously offers him to write to the Holy Father. To help her, Sister Gabrielle, her nurse, holds her a little wooden desk.
At the cost of a lot of efforts, two drafts, then a first badly calligraphic copy, Bernadette writes a moving letter where she confides: “I can only continue what I have done so far, it is -Ades suffer and pray. Then she adds that the Virgin must “protect him in particular” for proclaiming the dogma of the immaculate design. Back in Nevers on January 14, Mgr de Ladoue will put him in response the apostolic blessing of Pius IX as well as a small silver crucifix, personal gift of the Pope, now exposed to the museum.
8. Collages and pious images
In the moments of respite that the disease leaves her, Bernadette paints pious images which she joins to her letters.
April 16, 1879
This last year, Sister Marie-Bernard, even more weakened, very rarely has the strength to hear mass, from the Balcon de la Chapelle, yet a few meters from the infirmary. At the end of March, she replied “Yes, I will not forget anyone” to the sisters who ask her to remember them in heaven. This April day, in the community newspaper, the sisters of Nevers note soberly: “Our dear little sister is worse and worse. We recite the prayers of the dying, to which she unites with all her knowledge. The chaplain renews absolution.
At 3 o’clock, she returned her beautiful soul to God, surrounded by a part of the community. Bernadette is so popular that it cannot be buried in the municipal cemetery for fear of relic hunters. She will therefore rest in the garden, in the small Saint-Joseph chapel, until September 1909. We discovered her intact body there, while he was exhumed for his beatification trial. The little girl of Lourdes, canonized in 1933, is now based in a glass shrine, in the chapel of the convent where the many pilgrims are welcomed.
