insisting that she should ask the apparition who and what she was.
Accordingly on this occasion she said: "Madam, kindly inform me who you are?"
Then the figure crossed its hands over the breast, lowered the eyes, and said: "Je suis l'Immaculée Conception, et je desire une chapelle ici."
It is deserving of notice that the apparition did not state that she was the Blessed Virgin, but that she was an abstraction, the manifestation in visible form of a dogma.
Now Bernadette had been subjected for some time to strong suggestion. She had been influenced by the Abbé Ader at Bartrès, who had announced that she was just the sort of person to be chosen by the Blessed Virgin to see her; then she had been under the direction of the vicaire Pomian, and the strong personality of the curé Peyramale, who could mould such a feeble creature as wax. I do not imply that they consciously provoked a fraud; far from it. I think that these clergy had made up their minds that Bernadette was a suitable subject to be favoured by a vision, and had let her understand what their opinion of her was. Indeed, the schoolmaster at Bartrès, in his simplicity, wrote as much in the Guide du Pèlerin à Lourdes. The fathers of Garaison, who "ran the show," to use a vulgar expression, were so alarmed at this revelation, that they brought up and destroyed every copy of the Pèlerin on which they could lay their hands. According to J. de Bonnefon, Lourdes et ses tenanciers:—
"Somewhat later, the Abbé Ader, dissatisfied, neglected, forgotten, was filled with scruples, and told everything."
What his authority for this statement is I do not know, but this is certain, that Ader was hurriedly removed from his cure, and sent hastily to the Benedictines, and kept in
