David A. Bell teaches at Johns Hopkins. The First Total War, about Napoleon’s Europe, is published by Bloomsbury.
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Vol. 21 No. 22 · 11 November 1999
pages 30-31 | 3320 words
Who mended Pierre’s leg?
David A. Bell
- Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age by Ruth Harris
Allen Lane, 473 pp, £25.00, April 1999, ISBN 0 7139 9186 0
On the surface, no two people in 19th-century France had less in common than Louis Pasteur and Bernadette Soubirous. Pasteur, the great icon of modern biological science, was a French national hero, a pillar of the academic establishment: the very embodiment of modern, rational, liberal civilisation. Soubirous was a miserably poor, tubercular peasant girl, illiterate, unable to speak anything other than Pyrenean patois, who claimed, in February 1858, to have seen a miraculous apparition in a grotto near the village of Lourdes. ‘Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou,’ the apparition said to her: ‘I am the Immaculate Conception.’
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Letters
Vol. 21 No. 23 · 25 November 1999
From Jessamy Harvey
David Bell (LRB, 11 November) misses one fascinating aspect of the miraculous cure of Pierre de Rudder's fracture. As Ruth Harris notes in Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age, Pierre did not make the pilgrimage to Lourdes, but to a replica of the grotto in Oostakker, in Belgium. The 19th-century taste for reproductions is evident in the proliferation of facsimiles of the Lourdes grotto across Europe and the Americas. They can now be found all over the world ' in Conwy Town in Wales, Inchicore in Ireland, Bühlertal in Germany, Baguio City in the Philippines, Mar del Plata in Argentina and Manitoba in Canada, for example. The existence of these replicas does not conflict with Christian belief, because the holy is not believed to reside in a fixed place. The holy object, whether a building, a human body or an image, can be dismembered, moved from place to place and copied but still retain its ability to heal or work miracles ' fortunately for Pierre, as he could neither afford the fare nor muster the physical strength to make the pilgrimage from Belgium to the South-West of France. He reached the original grotto eventually, however. After his death, his body was exhumed, his leg dissected to find evidence of the miraculous cure and the stripped bones were then shipped to Lourdes. Ruth Harris informs us that the bones are displayed in a glass case next to the Medical Bureau, and in true Lourdes style, bronze replicas can be seen in the museum there.
Jessamy Harvey
London N16
